INTRODUCING THE LIVING TAROT

Today, something’s different about you. You decided to pick up a tarot deck for the first time.

Or maybe you have a tarot deck someone gave you ages ago, and for some reason it suddenly called to you.

Or maybe you’ve been dabbling in tarot for years, and it’s never quite scratched that itch. But you know it could.

Whichever it is, congratulations! You bought this book, which means you’ve crossed a magical threshold, and when you look back at this day ten, twenty, thirty years from now, you’ll say, “That was when everything changed.”

But right now, let’s face it: you have questions.

Any sensible person living in the twenty-first century, like you, is going to have plenty of doubts about tarot. Is this really going to work? Am I psychic enough to do this? (I never thought I was before! What does “psychic” even mean?) What about my free will?

What about fate? Can I really memorize meanings for seventy-eight cards?! Will my friends and family laugh if they find out? And also, of course—depending on where you’re coming from—is it evil?

For twenty-five years I’ve been reading tarot and wrestling with these questions. If I’m at peace with them today, it’s because of that long journey, which was so personal and so idiosyncratic I’ve sometimes thought, Can you even teach anyone tarot? Doesn’t everyone have to figure it out for themselves?

On the other hand, I don’t really think that there’s such a thing as a “novice tarot reader” or a “tarot beginner.” I believe anyone can get meaningful, life-changing results from tarot from day one, because tarot is weird and uncanny and miraculous that way. So again: Can you even teach anyone tarot? Won’t tarot happen whether you’re trying or not?

Over the years, I’ve come to this conclusion: no, you can’t teach anyone tarot. But maybe— just maybe—you can teach someone to teach themselves tarot, and that’s what this book aims to do. Here are the two things I hope you’ll come away with by the end of our time together:

1 | Learn to find meanings in the cards for yourself. Reading tarot, when it comes right down to it, is about finding meaning in a set of seventy-eight images. Let’s face it, you’re not going to learn—really learn—all those meanings from the little book that comes with the deck, or from somebody else’s cookbook of meanings. They might be a starting point, but when you truly read tarot, tarot is everywhere; you see it, you breathe it, you feel it in your bones. That’s what I mean by “living tarot.”

That’s because tarot is just a way of talking about the world that exists all around you. Everything “out there” is in the cards: you just have to make the connections between tarot and the everyday life you’re already living. You don’t have to memorize the meaning of each card so much as uncover it.

The good news here is: you’re learning something you already know. So how hard can that be? By the end of this book (actually, by the time you’ve finished chapter 3), you’ll have developed a core encyclopedia of seventy-eight meanings: what tarot means to you. And no one can ever take that away from you.

2 | Figure out how tarot fits into your life. You are a deep thinker. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t even be entertaining the possibility that tarot might have something to offer you. You know that looking for meaning in randomly drawn images has implications— implications about reality, about the way the world actually works.

Chapters 4, 7, and 8 of this book offer you a way of dealing with that. They’ll give you a working framework for trusting the uncanny synchronicities you deal with on a daily basis when you read tarot. I’ll help you find your way to thinking about reality in a manner which, I believe, coheres and holds together intellectually. This should save you a lot of cognitive dissonance and second-guessing as you’re getting going.

If you’re new to tarot, this book should help you find your way to reading with a reasonable degree of fluidity and confidence by the time you get through all eight chapters. Tarot may be the work of a lifetime, but you can be up and running in a few weeks. If you’ve been reading tarot for a while already, this book should still help you solidify some of your practices, fill in some of your interpretive gaps, and help you find ways to crystallize and deepen your work with the cards. In fact, even after twenty-five years, I do the assignments in this book myself all the time—they’re a core part of my praxis.

What You Need

As far as magical practices go, tarot has an incredibly low barrier to entry. You don’t need an athame or a special ceremonial robe or a stack of parchment or myrrh ink. You don’t need to fast for a day, or a week, or memorize any incantations. To read tarot, all you need is a set of tarot cards. And to complete this workbook, you don’t need much more than that. The way I see it, there are really just three requirements if you want to undertake the work outlined in this book.

First, you’ll need a Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck. These are easy to find: look for the keywords Rider, Waite, Smith, Pamela Colman Smith, 1909, or any combination, like Rider-Waite or Waite-Smith. Confusing? Rider was the original publisher, Arthur Edward Waite was the magician who conceptualized it, and Pamela Colman Smith (known lovingly to tarotists everywhere as “Pixie”) was the artist; the deck was first released in 1909. There are about a million different versions with different colorations, sizes, card stocks, etc. Just pick one that appeals to you and that you can imagine getting to know so well you can see it in your sleep. And yes, you can buy it for yourself in a store or online. Nobody has to give you your first tarot deck, and you don’t have to steal it—please don’t!

We’re using Rider-Waite-Smith because it’s the universal language of most English-speaking tarot readers, and because the minor arcana (Ace through 10 cards) have relatable pictures of ordinary people doing ordinary things. These are known as scenic minors, and not every tarot deck has them. Aleister Crowley’s Thoth deck, for example, is popular for its moody, cryptic vibe, but apart from the courts and majors it contains no human figures. The Tarot de Marseille, a family of woodcut decks dating from seventeenth-century Europe (and still very popular there), has what are known as “pip cards”—featuring only the appropriate number of suit emblems on its number cards, rather like an ordinary playing card deck. In fact, many Tarot de Marseille readers work only with the major arcana. Neither Thoth nor Marseille decks will work for The Living Tarot, so if you’re interested in those, you’ll probably be better off seeking out books specifically designed for them.

The next thing that you’ll need is something to write in. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a physical notebook or a collection of digital documents and spreadsheets. You’ll be keeping track of card meanings, so if you’re using a physical notebook you’ll want at least one page for each of the seventy-eight cards. You’ll also be doing writing exercises, word problems, filling in tables, etc. There’s blank space in this workbook for you to fill out, if that’s what you prefer, or you can keep your work separate on your laptop or in a special journal or in the notebook with your card meanings. If you’re artistic, there will be ways for you to express that; if you’re not, you won’t have to. I do practically everything on my laptop, but lots of people find that writing by hand helps them remember and learn better. You do you!

The last thing you’ll need is commitment. There’s a lot of thinking and a lot of writing, so if you hate writing, this is probably not the workbook for you. You’re also going to need to draw a Card of the Day every single day. The other assignments you can tackle on your own time—it’s all right if it takes you years to read this book cover to cover—but the Card of the Day practice is something that really has to happen every day. It’s not necessarily going to take you a lot of time once you’re past chapter 1; you can do it in a couple minutes, or luxuriate in the process and take an hour if you want. But it needs to be part of your routine, the way brushing your teeth is part of your routine (I hope!).

If you’d like to add in some tarot content that’s more esoteric, you may enjoy my other works:

• Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers (Llewellyn, 2018): A comprehensive guide to astrological, numeric, Kabbalistic, and elemental correspondences to the cards, together with ways to use them.

• 36 Secrets: A Decanic Journey through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot (Anima Mundi, 2021): A deep dive into the numeric (2 through 10) minor cards, and my most personal work.

• The Fortune’s Wheelhouse podcast: A show I created with the tarot artist M. M. Meleen. It has an hour-long episode on each card, and it is available anywhere you listen to podcasts.

• Tarot Deciphered: Decoding Esoteric Symbolism in Modern Tarot (Llewellyn, 2021): Essentially the text version of Fortune’s Wheelhouse, expanded out into a 600-page reference volume.

These books are not necessary for you to do the coursework. But you may find them helpful—especially for chapters 3 (Tarot Forward) and 8 (Tarot Magic). Tarot Correspondences in particular has a ton of reference material you might otherwise find yourself looking up online or in a variety of primary sources, which is a pain. I wrote it to save myself some trouble, and hopefully it will save you some trouble as well.

Time Frame

This is a self-directed workbook, organized into eight sections. You can take as long as you want to do them. It’s not a bad idea to set goals, though, especially if you’re like me and can’t do anything unless there’s a deadline. So here are some suggestions for how long you might take to make your way through the entirety of the work.

• Chapter 1: Card of the Day: One to two weeks.

• Chapter 2: Tarot Backward: Two to four weeks.

• Chapter 3: Tarot Forward: Two to four weeks.

• Chapter 4: This I Believe: One week.

• Chapter 5: Ask a Question: One to two weeks.

• Chapter 6: Design a Spread: Two to three weeks.

• Chapter 7: Rituals, Ethos, Praxis: One week.

• Chapter 8: Tarot Magic: Two to three weeks.

Chapters 2 and 3 are kind of twins, and you can do them simultaneously if you wish. Don’t worry if life gets the better of you and it takes you longer than the three to six months projected here. Just keep drawing a card a day, and get back to deeper study whenever you have a chance.

About the Living Tarot Online Course

The materials in this book derive from the Living Tarot online course, which I launched in 2018 and which now has over 300 students.1 The materials are organized a little differently online, simply because of the difference between print and digital media.

If you wish, you can join the online course in addition to working through the book. If you do, you’ll be able to attend the monthly Zoom meeting, where you can ask questions about the work, meet fellow students, discuss tarot synchronicities from your daily life, and try new spreads (I construct one each month). You’ll also get personalized feedback on your final assignments from me. And if you make it all the way to graduation, you get to have a one-question reading with me.

Whether or not you choose to do that, I’m glad you’ve chosen to teach yourself to read, and more importantly, to live tarot. I hope your own journey with the cards is only just beginning.