How to Read Tarot Cards

Reading tarot comes down to three moves: you settle on a question, you deal cards into positions that each stand for one part of that question, and you read whatever card lands in a position as the answer to that position. A full deck holds 78 cards, but fluency has far less to do with memorising all of them than with learning to read one card in the light of where it fell.

What is actually in the deck

The pack divides in two. Twenty-two cards make up the major arcana, arcana being an old word for hidden or secret things, and these are the named picture cards numbered from zero to twenty-one, with titles such as The Tower and The Star. The remaining fifty-six are the minor arcana, built much like ordinary playing cards: four suits, commonly wands, cups, swords and coins, each running from ace to ten and finishing with four court figures.

Two rough principles carry a beginner a long way. Major arcana cards are read as the structural business of a life, the things that take a year to work through. Minor arcana cards are read as ordinary weeks, meaning the conversation, the invoice, the decision about Thursday. A reading full of major cards is traditionally taken to be about something large, and one made entirely of minors about something practical.

The sequence of a reading

Every reading, however simple or elaborate, runs through roughly the same order:

• Fix the question first. Write it down if you can. A question that shifts halfway through the deal cannot be answered by cards already on the table.
• Decide how many cards and what each one is for. One card, one meaning. Three cards, three defined jobs. The positions must be agreed before you deal, not invented afterwards to suit what turned up.
• Decide about upside-down cards. Some readers give a card a modified meaning when it lands reversed, others read every card upright. Either is a legitimate practice. Choose before you shuffle.
• Shuffle and deal. There is no correct technique and no required number of shuffles. Deal face down, then turn the cards over in position order.
• Read each position on its own. Say out loud what the card means in that particular slot, not what it means in general.
• Then read the whole thing at once. Look at what repeats. Three swords together, or nothing but court cards, says something the individual meanings never will.

That last step is where readings stop being a list of definitions and start being a reading. Beginners tend to finish at the fifth step and wonder why the result feels like six unconnected fortune cookies.

Reading a card you do not recognise

You will turn over cards whose meaning you have not learned, and looking every one up breaks the thread. There are three handles that work without a book.

The picture. Describe plainly what is happening in the image. Who is in it, what are they doing, are they moving towards something or away from it, does the scene look busy or empty. Most decks were illustrated so that the drawing carries the sense, and your plain description is generally close to the traditional meaning.

The suit. Each suit owns an area of life. Wands cover drive, effort and projects under way. Cups cover feeling, attachment and relationships. Swords cover thinking, conflict, and what gets said. Coins cover money, work, the body and anything physical.

The number. Within a suit the numbers form a progression. Aces are beginnings and raw potential, the middle numbers are the working out, fives are traditionally the point of friction, and tens are the end of the line, for better or worse. Court figures are read either as actual people in the situation or as a manner of handling it.

Suit plus number plus a plain look at the picture will get you a serviceable reading of any card in the pack. Precision comes later, and it comes from repetition rather than from harder memorisation.

Asking something the cards can answer

The quality of a reading is set almost entirely by the question, and yes or no questions produce the worst ones. Ask whether you will get the job and you draw a card you then have to argue into meaning yes. Ask what would help you go into the interview well, and the same card has something to work with.

Questions that tend to produce useful readings begin with what or how: what am I refusing to notice here, how is this situation likely to develop if nothing changes, what would this choice actually cost me. Questions about your own conduct work better than questions about the behaviour of people who are not in the room.

Two habits to avoid. Do not redraw on the same question because you disliked the answer, since the second reading is just you overruling the first with extra steps. And do not put medical, legal or financial decisions to a deck of cards. Those need a professional, and the fact that a reading feels convincing is not evidence about your health or your money.

What a reading can honestly do

Tarot is a tradition of interpretation, not a demonstrated method of seeing ahead. There is no evidence that the cards know anything about your future, and any honest account of the practice starts there.

What the cards genuinely do is force articulation. A random image dropped into a defined position obliges you to say something specific about your own situation, and the thing you say is often something you already knew and had not put into words. The structure is doing the work: a fixed question, fixed positions, and a prompt you did not choose, which is much harder to dodge than open reflection.

Keep a short note of each reading, the date, the question, the cards and the sense you made of them. Come back to it in a few months. That record teaches you more about reading than any single card meaning, and it keeps you honest about which interpretations held up and which you simply liked at the time.