✦ Tarot: Foundations

From a deck you don't know what to do with to reading a full spread as one picture. No jargon, and nothing to take on faith.

Listen to the whole course All 12 lessons back-to-back, in my own voice — press play and browse the list as you listen.

← All courses

Where tarot came from, how the 78 cards are organised, and what each part of the deck is for. The Major Arcana as one story, the Minor Arcana as a pattern you can learn rather than memorise, then your first readings: one card a day, three cards, and the Celtic Cross. Written for someone who has never shuffled a deck, and honest about what a reading can and can't do.

The lessons

1. What a tarot reading actually is — and what it isn't A mirror, not a forecast. What a reading can and can't do, and how to tell one that lands from one that merely flatters.
2. Where tarot came from — and the stories that aren't true A card game from fifteenth-century Italy that became an occult instrument three hundred years later. Egypt, Atlantis and the Romani story were invented in the 1700s and after, and saying so costs the cards nothing.
3. Why random cards mean anything Meaningful coincidence, projection, and the reader's own part. Seeing that something works is not the same as knowing how it works — and you don't need to settle the second to use the first.
4. The shape of the deck: 78 cards, two arcana, four suits Twenty-two trumps, forty numbered cards and sixteen courts. Why the deck is built the way it is, and why a Major turning up means something a Six of Cups does not.
5. Choosing a deck, and the three families you'll meet Waite–Smith, Marseille and Thoth are three different ways of reading, not three sets of pictures. Which one makes learning easiest, and what a deck family is.
6. The Fool's Journey: twenty-two cards, one story Read in order, the Majors make one arc, from setting out to arriving. Where that reading comes from, how much of it is modern, and why it is still the best way to learn them.
7. Fool to Chariot: finding your feet in the world The first eight Majors: the powers you're handed, the people who shape you, your first real choice, and the first thing you drive yourself.
8. Strength to Temperance: turning inward The middle seven Major Arcana, where the sequence turns from the world outside to the person inside. Including Death, and why it is the least frightening card in the deck.
9. The Devil to the World: the long way home The last seven Major Arcana: the hardest run of cards in the deck, the release at the end of it, and what the Tower is actually for.
10. Four suits, four elements Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles: where the suits came from, the element each one belongs to, what it is like at its best and at its worst, and how to spot its flavour in a real situation.
11. Ace to Ten: the shape of a number One is a beginning and ten a completion in every suit. Learn the ten positions once, put them together with the four suits, and you can read all forty numbered cards.
12. The court cards: a person, or a part of you? Sixteen people: a Page, a Knight, a Queen and a King in every suit. What each rank is like, how suit and rank combine, and how to tell whether a court card means someone in your life, a way you are behaving, or the mood of a situation.