Tarot Basics

Tarot is a deck of seventy-eight image cards and a symbolic language more than five hundred years in the using. Every card is a painting: figures, postures, objects, sky and numbers combine into a fixed visual grammar — a pope enthroned on high, a man hanging upside down, Justice holding her scales. To “learn tarot” is, to a large degree, to learn to recognize this grammar and translate it into language that is useful for your own situation.

First, what tarot is not: it is not a fortune-telling art, and it will not decree your future for you; nor is it obscure esoteric knowledge that requires a master's initiation before you may touch it. Historically it began as a card game in Italian courts, and only later did generation after generation develop its uses for divination and self-reflection. Keep its stature level with your own, and you will actually learn it faster.

Its most common use is the divinatory question: around one concrete question you draw several cards, and within the frame formed by card faces and card positions you look for a response. But its mirror side matters just as much — what the cards reflect is often not a prophecy about the future, but your unspoken feelings, expectations, and blind spots in this present moment. Many experienced readers prize the latter even more: the value of a reading lies not in telling you “what will happen”, but in helping you see clearly “where you are standing right now”.

This site's view of tarot follows from exactly this: the core computation of a tarot reading — the draw, the spread, upright and reversed orientations — follows fixed rules, while the interpretation is closer to a structured conversation with yourself. This tutorial proceeds in the order know the cards → learn to ask → learn to read → start practicing, and every chapter ends with a small exercise you can do immediately. Treat tarot as a thinking tool, and you will gain far more than “fortune-telling”.

A standard tarot deck holds seventy-eight cards divided into two parts, and the two parts play completely different roles. Understand the division of labor and all the memorization and interpretation ahead will come twice as easily with half the effort.

The first part is the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana, running from “The Fool” to “The World”. Each one is an archetypal figure or theme — the Lovers, the Chariot, Death, the Devil, the Tower. They carry the most weight when they appear, pointing to the major subjects of a life stage: an identity shift, the essence of a relationship, an ending you have to go through. A single Major Arcana card is enough to carry the main line of a reading.

The second part is the fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana, divided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. Each suit contains the pip cards from Ace (1) to 10, plus four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, and King. If the Majors are the chapter titles of a life, the Minors are the everyday details inside the chapters: Wands concern action and passion, Cups concern emotion and relationship, Swords concern thought and conflict, Pentacles concern work and money. When you ask the cards about Wednesday's meeting, about a move, about an argument, it will mostly be the Minor Arcana answering you.

Compare the two cards below and feel the temperament of each part: The Fool is the traveler setting out itself; the Ten of Cups is a scene of ordinary life everyone longs for. As a beginner, don't rush to memorize all seventy-eight cards at once — first get familiar with the arc of the twenty-two Majors, then use the “element + number” method to understand the Minors (chapter 4 expands on this), and the memory burden drops sharply.

How can a few images drawn at random after shuffling respond to your question? This is a question every beginner deserves to face honestly, and this section gives you an answer you can use without having to “believe” in it.

One widely accepted understanding is this: tarot is a projective tool. Seventy-eight image-rich cards cover nearly every archetypal situation of human life, and when a few of them “randomly” freeze under your hands, your attention will be seized, willy-nilly, by the images that resonate with your situation — an anxious person easily spots the Tower in the cards, an indecisive person easily sees the choice on the Lovers. Interpretation, then, is the process of translating that resonance into words.

Randomness is precisely where this mechanism's value lies. When troubled, people replay the same self-narrative over and over: “He obviously doesn't care about me”, “I just have to endure this job”. Drawing cards sidesteps the rehearsed narrative and forces in a new perspective — the card you think you “drew wrong” is often the most informative one, because it refuses the answer you wanted to hear.

Seen this way, tarot's operating mechanism is closer to the free association and active imagination of psychology than to a mechanical prediction of the future. This also explains why tarot practice always stresses that how you ask matters more than how the cards resolve: for the same situation, asking “Does he still love me at all?” versus “What do I really need in this relationship?” yields completely different responses from the cards — the former hands agency over to the cards, the latter hands it back to you. Chapter 3 trains questioning deliberately.

One last honest sentence: you do not need to believe the cards carry any magical power to use tarot well. Treat them as a vivid sandbox for thinking, bring a little playfulness and full sincerity of self-reflection, and they will keep paying you back.

Most tarot decks and teaching materials on today's market trace back to the same template: the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, published in 1909 (usually shortened to RWS, or the Waite deck). Designed by Arthur Edward Waite and painted by Pamela Colman Smith, this deck was the first to give complete scenic illustrations to all seventy-eight cards (the earlier Tarot de Marseille had pictures only for the Majors and the court cards), and it rearranged some card orders and names. It turned tarot from an aristocratic card game and a mystic's codebook into a visual textbook anyone could learn.

RWS illustrations are themselves a book of meanings. Take the Two of Swords: a blindfolded woman holds a sword in each hand, a heaving sea behind her — the blindfold is “not looking”, the crossed swords are “standoff”, a sea so calm it looks frozen is “emotion held down”. No keywords need memorizing; the picture speaks for itself. Every painting buries such a layer of detail that can be “read out”.

This design in which the picture is the meaning is exactly why this tutorial keeps repeating “look at the picture first, memorize later”. This site's card library, its draws and readings, and this whole tutorial all take the RWS imagery and meaning tradition as the baseline; when you later meet other decks, as long as their pictures follow the RWS paradigm, every method learned here transfers directly.

If you want the full lineage of how this system evolved from fifteenth-century Italian court card games to today, there is a further read on tarot history inside the site.