The past couple of decades have seen a resurging interest in most things witchy, tarot cards among them. For many, tarot is a handy celebration trick, a way to help a friend make connections they might have resisted. For many others, the tarot card is sacred, a highly effective tool with which to lead you life.
Though tarot cards have taken to a mystical meaning in the cultural creativity, they were originally planned as more of a parlor game. The cards have been used since the mid-15th century; the earliest recorded decks originated in various parts of Italy. Not before the 18th century has been the tarot utilized for its divinatory (or occult) function we understand it best for today — Antoine Court and Jean-Baptiste Alliette are credited with popularizing tarot”readings” at Paris in the 1780s.
Between those who think it’s a joke and people who think tarot card reading are real magic lies a vast group who find them insightful and enjoyable, if not necessarily supernatural. Whether it becomes a pastime or a full-time occupation , tarot reading (for oneself and for others) can be an efficacious method to pass the period .
What do I want to read tarot cards?
First you will need a tarot deck. The very popular and well-known deck is the Rider-Waite, drawn by illustrator Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1910. These cards have been known for their easy imagery, their easy colour scheme (featuring plenty of yellow, sky blue, and grey ), and their symbolism. Many people recommend the Rider-Waite deck for beginners, since the cards’ meanings are so frequently intuitive — and if they’re not, lots of translation guides exist in publications and on the internet. Many decks, including the Rider-Waite, include a little sheet of paper specifying all the card most frequent interpretations.
The Wild Unknown deck is especially pretty, however — fair warning — a bit less intuitive for newcomers. The Morgan Greer deck is a bit like the Rider-Waite on steroids: The symbols are similar, but the faces are somewhat larger and bolder and the colors more vivid and diverse. There are updated, varied decks and Game of Thrones-them eddecks. What’s most significant is choosing a deck with imagery that interests you personally, with symbolism you can interpret. You’re the one who’ll be using them, so they need to fit your personality and style.
What do the different types of tarot cards imply?
Though layout changes considerably, all tarot decks are uniform in a few ways. Each comprises 78 cards divided into two classes: the major and minor arcana. The major arcana are the deck’s 22 trump cards also, when pulled during a reading, normally refer to more major influences and revelations. These cards don’t have suits and instead stand alone, representing significant life events or figures in a individual’s life.
These 56 cards are divided into four suits: wands, swords, pentacles, and cups. (Occasionally, tarot decks may use different terms, such as”coins,” for pentacles, but these are direct substitutions for your four initial classes.) Each suit represents a different facet of life. Normally, wands symbolize imagination and enthusiasm, swords symbolize intellect, pentacles symbolize labour and cash, and cups signify emotion. There are different groupings here, also; each match can be aligned with a grouping of astrological signs, such that wands = fire, swords = atmosphere, pentacles = Earth, and cups = water.
These meanings can come into play where cards represent people and their zodiac signs, but since we are beginners here, the meanings you will most often draw out would be the functional definitions. For instance, a three-card disperse that contains three pentacle cards firmly suggests an issue having to do with cash. (More on the sorts of spreads in an instant.)
Much of that is all up to the deck owner and what feels right to them, however there are a couple practices common to the majority of tarot readings. If you are reading cards for someone else, you’ll want to ask them to offer you a question or instant what they are interested in, and hold that question in mind while you replicate the deck — also known as”clearing” the deck out of previous inquiries and readings. “Am I on the right career path?” “How can I finish my writer’s block?”)
You may then ask the person you’re searching for (also known as”the querent”) to reduce the deck focusing on their query. We enjoy this variation because it permits the querent to feel related to all the deck themselves, but some readers will reduce the deck to the querent. Either way, you will then pull as many cards as you will need for your spread, organizing them involving you and the querent — or even simply in front of you, in case you’re studying for yourself.
How can I browse the cards?
If you wind up asking what a”three-card spread” is, this is the section for you. There are lots of ways to read tarot cards, and frequently the instructions that come with your cards will include pictures of the most popular spreads. Included in these are the simple three-card spread, the Celtic cross, and also a seven-day propagate, but you’ll soon learn that there’s a disperse for virtually any situation, and you could always make up your own, too.
A three-card spread has the reader pull three cards in the deck after it has been shuffled and halved by the querent (more on that in a moment). Usually, the very first called pulled represents the past, the second represents the present, and the third reflects the near long run. How those timelines are interpreted depends on the reading and the question being asked –“prospective” may mean tomorrow or it may mean 10 years from now.
Another common use for tarot cards is a daily card reading, wherein a single card is pulled from the top of the shuffled deck and used as a reminder or a principle for the day ahead. This may be a very helpful practice for anybody looking to familiarize themselves with all the tarot deck and the cards’ meanings.
However, what does it mean?
It is important to think about every card individual meaning, but it’s essential to take into account the symbolism and vibe in the spread as a whole, also. Especially in larger spreads, there’s as much information to be gleaned from the overall picture as its pieces. If you are reading for somebody else, this is a chance to utilize them — the more stress you feel to mind-read, the harder this will be. Reading tarot doesn’t make you psychic, which should come as a relief: It is fine to ask the subject questions about the cards and to brainstorm together ways in which the cards may apply to their original question. Sometimes the cards will not match at all — that the querent asks about money, but also you pull two cups cards and”the fans.” This might imply what they actually desired to ask you was their love life. (Who does not?)
There are tons of ways to read tarot, but all of these require practice. Learning 78 distinct cards takes some time, especially when so many of them have multiple possible meanings. But the more you read and touch the cards, the more familiar they’ll become and the easier it’s going to be to use them as a tool to better understand others and yourself.