How to Study Tarot: Tips for Building a Real Relationship with the Cards

Each of us has a unique symbolic language through which our psyche tries to communicate. Every night we dream, receiving personalized symbols that attempt to convey something important to our conscious mind. Learning to work with Tarot can develop a collaborative relationship with your psyche that serves a similar function to dreams—but with a little more conscious participation and a common underlying structure that translates across contexts. Over time, it can even provide a shorthand for communicating with others.

The art of reading Tarot requires a combination of systematic learning and intuitive development. Here are some of the approaches I use in my course, More Than a Fool’s Errand: Tarot's Gateway to the Soul, that you can start applying on your own.

Study the Art Itself, Not Just the Guidebook

The most important tip I can give you is to pick a deck from an artist who is deeply versed in Tarot, and then study the art itself.

I teach with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck because Pamela Colman Smith, the artist who created the RWS, was extraordinarily deliberate. The facial expressions, postures, colors, textures, animals, architectural details—every element tells you something important about that card.

Most guidebooks are written by someone other than the artist. This holds true even for the iconic RWS and Thoth Tarot (an equally famous, but slightly different Tarot system). Both of these decks were created by female artists but were credited to the men who “wrote the book,” effectively erasing and overlooking the most significant contributors. While most modern decks now acknowledge both artist and author, it’s still not uncommon for guidebooks to say things about a card that don’t necessarily follow from the image, revealing how disconnected many guidebook authors are from the art they’re meant to amplify.

That’s not to say guidebooks can’t be useful, but I find them best as a supplement. You’ll get far more out of studying each card and learning to let the image communicate directly to you in nonverbal ways. For conscientious artists like Pamela Colman Smith, you can feel fairly confident that nothing is in the image that isn’t meant to be there.

Learning Tarot Through Imagination

Symbols are living things. Their meaning is layered and complex. Something gets lost when they’re reduced to a dead taxonomy, just as the life drains out of a butterfly when it’s pinned to a collector’s board. Studying a static specimen cannot tell you what it looks like in living motion.

Because the cards contain archetypal themes, they are multivalent, encompassing many facets of the instinct from which they spring. A good Tarot artist knows this and crafts images that feel alive and multifaceted, ready to leap off the card and speak to the moment.

One of the most powerful ways to experience this is through imaginally entering the card and interacting with the figures in it. In my course, I offer a guided meditation to introduce this process with one of the figures you’ll learn about, but you can and should do this with any card. The key is to not force or control the flow of the imaginal interaction, which can take some practice with freeing you imagination from your conscious will. With this method, though, you’re going beyond memorizing keywords or relying on books to give fortune-cookie-style meanings and tapping directly into what your unconscious is ready to present to you about this card at this time in this moment.

Expand Your Learning Beyond Tarot

I consider my course “foundational” not because it’s simplistic or only for beginners, but because it lays the bedrock on which your symbolic understanding can continue to expand. Tarot is an open-ended process, one that morphs and evolves the more you explore. Here are a few ways to keep that expansion going:

• Talk to other readers. Everyone brings a different background and set of associations to the symbolism. Dialoguing with other Tarot readers about what they see in a card is excellent grist for expanding the complexity of the symbol beyond your own limited associations.
  

• Read! Read! Read! Philosophy, spirituality, history, mythology, psychology—and fiction! As a lover of learning, I never cease to be amazed by how something seemingly unrelated to Tarot suddenly helps me add a new layer to my understanding of these cards.
  

• Visit art museums and study art motifs. The RWS deck in particular is filled with allusions to other symbol systems: mythology, Kabbalah, astrology, medieval iconography, alchemy. The more experience you get studying art and learning about artistic expression and symbolism, the better you’ll be at reading Tarot art specifically.
  

  

  The World Card as drawn by Pamela Colman Smith

  For instance, it’s one thing to know that the four animal heads on the World card are the four apostles. But until you recognize that the tetramorph was a very specific type of religious art, that little detail remains relatively empty. Juxtapose the World card next to traditional tetramorph depictions, and suddenly you’ve got a real conversation starter!

  
  

  

  Christ in majesty in a mandorla, surrounded by emblems of the tetramorph: ivory plaques on a wooden coffret, Cologne, first half of the 13th century (Musée de Cluny) anonymous, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

These are all things you can do on your own to enrich your connection to and knowledge of Tarot, and they’re also methods I use throughout my course with curated suggestions for outside material, personal reflection, and experiential engagement. These methods transform learning Tarot from memorization into an encounter with Tarot and with yourself.

In my next post, I’ll cover how to choose a Tarot deck: what to look for, what to avoid, and a few of my favorite beginner-friendly recommendations.

Learn More About My Tarot Course!