So the first and most crucial stage in seeking intuitive-level clarity is to unclutter your mind of any convoluted ego projections, motivations and agendas. Forging a completely honest, transparent, self-realized relationship with yourself is the only way to ensure you are a pure channel and giving absolutely accurate readings, whatever your purpose.
Reading the Cards: A Quick-Start Guide
When sitting down to read the cards, you should find a quiet space where you are unlikely to be interrupted.
You must then decide whether you want to do a general life reading, look only at a specific area of life or find an answer to a specific question.
Then, looking in the layouts section at the back of the book (here), select a layout that you feel will provide the most interesting and relevant reading or answer to your question.
Now, taking the entire deck, shuffle the cards in whichever way you find most comfortable, making sure you keep the cards image side down so you see only the generic backs of the cards. Bear in mind, if you are reading the cards for someone else, that it is always the person asking the question and receiving the reading who must do the shuffling.
While shuffling, hold the question you want answered in your mind, be it general or specific, until you intuitively feel the cards are sufficiently shuffled and ready to be laid down.
Place the shuffled deck on the table in front of you (it’s best to find a flat surface large enough to accommodate the number of cards shown in your chosen layout).
Still holding your question or intention in mind, split the shuffled cards into three separate piles and, remembering the order in which you cut them, place them image side down. The piles don’t have to be made equal, but can be if that is your preference.
Then put the deck back together in a different way from how you split it.
Now the cards are ready to be laid, image side down, in whatever layout you have chosen.
To lay the cards, first choose a number between one and seven, or, if you are reading for someone else, ask them to choose this number.
Say the number you choose is seven, first remove six cards from the top of the deck and place them to one side, so it is the seventh card that you place in position one of your chosen layout. Then, to lay the second card in the layout, do the same again, removing another six cards from the top of the deck, so it is the seventh card that you place in position two of the reading. Keep discarding six cards and laying only the seventh card until every card in the layout has been placed.
Once the cards are in position, you can begin to turn them over, so the image side faces up and is the right way round. You can either turn all the cards over at once, or, if you are new to tarot reading, it may be more beneficial to follow the sequential order specified for your chosen layout and turn the cards over one at a time. If you are a beginner, turning the cards slowly and individually will help you to fully absorb the lessons contained within each card before seeing how the story unfolds by moving on to the next. It is easy for beginners to become overwhelmed and despondent when faced with the large amount of information present in a multiple card reading, hence it is best for those new to tarot reading to take the step-by-step approach rather than trying to read the cards as a synthesized whole.
Using the intuitive go-to statements provided in this book as a starting point, you can now start to piece together a narrative framework in relation to your posed question or area of interest. On each of the cards pages that follow you will find words and ideas that will form a gateway between your conscious and subconscious. Basic key phrases for each card are emboldened for the purposes of quicker referencing to help refresh the memory of those who are familiar with the tarot and to help new users to grasp the basic meaning of each card.
While analysing each card individually is the necessary first step in learning to read the tarot, the tone a specific card has, rather than the basic symbolic ideas it presents, can shift depending on the type of influence specific to the others surrounding it. Herein lies the art of reading tarot: reading the cards together as a synthesized whole, which is akin to viewing each card combination through a prism to assess any tonal variations, enhancements and augmentations of their basic textbook definitions. This is what I hope the connective structuring of book will help you achieve, via its synthesized and bracketed suggestions of how various card combinations can play out.
Bear in mind that the ideas on these pages that inexplicably resonate or provoke an uncomfortable, rather than flattering, gratifying, indulging or obliging emotional reaction, are those with the potential, if the guidance is integrated, to induce the greatest growth, change and transformation.
Major and Minor Arcana
The tarot deck consists of seventy-eight cards: twenty-two Major Arcana cards, ranging from the Fool as card 0 to the World as card 21, and fifty-six Minor Arcana cards.
Each of the Major Arcana cards, which represent the major forces and events at work in the situation, depicts an archetypal character or scene, as you might find when analysing the individual driving forces in a fictional tale. Each archetype is distinctly different, embodying a uniquely individual type of psychology, philosophy, spirituality or pattern of behavioural response. Archetypes might have diametrically different responses to exactly the same personal or professional life situation. For example, though the Devil and the High Priestess both deal in hidden matters, the latter is morally and ethically grounded in their words and actions, whereas the former is not.
The fifty-six Minor Arcana cards are divided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Pentacles and Swords. They depict the minor events that occur as a result of the Major Arcana’s life-force archetypes.
Just as the knocking over of the first domino in a line will knock down the rest, so the Major Arcana cards set off a chain reaction to produce the situations and events depicted in the Minor Arcana. Therefore I have extended the twenty-two Major Arcana card sections to incorporate a deeper study and analysis of which key human interest areas will trigger a particular response from each unique archetype. These sections are broken down as follows: personification and psychology; spirituality and philosophy; personal life; professional life; property, finances and resources; health and well-being.
The four suits of the Minor Arcana need no such breaking down, as each, by design, deals specifically with one of the four key areas of human concern: the Wands, physical energy and action; the Cups, feelings and emotions; the Pentacles, money and material acquisitions; the Swords, thought processes and intellect.
Advancing your Tarot Reading
As the English poet and cleric John Donne said in 1624, ‘No man is an island,’ and by finding similar themes and symbolism repeated throughout the cards, you can begin to form a mental web or network of connections between the different narrative themes, scenes and characters of the Major and Minor Arcana. For instance, the symbols of the upright sword, Sun/daylight and Moon/night are featured many times throughout the deck, so in grasping the meaning of these symbols and seeing and forming connections between the cards, you can begin to understand how the cards, when read in combination, work together as a whole.
For the advanced practitioner, who already has a good understanding of the meanings for the individual cards, I have placed abbreviations for all seventy-eight cards, embedded within brackets, throughout the card interpretation sections. These can be used to assist the reader in realizing the links between the cards and understanding how it is possible to quickly produce refined, succinct and wholly synthesized interpretations from the huge amount of raw symbolic information contained within