The deck

Tarot card meanings

All 78 cards, each with upright and reversed meanings plus what it says about love, career, money, spirituality and health, and the symbolism and history behind the image.

New to this? Start with how the deck is structured. It turns 78 things to memorise into four suits, ten numbers and twenty-two archetypes.

Start with the structure

Seventy-eight cards is four suits, ten numbers and twenty-two archetypes. Each group has its own page.

78 cards

Major Arcana22

Twenty-two trumps, numbered 0 to 21. When these appear the reading is about something structural rather than situational.

Wands14

Fire · Will, drive and creativity. Wands are the fire suit: ambition, inspiration, enterprise and the energy that starts things. They ask what you want and whether you are moving toward it.

Cups14

Water · Emotion, relationship and intuition. Cups are the water suit: feeling, love, connection and the inner life. They ask what you feel, and whether you are letting yourself feel it.

Swords14

Air · Mind, truth and conflict. Swords are the air suit: thought, communication, honesty and struggle. The deck's hardest suit, and the one most concerned with what is actually true.

Pentacles14

Earth · Work, money and the body. Pentacles are the earth suit: money, work, health, home and everything material. They ask what you are building and whether it will hold.

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Learning the deck

Reading all 78 pages in a week is the slowest way to learn tarot. The fastest is one card a day for ninety days, looked up as it arrives.

The daily practiceThe full course

About the card meanings

Straight answers, without the mystique.

  • Do not learn them in order. Draw one card a day and learn each as it arrives, in the context of an actual day. Ninety days of that teaches more than reading all 78 pages in a week.

  • The Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909, which is what the overwhelming majority of modern decks descend from. Where a meaning differs between traditions (Strength and Justice swapping places, for instance) the card page says so rather than picking silently.

  • No, and trying to is the slowest route. Learn the four suits, the ten numerical stages and the four court ranks, and most of the 56 minor cards become decodable from their parts. That leaves 22 majors to actually know.

Writing

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Guides, card studies and the occasional argument about how tarot should be read.

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