Tarot Divination FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

General

  • Divination is communication with the Divine, especially for the purpose of gaining insight into a situation, or the future. Tarot divination is the practice of Divine communication facilitated through tarot cards: a distinct system of cards in five Suits.

  • That depends largely on the deck and the practitioner, really. Some decks are designed with religious and spiritual themes as well as beautiful artwork which corresponds to the heavens. Such art is far more likely to be spiritually useful than dangerous. Other decks contain crass imagery which appeals to the base desires and evil instincts (e.g. highly sexualized imagery). Such decks could certainly have moral and soteriological dangers if deliberately used for occult purposes. Similarly, some practitioners are of stable mind and occult experience so they will be psychically protected when divining. Others without experience and with suggestible temperaments (mediums) etc. may be in significant psychic and spiritual danger, especially with certain decks.

  • No. Tarot was invented in 1430s Europe as a trick-taking game, akin to bridge.

  • In some denominations, yes.

  • Perhaps the main mechanism can be explained like this: the higher self (incarnating soul) interacts with unseen realms, especially the astral light. For our purposes, the astral light is to be considered a storehouse of past causes and their potential resulting effects (i.e. a karmic storehouse. You may know this by the more recently invented term, Akashic records).

Tarot Cards & Decks

  • The typical tarot deck structure is 78 cards in two categories and 5 total Suits. These are Major Arcana and Minor Arcana with the latter divided into 4 Suits: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles.

    Since there are so many cards to learrn, it is sensible to start your practice with just the 22 Major Arcana. This is not just because the Majors are distinct from the other four Suits. Major Arcana cards read like oracle cards from their culturally recognizable themes. This makes them easier to interpret for a beginner than the Minor Arcana Suits which deal with day to day issues.

    1. As discussed in the “what is the structure of a tarot deck” answer, tarot cards are typically a recognizable set of 78 cards divided into Major and Minor Arcana. In comparison, oracle cards can have any or no structure. A tarot deck may have renamed suits and one of innumerable possible themes (like Angels or nature) but it will retain it’s 78 cards with 22 Major Arcana etc. In contrast, two oracle decks, whether on same or different themes, will be completely independently designed in terms of symbolism, number of cards, etc.

    2. Oracle cards are mostly relatively recent, being associated with the New Age movement. For example, Doreen Virtue conversion. Tarot cards were invented in 1400s Renaissance Europe for Italian elites and often retain references to this historical origin, however tangential.

  • I recommend starting with the Rider Waite Smith deck for a few reasons. Firstly, it is surprisingly deep with a set of accessible meanings based on a complex esoteric structure. You can learn about this structure in the 2025 book Spiritual Key To The Tarot by Tali Goodwin & Marcus Katz. Secondly, most of the tarot resources available in the English-speaking world are based on it. Thirdly, it is an enduringly popular deck which inspired a lot of other tarot decks. It has thus been turned into a tradition, even if this is quite far from Waite’s mystical intentions. Ultimately, the RWS tarot is a very important deck in the history of tarot.

  • Choosing: I recommend that you pray (however you wish) and then pick one (tarot deck) that you are intuitively drawn to. Buying: you go into a shop and pay for it. Or, Gen Z will already know that you can go online to pay for one - plus delivery!

  • My mother thinks so. But I disagree. This is a perennial myth possibly based on obselete laws forbidding fortune-telling. Or perhaps relating to magical beliefs about objects. It’s origin is yet unknown. And speaking of such, I would point out that gifting someone else their tarot deck can be a potent white magical act. Especially if the recipient of the gift is reading for others, this singular act can have great beneficient effects for months or years to come.

  • Yes. In reading tone, symbolic connotation, magical efficacy and otherwise. To expand on this a little, let’s take the first of these: reading tone. Decks such as The Good Tarot which whitewash scary cards (e.g. Death, Tower) are going to connote different things than the Rider Waite Smith (RWS) deck.

    Similarly, the allegorical nature of the RWS deck means that the Tower card generally connotes the corollary of moral lessons and esoteric guidance rather than literal disaster or shock which a fortune-telling style tarot deck might do. If this sounds psychological, that’s because it partly is. But what is actually happening when imagery connotes something? This is an occult mystery which does have non-psychological explanations for those interested in discovering them.

  • Yes. In fact, I recommend that you do so when starting your tarot divination learning. It helps with overall practice, including memorizing the 78 card meanings.

  • As a rule, the Death card (and other scary cards) are allegorical and metaphorical. This is especially true in the Rider Waite Smith system. However, and in rare cases, various unpleasant things can be shown through various scary cards, including literal death in the Death card. This is of course very possible to mitigate through knowledge of psychic protection. But in my view, it is better to treat the issue with some gravity rather than dismiss all fears of tarot cards with jokes or simple dismissals of ‘scaremongering’ and religious fundamentalism. I find such rhetorical posturing not only offensive to the piously religious but dangerous to the sincere student of occultism who may well falsely presume from such dismissals that they are perfectly safe to practice indefinitely as a divinatory reader without any concern for their safety. This is not true. In each case, the various factors must be considered for the truth to be discerned.

  • This question is asking whether taking scary cards out of a tarot pack is whitewashing or avoiding the bad.

    My position on this is that readers ought to use their discretion and common sense as regards what sort of messages they give to different audiences.

    This may involve taking scary cards out of the pack in cases when it can be anticipated that not doing so will be poorly received.

  • A deck should not cost less than around £20 in the UK and you should check the seller carefully before buying from them.

    When you get a deck, the printing should be proper (e.g. clear and well aligned) and the cardstock should be decent.

  • A simple, safe and effective method to cleanse and/or charge your tarot deck is heartfelt prayer as you choose.

    Cleanse or charge when you feel it is intuitively necessary or when a teacher from the system that you are following instructs it.

  • As a starting rule, I wouldn’t let people touch your deck if you are a divinatory tarot reader. Basically, because when someone else handles their deck (especially by shuffling for the reading) this impresses their energy upon the cards.

    In general, I believe it is preferable for the reader to shuffle and handle the deck instead so that a more objective insight can be gained.

Learning Tarot Divination

  • In the articles page on this site, search for the phrase (or select the category) “foundational tarot skills.

  • Here is my full method for assimilating the 78 tarot card meanings into your long-term memory. It is the same method that I used to learn the meanings within 6 months. And my students use it to learn meanings within Stage I of the Tarot Apprenticeship (18 months). As a self-study student, it will probably take you 12-30 months.

  • Reversals are cards laid upside down, as opposed to cards laid out normally or “upright”. It is important to understand that, in the traditional following of some tarot systems, reversals are not used. Instead, techniques such as elemental dignities or pure intuition may be used in their place.

    However, in the original Rider Waite Smith tarot system made for the public (i.e. in the exoteric divinatory meanings given in Key To The Tarot, 1910), Waite included reversal meanings. So in the Rider Waite System, and many systems that follow, it is popular to use reversals. Some tarot authors & authorities even hold dogmatic views on these optional extras.

    So how do you interpret reversals in the modern RWS system? The same card, expressed differently. Now you may ask “how is it expressed differently?” This is down to the interpretation of the reader as there is no set of agreed upon methods: tarot divination is an art. For example, I once read on Reddit that the Sun card reversed turned out to mean that a robbery had occured in broad daylight. The Sun card represents such things as power and publicity; in this case a public display of power.

  • I have an article on reading tarot court cards that addresses the two common problems that people face with court cards.

  • No. Hermetic qabalah is used by particular Western occultists within tarot reading, especially British schools of thought connected to the Rider Waite Smith and Thoth decks. In mainland Europe, it is common to use Tarot De Marseille decks without the use of Hermetic qabalah. This is despite many tarot readers in mainland Europe being Martinists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Kabbalists and other sorts of more long-standing Western occult streams.

General Tarot Divination Practice

  • Yes, diviners of any sort can predict the future - which is sometimes certain - in spite of free will. The reason is simple: free will is an often insignificant factor against an outcome determined by myriad other factors.

    For example, if a man asks out a lesbian, she will not go out with him. Both her and the man do have free will - but it is completely irrelevant in the sitaution!

    Some people reply to this by pointing out that the lesbian could just lie or make an exception. But this is special pleading. The point of the example is to show how normative conditions lead to fixed outcomes. That is, when it is the case that the lesbian seeks a genuine partnership with another woman (the normative assumption) then the answer is no - regardless of either party’s free will.

    It doesn’t take much thinking to come up with various other examples of future outcomes and events being definitely predictable in spite of free will.

    Of course, not all things are immutable. For most people, whether they passed a test or not was probably down mostly to whether they studied.

    But the idea that free will (including magic!) allows you to change your circumstances all of the time is a mainstream cultural myth of certain Western nations.

  • A safe, simple and effective method is prayer.

  • Reading accuracy is essentially dependent on your degree of occult wisdom; join a mystery school. One tarot diviner, u/tarot_practice on Reddit, put it like this “tarot divination is applied cosmology”. I agree.

    That is to say, study things like meditation, fate vs free will, the occult constitution of man, spiritual evolution, karma and reincarnation, life after death, the purpose of life, astrology, mysticism, intuitive development, ethics, occult soteriology etc…The more you learn about reality, and your place within it, the better you can read for yourself and others.

  • One of the easiest ways is to link planets and seasons to the cards via symbols and correspondences.

    For example, Pentacles might mean years, Swords months, Cups weeks and Wands days.

    The Sun might mean a year. The Moon might mean 28 days/a month.

    etc…

  • With the exception of those posing ethical concerns, I don’t focus attention on questions as much as technique and interpretation.

    Specifically, I believe that people practice divination (or consult diviners) for wisdom and spiritual guidance. The reader can give this regardless of how an enquiry was worded.

    For example, yes/no questions. If someone asks this and it is answered literally by assigning some cards to “yes” and other to “no” and then giving a one word answer, this is indeed not very helpful.

    Yet this is not due to the question asked but the literal and incurious interpretation given by many readers who get asked it.

    But other readers prefer to expore the yes/no issue further. For example, by using Josephine McCarthy’s 7 card yes/no layout from her excellent book Tarot Skills for the 21st Century (2020) which is designed for exactly this, with only the final cards as the binary answer.

  • Shuffling tarot cards can be done fine by combining riffling with overhand shuffling as the intuition dictates.

    There is also some maths to this such as the amount of riffle shuffles to make the card sequence unpredictable from the starting order.

    And there are some philosophical arguments to be made regarding the non-randomness of the shuffling process (due to occult explanations behind which cards get pulled).

  • Intuitive tarot reading is the practice of picking up a deck and reading it without learning it’s meanings set.

    For example, someone might be completely new to tarot. They pick up the Rider Waite Smith deck and pull some cards for themselves. Then they simply look at the imagery and symbols in the hopes that it inspires their intuition for an insightful interpretation.

    Intuitive divination (including with tarot cards) can work, especially with the 22 Major Arcana of the tarot.

    But tarot being strictly structured and steeped in largely consistent esoteric symbolism for centuries, the intuitive side is only one portion of the art.

    The other side is the technical part, or the meanings and techniques.

    It is when you combine intuition with technicality and technique that you get masterful divination.

  • Yes, but let me explain fully.

    I like to deal with with the issue of negative cards from two separate perspectives which can be synthesized only after you acknowledge both.

    The first perspective is material. In the physical world, evil exists. Death, violence, loss etc. are all objectively bad. We all know this. To avoid acknowledgement of evil is egregiously offensive. We all know this too. When you hear someone has died you don't immediately jump to "oh but they're in Heaven now". You say "I'm sorry for your loss. My condolences”.

    The second perspective is a higher or spiritual one which attempts to give reason and consolation to the very real evil and suffering in the world. Your pain will make you stronger if you use your resilience. Your job loss is an opportunity for you to find more fulfiling work. Your illness will make you appreciate your health more.

    When you synthesize these two perspectives, perhaps there is spiritual wisdom. Your job loss is troubling since you are now at risk of being crippled financially. It is a very real risk, no? Yet there is perhaps an opportunity here for you to find more fulfiling work.

    But if you are just going to say "there are no negative tarot cards" without making the two perspectives explicitly clear then you are just being offensive and ridiculous at the same time. This is like hearing that someone has died and instead of giving your condolences you just say "cheer up mate it's all an illusion". The only difference is you are seeing the Tower in the outcome and instead of reading it as the shock and disaster that it represents, you say "and the final card is the Tower. Don't worry everything will work out fine mate"