Tarot has a marketing problem. The dominant images attached to it — the dramatic Hollywood reading, the carnival fortune-teller, the social-media “what the universe wants you to know today” thumbnail — make it look like a parlour trick that promises specific predictions in exchange for credulity. The actual practice is much quieter and much more useful. It is closer to journaling than to fortune-telling: a set of prompts dressed as images, a way of slowing down long enough to notice what you already know, a framework for reflection that you can return to daily for years without exhausting.
This page is the practice-led version. It covers what the seventy-eight cards actually are, how the structure works once you stop trying to memorise meanings, three spreads worth learning at the beginning, and how to choose a first deck without buying five before you settle on one. None of it requires belief in anything supernatural. What it requires is a willingness to sit with an image for two minutes and let it ask you something.
What “reading tarot” actually means
A tarot deck contains seventy-eight cards divided into two groups: the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana (numbered 0 through 21, from The Fool to The World, each named for an archetypal figure or situation) and the fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana (four suits of fourteen cards each, structured like a playing-card deck with the addition of Pages alongside the Knights, Queens, and Kings). Pulling a card means turning one of the seventy-eight face up. Reading it means looking at the image, registering what it brings up in you, and noticing what that response tells you about wherever your attention has been pointing.
That is the whole practice. The card does not contain a hidden message. It contains an image, and the image becomes useful in the act of looking at it carefully — partly because the symbolic vocabulary has been refined over five hundred years and partly because the simple act of slowing down to look creates a pause in the day that almost nothing else does.
The cosmology underneath this varies by tradition. Some practitioners describe the deck as a structured system for accessing intuition. Others treat it as a randomising device that produces useful prompts through the structure rather than any extra-ordinary mechanism. A third group — the most common in serious contemporary practice — treats the question of mechanism as beside the point. The cards prompt reflection. The reflection is the practice. Whether the right card came up because of a meaningful pattern or a statistical accident is a question the practice does not require you to answer.
What tarot is not: a predictive system, an alternative to professional advice in matters that need it, a fixed-meaning lookup table where each card has a definitive answer, or a system that requires elaborate ritual or special talent to use. It is a deck of cards and a habit of looking at them honestly. That is more than enough.
The structure: Major and Minor arcana
The Major Arcana — those twenty-two numbered cards — name the larger movements of a human life. The Fool’s journey from card 0 (innocence, beginning, leap of faith) through the Magician (will, focus), the High Priestess (intuition, mystery), the Empress (creativity, abundance), and onward to the World (completion, integration) is a complete arc of development that has structured the deck since its earliest known forms. When a Major Arcana card turns up in a reading, the traditional reading is that the situation has a weight to it — a question of identity, direction, or a significant turning rather than a small daily texture.
The Minor Arcana — the four suits, fifty-six cards — name the smaller texture of everyday life. The four suits each map a domain of experience:
- Cups — emotions, relationships, the felt life. (Hearts, in playing cards.)
- Pentacles (or Coins) — material life, work, body, money, the physical. (Diamonds.)
- Swords — thought, communication, conflict, clarity. (Spades.)
- Wands (or Staves) — energy, action, passion, creativity. (Clubs.)
Each suit runs ace through ten plus four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King). The numbered cards typically follow a recognisable arc — Aces are beginnings, Tens are completions, and the cards between map the development of that suit’s quality through a small life-cycle. The court cards represent people, or the qualities of people — Pages as students or messengers, Knights as agents or seekers, Queens as the receptive mature expression of the suit, Kings as the active mature expression.
Reading a card means holding all three layers in mind at once: the Major-or-Minor weight, the suit if it has one, and the specific number or court rank. After a few months of practice this becomes automatic. At the beginning it can be done slowly with the deck’s accompanying booklet open — that is fine. The vocabulary deepens through repetition rather than memorisation.
Three spreads worth knowing
A spread is a layout — the pattern in which you place drawn cards so each position carries a specific question. The number of possible spreads is unlimited; the number worth learning at the beginning is three.
The daily one-card draw. Shuffle the deck, draw one card, look at it for two minutes, and write a sentence about what it brought up. That is the entire practice. Done in the morning it sets an angle of attention for the day; done in the evening it provides a small structured reflection on it. A month of daily draws will teach you more about how the deck reads than any amount of book study, because you will encounter most of the seventy-eight cards in your own life rather than as abstract definitions. The card pulled today might recur next week — and the practice is noticing what changed in the interval rather than what the card “means.”
The three-card spread. The image above. Shuffle, draw three cards, lay them left to right. The classical reading is Past–Present–Future: where this came from, what is here now, where this could go if nothing intervenes. Other framings work equally well — Situation–Action–Outcome, Mind–Body–Spirit, What’s helping–What’s hindering–What’s needed. The point of the structure is not that one framing is correct; it is that placing three cards in named positions forces a more articulated reflection than a single card can produce. Use this spread when something needs more thought than a daily draw can hold. Weekly is plenty.
The year spread. Twelve cards laid in a circle (or a row, if circular layouts are awkward in your space), one per month, drawn at the start of the year or at any meaningful turning point. Each card names the texture of the month ahead. This is a longer, more ambitious practice — not something to attempt before you have spent at least a few months with the daily and three-card spreads — and is best treated as a frame for monthly returns to the same notebook rather than as a fixed predictive structure. Look at January’s card on January 31st and write what actually happened. The reading deepens with that retrospective work.
There are dozens of other named spreads (Celtic Cross, horseshoe, relationship spread, etc.). Most are not worth learning early. The three above will hold most of the practice for the first year.
How to actually start
The first month is mostly about handling the deck. Pick a card daily, look at it without rushing, write a sentence. Do not look up “meanings” in the booklet until after you have written your own response — the booklet is a reference, not an authority, and your reading of the image as it appeared to you today is more useful than any consensus definition. Read the booklet entry afterwards if you want to.
By the end of a month most of the Major Arcana and many of the Minor will have come up at least once. By the end of three months the deck will start to feel familiar — not because you have memorised it but because each card now has a small set of personal experiences attached to it. The Four of Cups was the morning you couldn’t see what was being offered. The Eight of Wands was the week things finally moved. The Hermit was the November you spent mostly alone and grateful for it. This is what learning tarot actually is: not memorisation, but the slow accumulation of associations between cards and lived moments.
A small notebook kept beside the deck handles the writing. Date each entry. After six months, the notebook becomes its own valuable document — a record of attention across half a year, indexed by image rather than calendar. Most long-term practitioners say the notebook is more useful in retrospect than any individual reading ever was.
Picking a first deck
This is the single most over-thought question in beginning tarot. The honest answer: pick a deck whose imagery you actually want to spend time with. That is the entire selection criterion. The wisdom in the cards is in the images, and a deck whose images you find ugly, boring, or alienating will sit on the shelf no matter how “correct” the deck is supposed to be. A deck you genuinely enjoy looking at will be used.
The reviews on this site each cover one deck with notes on who it works best for:
- Cat Tarot for Beginners — the least-intimidating possible entry point; cats illustrate every card with the right gestures. Under £10. Surprisingly readable and a good first deck for anyone worried the practice will feel too solemn.
- Crafterian Classic — a traditional Rider-Waite-Smith style deck with high-quality production. The deck most readings online will assume you are using, and the natural choice if you want to follow tutorials and reference material easily.
- Dark Wood Tarot — atmospheric, moody, more witchy than scholarly. Good for evening practice and for readers who want the visual register to match the practice’s quieter side.
- The Witch’s Garden Tarot — botanical-themed deck that suits readers already on the Myrtle side of this site; each card draws on plant imagery and herbal associations.
- Gilded Royale — the most visually opulent of the five; better as a second deck after you have settled into a quieter first one.
One deck is enough to start. Most practitioners eventually accumulate several, but the collecting habit is its own thing and is not necessary to the practice. A single well-chosen deck used daily for two years will produce a much deeper reading practice than ten decks used occasionally.
What this is and isn’t
Tarot is a structured framework for reflection. Used honestly, it produces a steady practice of attention that compounds across months and years in the same way any other small daily habit does. It is meaningful, repeatable, and surprisingly difficult to exhaust — the seventy-eight cards combine into a near-unlimited number of situations and arrive at moments in the practitioner’s life that give them context.
It is not a predictive system. A card drawn for tomorrow does not determine what happens tomorrow. The card describes a quality of attention to bring; the day’s events follow whatever causes actually produce them. Tarot read as prediction inevitably disappoints, because the practice is not designed to do that work — and the predictive frame trains an unhealthy relationship to the cards in which they are consulted for answers rather than used for reflection.
It is also not therapy. If the questions you bring to the deck are questions that would be better held by a trained professional, the cards will not substitute. The honest move at that point is both: keep the daily practice if it serves you, and find a therapist for the work the deck is not equipped to do. The two are complementary, not competitive.
Used well, the cards do what most contemplative practices do — they slow you down, give you a vocabulary, and create a small daily window for attention. The seventy-eight cards have been doing this work since the fifteenth century. Across that span, the people who have found tarot most useful have almost never been the people promising specific predictions. They have been the people who sat with the cards quietly, drew one each morning, and wrote down what came up. Two minutes a day, repeated. That is the practice.
Pair the tarot habit with the moon rituals for a natural monthly rhythm (a fresh three-card spread on each new moon), or with the chakra hub for a body-centred frame to the daily question. The Mist side of this site is designed to interweave; the cards are one of its quietest and most steady threads.
More rituals on similar topics
Other Mist rituals you might enjoy
Also in Myrtle
Explore Myrtle care guides & techniques →