Where tarot comes from

Tarot is older than the uses people now put it to. The first decks appear in fifteenth-century Europe as a card game called tarocchi, played for entertainment rather than divination. The cards later absorbed influences from Kabbalah, alchemy and other esoteric traditions. By the eighteenth century, readers such as Etteilla, the name Jean-Baptiste Alliette worked under, were treating the deck as a system and tying the cards to cosmic principles and personal destiny. From then on, tarot was a tool for divination and self-reflection.

The 78 cards

The major arcana

Twenty-two cards, from The Fool to The World, each one an archetype: the Empress, the Hermit, the Tower. In a reading they mark the large movements rather than the detail.

The minor arcana

Fifty-six cards in four suits: Cups, Pentacles, Swords and Wands. This half deals in the ordinary. Cups covers emotion, Pentacles the material side of life, Swords the mind and conflict, and Wands energy and ambition.

What a reading is

How a session runs

A reading starts with a question. You shuffle while holding it in mind, and the cards land in a spread: three cards, the Celtic Cross, or something simpler. Position changes meaning, so the same card can say two different things.

Reading the cards

Traditional meanings are a starting point rather than the answer. The picture does much of the work: colour, who is in the frame, which way the figures face. A reader holds image and tradition together with what the person opposite them has said. Two readers can read one card differently, and both can be useful.

What tarot is for

Decisions and clarity

Tarot looks at what is already happening rather than at what will happen. It puts names to influences you had half noticed and opens options you ruled out early. The cards do not choose for you; they widen the frame.

What tarot is not

It is not fortune telling in the sense most people mean, and it does not remove your say in what happens. Sceptics often assume that anyone who reads cards believes the future is fixed. Most people who work with tarot do not. The cards get at what the conscious mind tidies away.

Getting to know a deck

A deck becomes personal through use. A card starts meaning something particular to you because of where it turned up the first time, and you build a private shorthand with the images.

Some readers clean a new deck in smoke or leave it under a pillow. Others do nothing at all. A ritual helps when it signals that the reading has started. Journalling does more: note the cards afterwards, with what you thought they meant, and read it back later. That is how you learn which ones you misread.