Tarot reading is a practice that uses a deck of 78 illustrated cards to gain insight into past, present, and future situations by formulating a question, drawing cards, and interpreting their meanings based on their position and surrounding cards.
The Tarot deck is structured into two main parts:
- The Major Arcana (22 Cards): These cards represent major life themes, spiritual lessons, and archetypal forces (e.g., The Fool, The Empress, Death, The Tower). They typically symbolize larger, life-changing influences or the core spiritual path of the querent (the person asking the question).
- The Minor Arcana (56 Cards): These are divided into four suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles), much like a standard playing deck. They represent the everyday issues, challenges, and actions that make up daily life.
- Wands: Represents creativity, ambition, passion, and action.
- Cups: Represents emotions, relationships, intuition, and feelings.
- Swords: Represents intellect, thoughts, communication, conflict, and truth.
- Pentacles (or Coins): Represents material world, finance, physical health, and resources.
A Tarot reader, or cartomancer, arranges the drawn cards into a spread (such as the Celtic Cross or a three-card spread), and interprets the story and energy revealed by the combination of the cards to provide guidance.
How Tarot Reading Can Help You
Tarot reading is not typically used for definitive prediction; its power lies in its ability to facilitate self-reflection, decision-making, and psychological insight into complex situations. It works by accessing your intuition and framing your challenges in a symbolic, narrative way.
- Gaining Clarity and Insight
- Illuminating the Unconscious: The cards often pull out and visualize thoughts, fears, and motivations that you already hold in your subconscious. This process externalizes internal conflict, making it easier to see and address.
- Framing the Issue: When you are overwhelmed, Tarot provides a structure (the spread) to break down a problem into manageable parts (e.g., Cause, Challenge, Outcome), giving you clear focal points for analysis.
- Facilitating Decision Making
- Exploring Potential Paths: Tarot helps you explore the likely outcomes of different choices by showing the energy currently surrounding each option. It allows you to check in with your feelings about each potential future presented by the cards.
- Highlighting Blockages: A reading can often pinpoint the internal or external factors (represented by certain cards) that are currently blocking your progress, allowing you to focus your energy on overcoming those specific obstacles.
- Fostering Self-Awareness (Inner Work)
- Understanding Patterns: Recurring cards or themes in your readings often point to deep-seated patterns of behaviour, relationship dynamics, or limiting beliefs (similar to inner work). Tarot helps you recognize these scripts so you can consciously change them.
- Connecting with Intuition: The act of interpreting symbolic imagery stimulates your own intuition. Even if the card’s traditional meaning doesn’t resonate, the personal feeling it evokes can be a powerful guide.
- Encouraging Empowerment
- Focus on the Present: Tarot reinforces the idea that the future is fluid and depends on your current actions. By showing the current state of energy, it empowers you to make different choices now to shift the predicted outcome.
- Validation: Sometimes, the most helpful aspect of a reading is simply having the cards confirm what you already instinctively knew, validating your feelings and giving you the confidence to move forward.
