Tarot Academy

Learn tarot from the beginning with the Meow Tarot Academy: upright and reversed meanings and correspondences for all 78 cards, tarot history and its main traditions, spreads and reading technique, astrology and the Kabbalah. 127 free pages.

Getting Started

What Meow Tarot is, how tarot works, your first reading, and common beginner questions

Meet Meow Tarot

  • What Is Meow Tarot Meow Tarot is an AI tarot app: you bring a question, choose a reader, draw and flip the cards yourself, and the reader r
  • Can You Trust Meow Tarot’s Readings? To say it up front: AI makes mistakes, and so does Meow Tarot. But it reads the cards with a method that is laid out in

Tarot Basics

  • What Is Tarot Tarot is a system of images and symbols built up over several centuries, with no magic in it. It is good at helping peop
  • Anatomy of a Tarot Deck A standard tarot deck has 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana cards about life-level turning points and 56 Minor Arcana cards abou
  • Your First Reading The full course of a reading, from settling the question to pulling together an answer, plus the best starting point for
  • How to Learn Tarot What to learn first and what to learn later: people take two opposite paths, each with good reasons, and which one you c

Everyday Practice and FAQ

  • The Daily Card Draw one card each day and check it each evening. It is the easiest and most solid way to practice tarot, and within a y
  • Beginner FAQ The questions that keep coming up in the first few months of learning tarot, answered in one place. Each answer gives on
  • Cleansing and Caring for Your Deck How to store a deck, how to shuffle it, and when to give it a "clearing." These are habits with no binding rules behind

History and Traditions

From Italian card games to the three main traditions

  • The Origins of Tarot Tarot cards were not used for divination at first. They began as a card game, and only centuries later did the occult tr
  • How Tarot Became Occult Beginning with an unproven but highly influential theory in 1781, tarot was drawn step by step into the correspondence s
  • The Three Main Traditions Marseille, Rider-Waite-Smith and Crowley's Thoth: the core framework of card meanings in nearly every tarot deck sold to

Card Meanings

All 78 cards upright and reversed, with a keyword index and a guide to symbols

Overviews

  • The Major Arcana The 22 Major Arcana cards are often read as one continuous story, the Fool's Journey: a soul sets out knowing nothing, p
  • The Minor Arcana The 56 Minor Arcana cards, in four suits, describe concrete everyday life rather than the fate-level themes of the Major
  • The Court Cards The 16 court cards (four suits times four ranks) are the hardest part of the Minor Arcana to learn, because each one com

The Four Suits

  • The Suit of Wands The Fire suit, concerned with will, action, creativity, career and passion. It is the most active and outgoing of the fo
  • The Suit of Cups The Water suit, concerned with feelings, relationships, intuition and the inner life. It is the most fluid and most rece
  • The Suit of Swords The Air suit, concerned with thought, communication, conflict and truth. It is the sharpest of the four suits and the on
  • The Suit of Pentacles Pentacles (also called Coins) belong to Earth and deal with material things, the body, money and daily life. Of the four

Quick Reference

  • Card Keywords at a Glance Upright and reversed keywords for all 78 cards on one page. Tap a card name for its full page. This table is compiled fr
  • Symbols and Imagery The same symbols turn up again and again across the deck: mountains, water, dogs, roses, thrones, pillars. If you recogn

Reading in Practice

Asking questions, spreads, reversals and combinations, applied topic by topic

Techniques

  • How to Ask a Question The way a question is worded sets the quality of the answer. Turning a vague concern into a precise question is part of
  • The Reading Process Knowing the meanings of all 78 cards by heart does not make you a reader. Reading is the process of weaving the card mea
  • Reading Reversals Treating a reversal as the simple opposite of the upright meaning is the shortcut beginners take most often, and it is a
  • Elemental Dignities Elemental dignities are an advanced technique handed down from the Golden Dawn tradition: instead of reading each card i
  • Energy Flow The direction the figures face is also a clue. Where the energy between cards flows, where it comes to rest and where it
  • Timing and Place Tarot images rarely point directly to an exact time or place, so readers convert them through correspondence systems suc

Spreads

  • Tarot Spreads A spread is a fixed layout for drawing cards, and each position in it has its own meaning. The complexity of the spread
  • Spreads in Meow Tarot The twelve spreads you can choose from when drawing cards in the app: how many cards each uses, what it looks at, which
  • The Three-Card Spread The most common beginner spread: decide how the three positions divide the work before you ask, or set no positions at a
  • The Two-Choice Spread A five-card spread for decisions: options A and B must be clearly defined before drawing, and in the reading the outcome
  • The Five-Element Spread A five-card spread built on the pentagram, with Spirit at the top point and Air, Fire, Water and Earth at the other four
  • The Celtic Cross The most classic ten-card general spread, with wide coverage, suited to big, less focused questions such as "what is goi
  • Relationship Spreads Three common spreads for relationship questions, the five-card Lover’s Cross, the eight-card Venus Love and the nine-car
  • Career and Year-Ahead Spreads The seven-card Zeus career spread, and the approach to yearly forecasting where N cards stand for N units of time.
  • Designing Your Own Spread When no existing spread fits, you can design your own. It does not have to be wholly original: swapping new themes into

By Topic

Correspondences

Numbers, astrology and the Kabbalah (advanced)

  • Correspondence Table One table brings together the number, Hebrew letter, astrological attribution and elemental link of each of the 22 major
  • Numbers in Tarot In the minor cards from Ace to 10, the same number describes the same stage in all four suits, just in a different area
  • Astrological Correspondences The correspondences between tarot and astrology are a system worked out in the Golden Dawn tradition: the major cards ar
  • The Kabbalah and the Tree of Life The Tree of Life is the central diagram of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. The Golden Dawn tradition mapped
  • Esoteric Titles The Ten of Wands means more than "completion": in the Golden Dawn system it has a formal name, the Lord of Oppression. E

Practice and Ethics

Reading for a living, being the querent, boundaries and standards

  • Reading Tarot Professionally Reading for people over the long term brings up issues that have nothing to do with card meanings but still affect the q
  • The Ethics of Reading Tarot readings touch on people's real situations and emotions, so when you read for others in particular, some practical
  • Being the Querent Most people first meet tarot by having their cards read. This page is written from the querent's side: how to ask, how t

Ritual Magic

Material beyond divination

  • Making Ritual Tools Magic oils, charm bags, spell jars: whatever kind of ritual item you make, the approach follows the same four-step frame
  • The 72 Angels The 360 degrees of the zodiac can be cut into 72 small spans of five days each, with one angel for each span; combined w

The 22 Major Arcana

Wands (Fire), 14 cards

Cups (Water), 14 cards

Swords (Air), 14 cards

Pentacles (Earth), 14 cards

References

  • A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1910
  • Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth, 1944
  • The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Book T, source of the correspondences and esoteric titles
  • Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, 1980