How to Learn Tarot
From the structure of the 78 cards to spreads and reversals
Tarot begins with understanding structure, not memorizing cards. Once you grasp how the Major and Minor Arcana divide, all 78 become far easier. Learn the cards first, then move on to spreads and reversals. It helps to have a deck at hand. Drawing the cards an article mentions and comparing them stays with you longer than memorising does.
Stage 1 · Know the cards
Start with how the 78 are put together: 22 Major cards for the large themes of a life, 56 Minor cards for everyday matters, and the court cards that stand for people. Cover these and the cards themselves are done.
- 1. The 22 Major Arcana of Tarot — The Journey of Life Read Through Symbols — From The Fool to The World, the journey of growth drawn by the 22 Major Arcana and the fundamentals of reading upright and reversed cards, laid out at a beginner's eye level.
- 2. The 56 Minor Arcana of Tarot — Four Suits That Illuminate Daily Life — The basics of the Minor Arcana — the four suits of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, the numbered cards, and the sixteen court cards — which read the fine details of everyday life.
- 3. The 16 Tarot Court Cards — The Key to Reading People and Attitudes — The four ranks — Page, Knight, Queen, King — and the four suits together make sixteen court cards. Here is how to read them as people and as situations alike.
Stage 2 · Lay them out and read
Knowing the cards, the question becomes how you lay them out and read them. Spreads give you a layout suited to the question; reversals give you the other face of the same card. Add yes-or-no reading and you can actually read for someone.
- 4. Tarot Spreads — From the One-Card Draw to the Celtic Cross — The kinds of tarot spreads whose answers shift in grain depending on how you lay out the cards, and guidance on which to choose for which situation.
- 5. Reversed Tarot — How to Read a Card That Comes Up Upside Down — Does a card turned upside down mean the meaning turns bad? A guide to the tones a reversed card speaks — delay, turning inward, excess — and how to read them.
- 6. Yes-or-No Tarot — Finding an Answer in a Single Card — When you need an answer now, yes-or-no tarot asks with a single card. Here is how to draw and how to read it.
By the end of this path you can read a card from its position and orientation rather than from a memorised meaning. Beginners often strain to pin down exactly what a single card means, but that is not what the deck is for. Look first at whether several cards point the same way, and whether the question was one a card could answer at all. A question that cannot be answered yes or no will not be answered by the cards either.
When you can change the order
There is no need to memorise all seventy-eight cards before you begin. Learning the twenty-two major arcana and then going straight to stage two, where the cards are actually laid out, tends to make everything stick faster. The minor and court cards can be looked up as they turn up, and tidied into place later. If you can already handle a deck, the opposite works too: skip stage one and start with the spreads and reversals in stage two.
What people usually get wrong
The most common misreading is that a frightening card means a frightening outcome. Death is the card of endings and clearing away; the Tower is the card of what gets rebuilt after a collapse. Neither says that misfortune has been decided. It is also a mistake to treat every reversal as negative. A reversed card is often read as something blocked or turned inward, and some cards are symmetrical enough that they have no reversed reading at all.
What this path does not cover
Every deck draws its symbols a little differently, and this path takes the widely used Waite-Smith deck as its reference. If you work with another deck the broad outline still holds, but you will want its own companion book beside you for the details. The care that reading for other people asks of you is not covered here either. Questions about medicine, the law, or somebody else's private life are not questions for cards.