How to Build a Strong Tarot Foundation and Improve Your Reading Skills
Start with what you know and grow from there
What’s one of the primary lessons of the Tower? When everything else crumbles, all you have left is your foundation.
You might also say that if you don’t have a solid foundation, you’ll collapse under pressure. And then what are you left with? A shitty foundation. And trust me, at some point reading tarot will test you. For most readers, the stakes will be low, and collapsing can be relatively painless. You may put away your cards and not look at them again for a few years (or ever), and that’s a shame. But it’s not catastrophic.
Of course, sometimes the stakes are higher. And hopefully anyone reading tarot under that kind of pressure knows the story of the Tower and has built enough of a support system to find their way back up out of the wreckage. Don’t reach too high too fast. That way hubris lies.
Incorporate layers of learning
This core lesson of the Tower is why I teach the way that I do: I focus on layers. The layers stack on top of each other, one at a time. In this way, the foundation is constantly tested, and you can prevent later collapse. It can feel intense, but it’s a preventative measure. Think of it like a bank having to weather stress tests.
One of the things that makes teaching tarot fundamentals different from, say, the LSAT or proper weightlifting technique or textual analysis (all things I have taught) is that tarot develops from a unique personal connection. You can learn the steps of every technique someone offers, but until you practice the methods enough to determine what works for you, you’ll always be looking for something outside of yourself to make the magic happen. Either that or you’ll be satisfied with no magic happening. That’s also a shame.
My goal in creating my tarot fundamentals intensive, Read Tarot like a Nerd, was to introduce tarot readers to multiple, complementary forms of interpretation and to encourage them to practice those methods through workbook exercises.
Learning happens in stages
First there’s the collection of new information. Then there’s the application of that information.
If you just collect more facts, more techniques, and more interesting personal anecdotes about tarot reading without ever putting that into practice, those data will not do much for you. Sure, I know that e = mc2 but I don’t actually know what that means or how to use it. It’s just in my brain as a frankly useless fact.
Knowing that the 5 of Swords is numerologically a 5 and elementally air is also fairly useless. But once I stop to think about what that means and how that relates to everything else I know about the 5 of Swords, I can start to see how it reinforces certain meanings.
The 5s are disruptive and break apart the calm stability of the 4, and air is tied to communication, so disruptive communication is a useful tie-in for arguments and conflict.
But if I already know that the 5 of Swords is about arguments and conflict, what else is that fun little factoid of the numerology of 5 and the qualities of air doing for me?
Well, I might think about sequence and see that the 5 is necessary if you want to move out of the complacency and stagnation of the 4 and into the brilliant flow of the 6. It’s painful, but it allows for progress (not unlike the Tower). That puts things on a different spin and helps me understand what’s happening in the 5 as well as, perhaps, why it’s happening and where it’s going.
I might also think about the nature of air as the element of thought, not just communication. Disruptive thinking can suggest more sinister qualities than simple argumentation. But disruptive ideas sound a lot like critical innovation and genius breakthroughs.
Given that, it makes perfect sense that the 5 of Swords would be associated with the astrological sign of unusual invention, Aquarius. And once I understand that, I can then use that information to support what I already know about the 5 of Swords through this elemental and numerological reimagining. Knowing that it’s tied to Venus might be less obviously helpful, but I hope that you’re curious enough to start thinking about how it might matter to this card of interpersonal conflict and misunderstanding.
Tarot is a language
Just because a book or blog post or rando on TikTok says that a card means {something} doesn’t mean that the card will mean {that something} to you. Tarot is a language, and just like language, it’s made up. By that I mean that it’s arbitrary and meaningless until you understand certain basic principles.
That you can read this sentence is a miracle of brain activity. Reading tarot cards is no less an impressive feat. In both instances, you’re translating symbols into concepts and connecting them into something coherent.
And like a language, tarot cards have shared meanings that fluent readers can quickly identify and connect into coherence. If you want to be a “tarot reader” and not just a person who gets messages from pictures and words (a more abstract but still valid form of divination), then you need to accept some level of those shared meanings. But just because we share a basic vocabulary does not mean that we communicate in the same way.
Think about how your parents or other childhood caregivers speak and write, how they read, and what they hear when they’re listening to someone else. It’s probably different from your way of receiving and expressing information. If you spend time communicating regularly with your closest friends, then you probably share similar ways of expressing yourself and of receiving their expressions. You might share more similarities with them than with your parents and caregivers, even though you actually learned most of your language skills in early childhood.
Consider tarot in a similar light. You will have learned some basics from some “elders,” and those will stick with you. But you’ll also have found your own way, often through your peer groups. And the more you communicate—reading and listening as well as speaking and writing (not to mention nonverbal communication)—the more refined your ability to express and understand will become. And refinement allows for personalization.
Your personal connections are important
Consider the Lovers card, one of the most easily understood yet arguably misunderstood cards in the tarot deck.
We can understand by the title of the card and the pictures that typically accompany it that the Lovers is a card of romantic relationships. Duh.
But also, it’s not at all about that.
The Lovers card is about making difficult decisions. It’s about the pull between what you think you should do and what you want to do. It’s about temptation and doing what’s morally (or socially) right. It’s about interpersonal harmony. It’s about knowing what is right for you as an individual. It’s about seeing oneself as distinct and different from another who might complement you and your goals but who is not you.
If you know the history of the card in an earlier version as The Lover (L’Amoreux is singular) card and the illustration as a man choosing between two women—sometimes between his mother and his lover and sometimes between two potential lovers—it becomes easier to understand this less sexy meaning. And if you know the myth of the Garden of Eden, then the Rider/Smith-Waite version might make some sense as well.
And if you know that the card can be tied to Gemini or that the history of the card in an alternate version was called The Twins, then you might have just opened a whole can of freaky worms.
The meaning of the Lovers—and every other card—shifts based on what you know. And what you know about the card doesn’t have to be what’s canon, the version that most people agree is correct. Because unlike everyday language, tarot is also a unique expression. It can be poetry as well as everyday conversation.
The Lovers could be about Biblical references or about vulnerability or about snakes in the grass or about the beginning of things outside the self. It could be about angels or rings or nudist resorts or about how ignorance is bliss. It could be about a volcano erupting. It could be also be about your favorite lyric in this one song you heard the first time that you simultaneously drew the card and had an intuitive connection with that song lyric.
Who’s to say what the Lovers means to you? Probably no one will care about that meaning if you try to explain why it’s relevant to your readings, but they don’t have to agree on all the meaning you attribute to a card.
Your intuition or your subconscious or your guides are all that that need to understand that connection for you. They’re the ones that will use it to communicate what you need to know from the cards. That’s how your intuition and your subconscious and your guides work most clearly through tarot. They use the language you know.
And that’s why you have to practice.
Praxis is key
Theorizing can only get you so far. You need praxis: theory in practice.
You have to play with what the cards mean in a common sense. You have to study the concept and then you have to apply that learning to see how it actually works. Learning requires both.
Yes, it’s true that certain words mean certain things, and that meaning will usually be the most relevant. But a word’s meaning can change over time and can change under different contexts, especially if you lean toward poetic or figurative use of language. And by language and words, I mean tarot and tarot cards.
To do that takes work, and it takes courage. To do it well requires taking ideas from different places and trying them out to see what fits. You have to be willing to fail and you have to be humble enough to learn from the failures. That means recording what you’ve divined and reviewing it. That also means seeking out new knowledge from people who have different experiences than you, including (but not limited to) people with more experience than you.
You also have to be brave enough to keep learning despite the failures, and you have to be willing to make the cards your own. That means compiling your own ideas about what cards mean based on how you’ve seen them appear in your actual practice.
It doesn’t matter if the Queen of Swords means a widow or the Queen of Cups means a blonde with blue eyes if you’ve never seen the relevance of that meaning in your readings.
Also, the whole “this suit is tied to this region/race of people” has super racist implications when you start to map the strengths and weaknesses of the suits and apply them to whole populations. If you use that type of system—and it can be useful—be very careful with the boundaries you set around it.
Keep notes. Review those notes. Make new notes in the margins.
And try new things when you are ready to add to your lexicon.
In Read Tarot like a Nerd, I teach six interpretive strategies that I think almost any tarot reader can use well. But you wouldn’t use every single one of them for every card in every reading. It’s good to have options. You’ll be drawn to some, and you’ll hone those skills. Others will be waiting in the wings for when the status quo isn’t cutting it anymore and you want to stretch yourself.
Okay, that’s enough reading and receiving. It’s time to practice!
When you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get a discount code to download my Personal Arcana Journal for free. It’s a handy way to keep your own personal notes in one place if you don’t want to just use a blank journal (my favorite tarot tool). You might also want to follow along with the exercises from my Forecasting My Life Line challenge. There’s a free blog post version or an inexpensive PDF workbook if you want to keep track of your work and all the exercises in one handy place. As for why I think you should use workbooks (and why I make them), that’s a post for another day.