Welcome to the wonderful world of tarot! I envy you this exciting beginning, this journey into the unknown. As you begin to breathe in the soul-nourishing air of symbols, unfurl your intuitive self, and summon magical insights, you will learn things about yourself and the world that you never knew before. You will discover things that you didn’t expect even existed. You will experience things that, ironically, you couldn’t have predicted.
It’s such an honor to be your guide and introduce you to the cards that I love so dearly. Guide really is the best word for my role here with you. As you will see, tarot isn’t as much about memorizing secret meanings as it is about uncovering the secrets of your inner landscape. No one can do that for you … but those who’ve gone before you can give advice, shine a light, and point the way.
Tarot is such an incredibly apt tool for humans. One of the main ways humans understand the world is by considering things in dualities or pairs of opposites. Something you will notice about tarot right away is that this idea of opposites comes up a lot. This book’s approach also uses the idea of opposites by interspersing tarot reading skill-building activities woven throughout the text.
This approach, presenting practical experience alongside information, reflects how people actually learn tarot. Plus it is more fun to play with the cards and not just read about them.
Tarot is, after all, never fully mastered. If we waited until we knew it all, we’d never shuffle the cards. So we will have recess in between lessons, although the playtimes will be more than just taking a break. In this book, they will help you form connections between the materials in the lessons and your life.
So many introductory books focus heavily on card interpretation and for good reason. The cards, like all good symbols, are layered and changeable. This is why we say tarot is never fully mastered. The cards, or the energies behind the cards, always evolve. Or perhaps it is human understanding that evolves. Probably both. Consequently, it would be so easy to write pages and pages about each individual card.
To actually become a competent reader (which is probably why you bought this kit), you have to consider so many other things than just card meanings. Your interpretations for the cards will deepen and broaden over time. Thinking that you have to learn everything about the cards will just paralyze you and for no good reason. Instead, this book focuses on a well-balanced approach to reading the cards and developing all your skills at the same time. Kind of like a well-rounded exercise program … you’ll work all of your tarot muscles equally.
As you make your way through this book, you’ll move both quickly and slowly. You’ll jump in right away by doing your first reading at the start of CHAPTER 1. You will see that you won’t hurt or wreck anything; you can do this even if you don’t know everything, or perhaps even think that you really don’t know anything. You will see that you have a capacity for tapping into the wisdom of the cards. You will see that as a human, you respond to symbols just like anyone else. You will see that tarot is just really amazing. And those moments of amazing revelation, if you are anything like me, will make you want to discover more.
You’ll also move slowly, or at least I hope that you will. My best suggestion, if you want to read this book quickly, is to do that … read all the way through as quickly as you like, but then start over, reading more slowly. This will give your subconscious time to be nourished by your experiences with tarot. Give your soul time to reveal its mysteries, for as you work with these images, you will summon your soul to come dance and play with your conscious mind. When the mind and heart, the conscious and subconscious, the self and the soul weave together, that’s when the real magic of divination occurs. That is what I call “being in the zone.” By developing all of your tarot skills together, you will recognize what the zone feels like and you’ll know how to get yourself there at will.
Are you ready? I thought so! Let’s jump right in and see what wonderful things we find.