Message for the week: This week is about facing what holds you back from achieving your goals. What past cruelties have kept you from moving to the next level? What conflicts have sucked your energy? The Page of Swords sits in the middle contemplating the decisions before them – and the blocks around them. Getting what you want is dependent on facing your fears.
Writers are known for their insane writing rituals. Those completely necessary – and completely inexplicable – ceremonies required to get them in the headspace to write. But the why of the ritual is a useful practice to delve into – especially when you realize it can be applied to any creative discipline.
So why the arcane rituals for writing? Creating requires a certain state of mind. What lays behind all the disparate writing rituals is their ability to get the writer into the specific headspace. Reading the cards is no different: how well your intuition finds the correct meaning is going to depend on your current mindset. You probably don’t need to follow Dan Brown’s habit of hanging upside down. Instead, I suggest finding the one that works for you.
In The Art of Learning by Joshua Waitzkin he breaks down a process that I’ve found incredibly useful: find the steps that get you into the right frame of mind, then work on turning that into a smaller ritual. For example: my intuition works best after a long walk and some meditation. This, however, can take a long time; sometimes hours. I want to be able to snap into the right mindset for throwing cards in five minutes or less. So, the trick was to condition my brain to snap quickly. You can do that by training a Pavlovian response to something. After a long walk I started adding a cup of coffee to my meditation sessions. I did this every day for weeks, training my brain to association the taste of the coffee – the steam and the warm cup – with the state of mind I wanted. Then, slowly, I started to shorten the walk and the meditation and kept the coffee. It can take a while, but eventually I arrived at the point where five minutes with a cup of coffee is enough; and now that’s my ritual.
So that is today’s advice for reading: find your tarot ritual. Find the thing that gets your brain ready to interpret symbols and sends you the correct messages.
The most intimidating part of learning to read tarot is memorizing seventy-eight cards plus reversals. Throw in multiple decks where the same cards can have different meanings, and it can be downright overwhelming. I’ve gone over a few different practice methods here and here. But as anyone who has studied an art knows: you need to have multiple different ways to practice. So today I want to talk about how to memorize the cards by relating them to your everyday, non-tarot life.
When your intuition is leading a reading, you will often feel the emotions of the cards as you throw. The emotions invoked by The Sun are very different from the emotion invoked by The Falling Tower. You can link these emotions to images, music, places, and people you meet in real life. Doing so can help you hone your emotional connection between the cards and your intuition.
For an example, I love photography and often find I’ve taken photos that evoke certain cards (I have started cataloguing some of them here). But photography is just one way to relate life back to the cards. Music is another. A good way to practice is to shuffle your cards and pull one. Look at it, think about your own interpretation, even read a few outside interpretations. Then, try to find a piece of music that gives you the same kind of feeling. For example, when I pulled The Star one of the songs I find that brings out the same feelings for me is the Muppet classic Rainbow Connections.
The second practice I suggest is doing the opposite: find a song you like, then look through your tarot deck to find a card that matches. (Even better, find multiple cards that tell the same story as the song.)
Strengthening your connection with the cards will help to bring fuller meaning and more reliable predictions to your readings. It is also, honestly, just fun.
You would not think throwing some cards around would be exhausting. Yet one of the questions I see repeatedly from beginners is: why am I so tired after reading my cards? And not just tarot; this question comes up in any sort of divinatory or intuition-based practice. The best answer I have is to think of your intuition like a muscle: you need to train and strengthen it slowly and consistently to lift the very heavy things.
Routine is key to learning the tarot. Memorizing 78 cards plus reversals is a monumental task. But you can’t forget that it isn’t just the mundane aspects that require consistent practice. So many of us have neglected – or actively suppressed – our intuition that relearning how to use it takes time and active practice. So here are just a few suggestions I have for getting started strengthening your tarot reading muscles:
Consistency is key. Just like physical exercise, it isn’t the fancy routines that win, it’s the routines that stick.
I always say to approach practicing tarot like you would music or art, this means there are multiple types of practicing required. One of the most important aspects of good practice is to get feedback. Another time I’ll write about getting feedback from other people, but today I want to look at the importance of self-feedback via keeping a tarot journal.
When I was a teenager, I used to mark my most important readings in my regular diary. For the last decade I’ve kept a separate, dedicated tarot journal for almost all my personal readings – and the feedback has been invaluable for increasing my skills.
When you’re learning a skill that involves your intuition, you need to hone the feeling of a ‘hit’ and a ‘miss’. When you sit down to do a reading, I suggest marking the following information:
And then – most importantly – come back to this information later; especially if it was a predictive throw. When you come back, mark what was right on the money and what was a little off. Try to remember the feeling you had from your journal description. If it was a strong hit, that is the feeling you want to hone.
As you get better, you’ll find one card can have multiple meanings, and you may recall more than one during a throw. If you have honed that intuitive ‘hit’ feeling you will no longer have to guess at the correct one, you will know it.
The best part? It is the perfect excuse to buy up every pretty blank journal you see at the bookstore. You have a purpose for it, after all!
I’ve never met two tarot decks that have the same personality. Some are snarky, some are sweet. Some like to wax romantic, some will quit reading for you if you ask another question about your love life. Even two of the same deck will have differing personalities: I have one Scapini that will clam up at relationship questions, and another Scapini that is a shameless romantic gossip. What is important is to get to know your deck. Today, I’m going to look at the different deck personalities I have come across, and a couple of ways to get to know your own deck.
First, the images can give you a general idea of what the deck’s personality will be like. Soft warm images are going to have a cozier personality – the Ethereal Visions Tarot, for example, always tried to soften any bad news it gave me. Historical decks tend to be plain spoken and forthright – regardless of my feelings on the matter.
Here are a few examples:
The Medieval Scapini, with its historical Visconti inspired imagery tends to enjoy everyday questions about work, love, and family. This deck has always been delightfully snarky (or at least I find it delightful). It does not put up with nonsense and gives clear answers…no matter how little you wanted to hear the truth. It has a very straightforward personality with a bit of sass. (okay, a lot of sass.)
The Dark Wood Tarot, with its witches and occult imagery, has always been eager to dive deeper into questions about magic and witchcraft. I have also found this deck to be straightforward. And though it tends to give less sass than my Scapini deck, it has a sense of humour.
The Shadowscapes Tarot, with its grand sweeping imagery only ever answers Big Important Questions for me…and even then will only give me Big Important Answers – it seems to consider details beneath its notice. There is no sass here, and no clear-cut answers. This deck tends to ask me more questions than I ask it. Very much a forest – not the trees – personality.
Just like getting to know people, it takes time to get to know your deck. But here are a couple of exercises to get you started:
“Keep a dream journal!” This is the #1 piece of advice when it comes to any sort of dream work, from shadow work to lucid dreaming. It is excellent advice, but not so easy to execute. So I’m going to go over a few different ways to keep a dream journal.
The most common method is to keep a journal by your bedside and write your dreams down as soon as you wake up. Not a bad idea, but not always feasible. Do you sleep with someone else? They probably won’t appreciate you turning on the light at 3am. Does turning on a light in the middle of the night make it hard for you to go back to sleep? Do you (like me) just hate moving that much when your bed is so warm and snuggly? Does your cat always refuse to move off your chest? So below are some of the different methods I’ve collected for recording your dreams.
My personal routine is a mix. I keep a little tape recorder by my bed at night, one I can operate without light. Both when I wake up in the middle of the night to powder my nose, and when I wake up in the morning and the cat has claimed my legs as his sovereign territory, this is the best method I’ve found for capturing lengthy dreams, as well as the floating snippets of illusion leftover from the night. After my morning routine of coffee, more coffee, and meditation, I transcribe the recordings into Day One. This helps me to sort through the repeated patterns of my dreams, what’s changed, and what’s significant. I’ve often found my “barely awake” brain cannot distinguish the truly significant dreams from the random; I need time to sit with them. After that, I will throw the cards on any dreams or aspects I want to clarify.
Dreams are an important part of my practice, so my routine is a little bit more involved. But merely recording your dreams once, in any manner that works for you, can help hone your intuition.
The Ace of Swords in my Medieval Scapini deck holds a very different meaning than any Rider-Smith deck I’ve ever read with. Most little white books will tell you upright means victory and reverse means defeat (usually using softened terms like “victory is not assured”). In my Medieval Scapini the upright Ace of Swords means clarity or breakthrough, reversed it means victory. How can the same card have two very different readings? This is why it’s important to train your intuition rather than relying on the books that accompany every deck, or even a well-researched Tarot Tome like Holistic Tarot.
When you are learning to read – or just got a new deck – it’s important to familiarize yourself with the images. In doing so, symbols are going to pop out that you might have missed if you go straight to the book definitions. Let’s take the Ace of Swords. Upright you can see the sword piercing through a crown: clarity, insight – makes sense to me.
But when I first drew this card reversed I was immediately struck with the handle: the image of an upright Winged Victory with a laurel crown above her head. There was just no way this card could symbolize defeat from the image I saw.
But in the Rider-Smith, the Ace of Swords reversed looks like defeat to me.
Whatever deck you read with, I always suggest keeping a journal of your readings, interpretations, and insights. And why you should always follow your intuition when it comes to tarot: your intuition is the most important skill to cultivate as you learn.
“What does the Universe want me to know?” is a good question to ask when you have time and resources to devote to a spiritual practice. “How can I pay the bills next month?” is a better question to ask when you are staring at an empty bank account.
You do not have to believe in lofty powers for Tarot to be useful. While it can be helpful for spiritual guidance, it is remarkably useful for the mundane questions. Oracles can sit on high and proclaim warnings and prophecies, but good ol’ fashioned fortune telling has its roots in the mundane questions of life: who will I marry? Will my children be healthy? How can I earn a living? These are the questions that vex the greater populace, and these are solid questions that need solid answers.
We shouldn’t elevate the tarot to the lofty planes of angels and sages, we should keep to its roots: playing cards – a wholly mundane and practical antecedent. There is more dignity in these roots than I think we allow for. It permits them to be playful in a way Divining for Kings would never allow (let’s take a moment to appreciate that we, modern readers, don’t have to worry about losing our heads should The Tower show up for a client.)
There’s a common question I hear beginners ask a lot, “can I buy a tarot deck? I was told you must be given one.” Well, I stole my first deck and we’ve been besties for over twenty years now, so I’m going to give a resounding: Gracious yes, you can buy that deck you’ve been eyeing! Folks were gambling with these cards in the beginning, your deck is not going to be upset with a little commerce.
So ask about your love life, ask about your business, ask about how to deal with the narcissistic manager you’ve been stuck with and how to sabotage his job so you and your coworkers can breathe a sigh of relief together. They won’t mind, I promise. They may even come up with an amazing plan for that manager.
Can you be good at tarot right away? This is a question I see posted on a lot of tarot forums. What is lost in this question is the idea of tarot reading as an art. Would you sit down to draw, play cello, or start a martial art with the assumption that you’ll be perfect from the start? Art takes time to learn, and reading tarot is the art of story.
Every now and then a wild Yo-Yo Ma appears who seems to magically master an art from the very beginning. These folks are rare (and you never see the tremendous amount of work they put in before appearing). For most of us – be it cello or tarot – we need to slog through the thankless task of practicing. There are, however, a few skills that could elevate your readings before you start, (if you have already been practicing them for a long time):
Strength in any of these areas will make your ability to read tarot stronger. It’s like picking up the cello for the first time, but you’ve been playing violin for years. You know how rhythm, tempo, and pitch work – you have already cultivated your musicality, so it follows you from violin to cello. And if you have not learned these arts before picking up the tarot? Studying any of these skills will increase the speed you grow proficient.
My favourite suggestion for getting good fast is to record all of your readings: the question you asked, the deck you used, the cards you got, and your interpretation at the time. Periodically got back to these journals and compare your readings with what ended up happening. You will see your strengths and weakness very quickly: cards you have miss-read, warnings or signs you passed over (these signs often repeat), and – most importantly – seeing the readings you got dead-to-rights.
Duchess Tarot 