How to Read the Cards

Reading, not fortune-telling

In Russian the word for fortune-telling sounds a lot like the word for a nasty creep — a creep who “tells fortunes.” That’s how it sounds to me: some unpleasant person trying to push their view on you without actually knowing anything.

A fortune-teller says: it will happen, it won’t happen, or it will happen like this. There’s no clear method behind it, no real way of reading the cards. A fortune-teller seems to pull information out of thin air, without any knowledge behind it.

I read cards. I don’t tell fortunes. So the first thing I’d say to someone who has just bought a deck: cards are there to be read, which means they have to be studied.

Where to start

Start with the classic. Rider–Waite is the classic and the foundation. To study other decks, Thoth for example, you first need to know Rider–Waite really well.

Study each card on its own. Then how cards work in pairs. Then how they work in threes. Each card answers different questions in completely different ways, and you need to know and study that too. A pair of cards can change the answer. Three cards read completely differently — not as one card, but as a set of three. You need to study this to read tarot properly.

How not to drown in meanings

A card has many sides. In different readings we read the same card differently depending on the context — it all depends on the question and the cards next to it. The cards around it light it up and decide which side of it faces you.

So don’t memorize one meaning for life. Look at the question, and at what’s lying next to the card.

How to find a teacher

For about a year I couldn’t find a teacher I wanted to learn from myself. I went to one tarot seminar but decided not to study with that teacher. Then for a long time I watched tarot readers online and asked friends where and how they had learned — but something kept stopping me. The turning point came in Thailand: “I was amazed that in Thailand people read tarot everywhere, out in the open, and it’s completely normal.” I took it as a sign that I needed to find my teacher as soon as possible and start learning.

A system of signs

Our world, just like tarot, is made of signs we read every day without thinking, because we’re used to them. We’re used to red and green traffic lights. We’re used to going to the doctor, who reads our X-ray — we don’t understand a thing on it, but the doctor is also using knowledge, using certain signs.

Tarot is exactly the same kind of system, only deeper. You have to learn it, like any language.