Learn to Read Tarot: A Complete Course

This is a structured curriculum, not a collection of card meanings to memorise by rote. Each lesson builds on the last, using primary sources — A.E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980), and others — to explain why cards mean what they mean, not just what they mean. Where the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS), Thoth, and Marseille traditions interpret a card differently, the relevant lesson flags it. The goal is a reader who can pick up any deck, understand its logic, and work with it rigorously.

What this course will not teach you: how to 'receive messages from the universe', how to activate psychic gifts, or how to cleanse your deck with herbs. It will teach you a symbolic language with documented historical roots, a set of analytical techniques, and a repeatable reading process.

Every reading in this course follows the same five-step skeleton, which the lessons elaborate in detail:

1. Frame a question. The quality of your question shapes the usefulness of the reading. See the guide on how to phrase a tarot question for the full treatment.
2. Choose a spread. A spread assigns a positional meaning to each card before you draw, so you're not interpreting cards in a vacuum. A one-card pull suits a daily check-in; the Celtic Cross suits a complex situation. See /spreads for the full library.
3. Draw cards. Shuffle and draw according to your chosen spread.
4. Read each position. Interpret each card in light of its positional meaning, its imagery (figures, colours, symbols), and its orientation (upright or reversed).
5. Synthesise. Cards modify each other. A reading is a sentence, not a list of isolated words. Part 7 of this course covers that grammar directly.

Once that skeleton is in place, everything else — Major Arcana symbolism, elemental dignities, reversal methods — is detail hung on the same frame.

Here is what each part covers and what you will be able to do after completing it.

Part 1 — Foundations (tarot-foundations) The structure of a 78-card deck: 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana (four suits of 14 cards each). The three major historical traditions — Marseille, Rider-Waite-Smith, Thoth — and how they differ in design philosophy. How to choose a first deck. The mechanics of a basic reading. After Part 1 you understand the map of the deck before memorising any territory.

Part 2 — The Major Arcana (learning-the-major-arcana) The 22 trumps as a symbolic sequence. Pollack's influential reading of the Major Arcana as a hero's journey — the Fool moving through successive archetypal encounters — gives a narrative spine to what might otherwise feel like 22 disconnected symbols. Waite's own interpretive notes in the Pictorial Key are the textual anchor. The lesson also contrasts RWS trump imagery against the Marseille woodcut tradition and Thoth's astrological attributions. After Part 2 you can read any Major Arcana card with reference to its position in the sequence, not just a keyword.

Part 3 — The Four Suits (learning-the-four-suits) Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles as elemental categories (Fire, Water, Air, Earth) governing distinct life domains. The lesson covers the pip structure (Aces through Tens) and how number symbolism compounds with elemental character — so the Three of Swords is Air at a stage of creative conflict and rupture, not just 'heartbreak'. Thoth's fully illustrated pips and the Marseille's unillustrated ones are compared to the RWS scenes. After Part 3 you can derive a working interpretation of any Minor Arcana pip without a keyword list.

Part 4 — The Court Cards (learning-the-court-cards) The sixteen court figures (Page, Knight, Queen, King across four suits) are the deck's most misread section. The lesson covers three practical models: courts as personality types, as modes of energy, and as actual people in the querent's life. It draws on elemental dignities — a Knight of Wands is Fire of Fire — to explain why courts behave as they do. After Part 4 you have a consistent method for interpreting court cards rather than guessing.

Part 5 — Spreads (learning-tarot-spreads) How spread design shapes interpretation. The lesson progresses from single-card pulls through three-card spreads to the Celtic Cross, with attention to how positional meanings constrain and direct a card's range. It also covers how to design a custom spread for a specific question. After Part 5 you can select or construct the right spread for any reading context. See also /spreads.

Part 6 — Reversals (learning-to-read-reversals) Whether and how to read reversed cards is a genuine interpretive choice, not a binary. The lesson presents Mary K. Greer's four reversal modes — blocked energy, delayed energy, internalised energy, and projected or shadow energy — as a rigorous framework for deciding what a reversal means in a given position, rather than simply applying a 'negative meaning'. Waite himself includes reversed interpretations in the Pictorial Key, though he treats them more mechanically. The lesson cross-links to /reversals and reading-reversals. After Part 6 you have a principled approach to reversals.

Part 7 — Cards in Combination (reading-cards-in-combination) Individual cards interact: elemental dignities (two Fire cards strengthen each other; a Water card weakens a Fire card between them), figure gaze and direction (a figure facing toward the next card in a row creates narrative connection; one facing away creates rupture), and thematic clusters. The lesson provides a working grammar for synthesis so a reading becomes a coherent statement rather than a bullet-point list. See also /combinations. After Part 7 you can read a spread as a whole.

Part 8 — Developing Your Practice (developing-your-tarot-practice) Building and sustaining a reading practice over time: journaling methods, tracking patterns across readings, expanding to new decks, and knowing when a reading is genuinely useful versus when it is a substitute for a harder decision. After Part 8 you have a sustainable, self-correcting practice.

Work the parts in order on a first pass. The suits make more sense after the Majors; reversals make more sense after you have upright meanings stable; combinations require both. On a second pass, jump to whichever section matches the question you are sitting with.

For total beginners: read your-first-tarot-reading and how-to-read-tarot alongside Part 1 — they are shorter, practice-first companions to the more analytical material here.

For readers who already know the basics: Parts 6, 7, and 8 will do the most work. Greer's reversal framework and elemental dignities in particular are the techniques most frequently skipped in introductory guides and most consequential for reading quality.

The course uses four primary anchors:

• A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910): The companion text to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Waite provides upright and reversed meanings for each card, along with notes on symbolism and history. He is deliberately guarded — concealing some of his Golden Dawn material behind an oath of secrecy — but the Pictorial Key remains the textual foundation for RWS interpretation.
• Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980): The most influential modern commentary on the RWS deck. Pollack reads the Major Arcana as a Jungian hero's journey and brings mythological and feminist lenses to bear on individual cards, giving each a psychological depth Waite's text largely withholds.
• Mary K. Greer, Tarot for Your Self (1984): The source of the four-mode reversal framework and several journaling and self-examination methods used in Parts 6 and 8.
• Robert M. Place, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (2005): The most scholarly single-volume history of the deck. Used throughout the course to distinguish documented history from popular mythology.

Where the Thoth deck (designed by Aleister Crowley, painted by Lady Frieda Harris, published 1944) or the Marseille tradition differs meaningfully from RWS, the relevant lesson notes the divergence rather than treating RWS as the only valid system.