Reintroducing My Tarot Tableau

A little over a year and a half ago, I released my first self-published tarot book, Tarot Tableau: The Fool’s Journey, a comprehensive guide to using techniques from the Grand Tableau of Lenormand and other forms of cartomancy to expand what most people believed they could do with tarot. By using the 22 major arcana in a structured grid pattern organized around themes found along the Fool’s Journey, I found that you could divine surprisingly precise information about what was most important to a situation and where curveball energies might appear to throw you off a more predictable path. 

I say “surprisingly precise” because I often hear how accurate many tarot readers’ divinations are when using the system, something that can be hard to achieve in tarot when you lay out so many powerful cards. And yet the precise articulations of the Lenormand tradition come through beautifully to create a kind of tarot reading that is new to many modern readers. By goal was to teach those techniques through the familiar language of tarot and transform how readers envisioned the way that tarot could work.

I suspected at the time that a tarot tableau was not a novel idea. How could it be with so many card-reading traditions using a tableau? And it turned out, that I wasn’t the first person to describe a tableau system for tarot. But I was happy to hear how my explanation in Tarot Tableau went so much further than previous attempts to provide concrete steps with clear rationales for how and why you might choose to read the cards this way. I was happy because I think that tarot can be many things, and I like—no, I love—teaching people how to add nuance and layers to their understanding of the world, and that includes tarot. 

To know that it can be used as a deep self-reflective tool for journaling, as described by Benebell Wen, was brilliant because it wasn’t what I had necessarily intended with the method. And to hear from those who used the method that it gave them much more precise information than their usual methods of reading warmed my heart. People often come to tarot because they are confused or unsure, and precision allows for clearer guidance. 

I tend to lean on the Socratic method of guiding querents to find their own answers from within, but it’s nice to be able to home in on the most salient parts of their situation that they may not realize is important, and the connections that are possible in a tableau help the reader see the influence of things that would otherwise seem totally unrelated. Yes, intuition and psychic messages can communicate through any means, but for those still developing their gifts or those who are skeptical of such methods (or just have strong Earth placements), it’s nice to have “evidence” in a spread to help you explain how you came to an insight.

What started as a single tarot spread became a blog post and then a mini booklet and then a PDF guide with reference tables and alternative considerations for customizing your spread and then various other digital incarnations (ePUB for iPhone Books app users and MOBI/AZW3 for Amazon Kindle readers) before finally arriving as a printed full reference guide with worksheets and free video tutorials to help you learn how to put the method into practice. 

The first printed version of the book is a pocketbook-sized (6”x9”) coil-bound book designed to make it easy to carry around and, when needed, lay the book open to refer to the tables as you conduct a reading or fill out a worksheet. I still have copies of that version left, but I probably won’t be ordering more in bulk to store, and eventually they will only be available by special request.

Instead, I’ve decided to finally launch the larger paperback version (8”x10”) through Amazon’s print-on-demand Kindle Direct Publishing service. In addition to just having more space for writing in the margins, the larger pages mean that the font is large enough to not require a magnifying glass for most people. And the increased number of built-in worksheets (all of them, not just the standard ones) will make it easier to keep track of readings as you play with the alternative formats. 

Being on such a large marketplace also just gets this method into more hands, and I think that will be great for our community. And that’s because Tarot Tableau can help tarot readers see the value of other forms of cartomancy. Having those layers and being willing and able to reimagine what tarot can be just makes tarot that much better. It’s not a one-or-the-other binary but a both-and situation. Tarot can be deep and abstract and mysterious with hour-long readings based around no more than three cards, but it can also be succinct and to the point with lots of cards showing clear patterns of interconnectedness. Familiarity and comfort with both just makes us better tarot readers.

So all of that is to say that you should definitely try the method out because I think it will expand your reading abilities in surprising ways. For the near future, I am offering the the ebook only through Amazon’s Kindle store, so you won’t find the three digital versions available in the Books & Guides section of my online store. But if you want the coil-bound version, you can still order it on my site or by special request. And if you want the larger paperback version, you can find that on Amazon or other places where they distribute their print-on-demand services.