Your First Reading
The full course of a reading, from settling the question to pulling together an answer, plus the best starting point for practicing on your own: one card a day.
How a reading goes
- Settle the question. The way a question is phrased determines the quality of the answer; see How to Ask a Question. As a tool built on images, tarot is better at concrete questions about causes, developments and outcomes that don't depend on an exact time or place. For specific dates, specific places, and questions of life and death or ethics, tarot may not be the right tool, and the reader needs to know the limits of what they can do. A straightforward divination session usually doesn't require the querent to give their name, birth date and time, or the detailed background of the matter. The more you ask, the more likely the querent is to feel you are "fishing" for information, which lowers their trust. Gathering this background is only necessary when tarot is explicitly being used for counseling.
- Choose a spread. How complex the question is determines the size of the spread; see Tarot Spreads. Options range from a single card to the Celtic Cross.
- Draw and lay out the cards, and read each card according to the meaning of its position.
- Look at how the cards relate to each other instead of reading each one in isolation. The spread of suits, repeated numbers, the balance of major and minor cards, and the number of reversals all carry information. For an advanced technique, see Elemental Dignities.
- Pull it together into one answer, going back to the original question.
Start with one card a day
Many people learn tarot as a daily practice for getting to know themselves, with no plan to read for others. A common way to begin is to draw one card each day, sit down and think about what it might be saying, and write it in a journal. Once you know the card meanings fairly well, you can go further and ask about a specific situation. For example, ask yourself "What lesson should I be learning from this right now?", draw one card, and write down both the card and how you feel at the moment, to look back on later.
In practice, you can close your eyes, spread the cards out and pick one by feel. Once you've chosen it, turn it over side to side instead of flipping it straight up (so you don't accidentally see whether it is upright or reversed first and read it with a preconception). Then study the image carefully, and finally ask yourself, "Where does this card match my situation right now?" This order, looking at the details of the image first and then connecting it to your own situation, follows the same idea as the beginner's advice in Anatomy of a Tarot Deck to "start from the image and the keywords." Here it simply becomes a fixed exercise you can repeat every day and use to build intuition gradually.