What Is Tarot?

Photo by Nikkie Jay — I have the rights to this image

What Is Tarot?

Let’s talk about Tarot. First of all, it isn’t evil. No cards are evil. The person performing a reading will interpret them according to their own supposition. If you come to anything with bad intentions, you will get a lamentable result. That is true of all things, not just the mystic arts.

Tarot is also not a way to predict the future. Sorry, but when I read your cards, I can’t tell you if you are going to win the lottery and what numbers to choose. If I could do that, I would have done it for myself.

What tarot is, is a way to read the energies that are around us. It is akin to astrology in that way. You then have the choice whether to work with those energies or to ignore them or even work against them.

Tarot can give great insight into things that are affecting you and sometimes ways of dealing with them. It can be helpful when you feel stuck. A good tarot reader will also give you hope during difficult periods of your life. They can see the way the energy is working around you and hopefully, some direction as to how to manipulate it to work for you.

Each card has a divinatory meaning. This is just the surface of what the card represents. The true skill comes in reading them all together within the context of the question (when doing one-to-one readings), or as a general pattern if reading for a wider audience.

The cards also have reverse meanings. When a card comes out upside down, it is considered in the reverse. This doesn’t always mean that the complete opposite is going to happen. Sometimes a tarot reader will choose not to read the reversals, it is all about personal choice. But if they do, it may be that the card’s meaning is delayed or needs working on to flip it into the divinatory meaning.

Reading tarot cards isn’t just about knowing the meanings of each card and trying to link them together. A reader will have intuition and guidance that they follow. Some tarot readers ‘hear’ spirits guiding them. Some tune in via meditation prior to a reading. Others may just go with their gut instinct. We all work in different ways, there is no right or wrong here.

I am an intuitive tarot reader. This means I get a kind of ‘knowing’ a feeling about things. Sometimes things come out of my mouth that I was…