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These are my tips and tricks for beginners on how to start their journey in tarot. These aren’t going to be for everyone, and please do not take this as a rule book. But hopefully, you will find something useful here that will ignite something within yourself, to push yourself further to that next stage in your tarot, or start at all!
1- Tarot should be a practice you get into, to enhance your spiritual journey, not to make a quick dollar. Although we live in a hustle culture, and some of us have dedicated our professional lives to tarot, you should not be doing this just to make money. While, I recognize that many of us are in financial situations where any side hustle is a necessary thing, and by no means am I trying to suggest that anybody who reads for money is bad, I myself read for money. If the sole purpose that you are getting into tarot is to make money, that perpetuates a lot of negative connotations. Tarot, as a community, has a negative connotation with being scammers, grifters, and con artists. And when we get into something like tarot before we are ready and are charging people money, whether we meet or not we are accidentally perpetuating this negative stereotype. My recommendation to you if you would like to charge people is to be transparent. Tell them that you’re learning, and offer them the opportunity to tip you if they would like. This way nobody is being disillusioned, and you’re still able to potentially make money for your time.
2- It’s not a race. Tarot is a craft, like any other journey in magick and witchcraft. Although people on the internet may make it seem as though you can get a deck tomorrow, and suddenly you’re an expert, this is simply not the case. It’s easy to find ourselves in a position where we are comparing ourselves to other readers, or even which is based solely on their social media. While some people might be naturally inclined to already be quite tapped in with her intuition, that doesn’t make you a failure for not immediately being in that position. Remember that social media is a lie. Although there is a lot of validity and truth in social media, it is of course curated to be consumed by individuals. Don’t base or practice off what we see from others doing on the Internet and that includes tarot.
3- Start with a Rider Waite Smith. While there are several other kinds of tarot decks, including Pip decks or the Thoth tarot, it is my opinion that everyone should start with the Rider Waite Smith. The symbolism, numerology, and even color correspondence in each card in the RWS, is foundational to set you up for success in using PIP and indie decks in the future. There are modern versions of the stack that I still find acceptable, such as the Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle, but overall we should be starting with the key initial imagery. It gives you a good foundational basis to understand the meaning of each card, so that way you can then move on to a more unique deck. Because as we all know this point I love supporting indie decks and I think that we should all be supporting them as long as, of course, we have that foundation set up for ourselves. If you are interested in looking into the Thoth tarot, I recommend joining Maevius Lynn’s study discord.
4- Keep a Journal!! I know that you will hear this in other aspects of witchcraft, keeping a book of shadows or a grimoire. In this case, that is not necessarily what I’m referring to although it is incredibly aligned. Tracking or magical journey is an important key to growth. And the same can be said in tarot. I myself keep a tarot journal that I pull one or two cards whenever I can and I write it down. However, in the early days, I was pulling cards every single day to continue to push myself to grow. From a divination standpoint, this can also be a great tool for doing things like predicting the future in short term, digestible ways. Pull a card and make a prediction on what that will mean for your day, and then the next day refer back to it and reflect on how accurate you were. This is a really good tool as well to just develop our intuition and put ourselves in a great stay on point for growth.
5- Focus on one or a few cards at a time. This particular technique is not going to be for everyone. However, if you pull one card and focus on it for two maybe even three days straight. And again keeping a record of this in a journal. In that journal we’re going to write down what does that card mean upright, what does it mean in reverse, what symbolism are we seeing what does that mean, what are the key color correspondences are taking play here? Ruminate on what this card could mean for different life situations and journal it. It’s important that if you do take this path journal each card, so that way you can refer back to one source instead of dozens. Simultaneously I would recommend starting with the full and working forward in order, that way when you do reference back to this book it’s easy to find which card you’re looking for.
6- Learn the Numerology! Learning numerology is a key point in tarot in my opinion. It’s not perfect, but when we understand the numerology in tarot, it can set us up for clutch situations where we have forgotten what a card means and we’re able to deduce what that card means because we understand the suits met with numerology. Now, this isn’t going to be perfect in all situations but it is something that sets you up for a basic foundation for most of the cards.
I hope this is useful to you all! Best wishes and luck on your tarot journeys!
