One of the reasons I’ve not been as interested in making tarot content lately is because I feel like I’ve covered most of what I have to say for beginners. When I open the floor for questions I mostly get the usual ones - “What deck should I buy?” “Do I need to cleanse them?” “What spreads should I use?” - and while I totally get why that’s what a lot of people are concerned about, I think that kind of thinking can really limit someone’s relationship with the cards. So I wanted to suggest some better questions to ask your favorite tarot writers to illicit more interesting answers and attempt to answer them myself.
“How does tarot work?”
My personal view is that the “universe” + deities + spirits generally can use the random nature of the cards to communicate messages. Instead of having to intuit an entire message from them, I only need to intuit when they’d like me to stop shuffling - when the cards are in the arrangement they want to use - and then read the meanings of the cards to decipher what they wanted me to know.
Pretty straight forward.
“What is tarot good for?”
I think tarot is good for all sorts of things. I learned it because I was drawn to oracular work specifically. I’d grown up having “flashes” of things that would later come to pass and I was looking for a way to tap into that on purpose and not just randomly. I wasn’t allowed to explore that openly in my fundamentalist Christian home at the time - I was 15/16 - but a friend got me a pack of tarot cards for a Christmas present that I was able to open in private and hide. Once I started to get the basics down, I wanted to help others with them, so I began to read for other people once I left for college (the first time). Later on as I got asked more questions about spirits, I stumbled into using it as a spirit communication tool. I mention all this because it shapes what I think of as tarots strengths and weaknesses.
Tarot did indeed prove to be a good tool to develop my oracular capacity. I am much better at looking toward a topic and getting flashes at will now. The flashes are also much much more accurate and detailed than they used to be. So if you’re looking to learn it for that, I can highly recommend it.
I’ve found it to be a little hit or miss for helping people. It depends so much more on the other person’s openness and capability to act on the reading than my abilities and I think that’s always what I’ve found most frustrating about reading for clients. I can hone my skill for the decade plus that I have but it’s completely useless if someone asks a question they don’t actually want the answer to. So mixed bag there.
I think Tarot is actually a little tricky for spirit communication, especially with human Dead and the like. I think it might be a little too complex? I prefer geomancy when working with the Dead. The answers tend to be much clearer with more ways to double check. Tarot has worked alright for communication with deities and the like though. Tarot in general works best for me when I read for a specific need and connect with a more “universal” spirit to pull cards.
“What are the limitations of tarot?”
It’s less of a science and more of an art so that can be really difficult for people. It definitely threw me for the first couple years I was reading them. That art aspect can also leave more room for non-specificity which isn’t great for all applications.
It’s not gonna do the work for you, even if it’s good at highlighting it. Knowing what you need to do is only so useful unless you act on it.
Can have that “you see what you want to see” effect if you’re not self aware or have some form of shadow work practice.
“What skills are involved in being good at tarot?”
There’s basic intuition - being able to tell a yes/likely from a no/not likely - which I believe most people can develop. Aside from that, I think one of the main ones is being able to take in a lot of visual information + overlapping meanings and begin to pattern match enough to know which ones are most important. Another skill is being able catalog a whole library of meanings and switch between big archetypal level ones and very specific discrete ones to achieve a specific aim. Tying the meanings of the cards to the spread you’re using is something that trips people up but it’s pretty easily worked through if you treat the spread itself as divinatory material and not a quiz.
When working with querents, I think it gets trickier because often to give a good reading you have to have enough intuition to know you’re right about something even when they might disagree with you but you also need enough intuition to know when to hold back some because they might not be ready for a given piece of information. That balance is tricky to pull off. I used to make the mistake of giving all of the information I got out of a reading and not only did the important meanings get lost, but some times a particular piece would become an unhealthy fixation. As I’ve gotten older and more practiced, that’s doesn’t happen nearly as much any more and I’ve seen satisfaction with my readings go way up.
There’s also being able to navigate ethical questions and personal boundaries. What are you willing and not willing to read for? Yes even if it’s just for yourself. Will you read for third parties who aren’t present? Are you willing to stand by those even when I client is angry and threatening? What do you mention from a given reading for others in your personal notes or with other people? How do you handle identifying information? How you handle those can really make or break you as a reader.
“What practice does it take to become good at tarot?”
I think it depends on you - you level of intuition, your interpersonal skills, your level of energy and timeline. I had the best luck learning to read tarot not from books but from doing reading after reading for people who had burning questions. The summer before I went to college, I did an alternative Freshman 101 course where I spent 8 days climbing, backpacking, and rafting with people in my future dorm instead of a semester course. It was great and I took a deck of tarot cards with me so ~12 people knew I could read tarot alrightish. Who told their roommates. Who told their friends. So I spent several nights a week reading in dorm lounges for random people who’d either heard about me or walked by and gotten interested.
Doing that many readings, especially back to back, meant I could notice changes in the oracular sense I was developing. It’s kind of like sampling different foods. Through contrast you really notice the spicy foods or the bitter ones or the sweet ones. With reading for a lot of different people who often had different kinds of questions over the course of a semester, I could really get that contrast that allowed me to see when I was really on to something or what specific feelings in conjunction with certain cards had tended to mean over time.
So I personally don’t think it’s something you can get good at by reading a book or practicing solo. Because there’s only so many “tastes” you can introduce yourself to over time. Reading for other people has the benefit of variety and confirming or challenging your predictions so that you can really sharpen those senses to divine at a high level.
But also - not everyone needs to be GoodTM at it. Good enough is probably easier to achieve but it wasn’t what I set out to try to pursue.
Conclusion
These are just some but I’d love to hear others take on what questions might be more fruitful for beginners to ask.
And if you’ve got any questions you’ve like to ask me, drop them in my ask!
hillbillyoracle