Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
Recently one of my friends mentioned that she uses a tarot deck that her mother, who passed away, used to use. My friend told me: “My mom had the gift. I don’t.”
The next thing I knew, I was passionately explaining to my friend how reading tarot isn’t a gift, it’s a skill.
Tarot isn’t for the chosen ones
It’s a misconception to think that reading tarot cards is only for people with a nebulous and undefinable ability that was mysteriously granted to them from an invisible source.
Popular culture would have us believe that to work with cards you have to have an otherworldly talent in which you can see the future, predict things, channel spirits, or who knows what else.
The truth is that tarot is a skill, and as such, it’s one you can get better at with practice and study. Just as with any skill, some people are naturally better at it with less effort, while some people have to work extra hard and still not be great.
Anyone can do it, but some do it better
In many sports and activities, people who have certain traits have an advantage over others. For example?
Basketball/volleyball = tall
Female gymnastics = short and compact
Chess player = excellent memory and ability to visualize
Salesperson = charismatic, persuasive personality
Does that mean if you don’t have the key traits, you can’t participate? Technically speaking, no. But having these traits gives you an advantage that makes you naturally predisposed to the work.
So, again, while you don’t need to have a mysterious gift in order to read tarot, it does help to have some specific traits.
Traits of great tarot readers
1. Intuition
The word “intuition” gets thrown around a lot when it comes to talking about tarot. It’s important to have a well-developed intuition; and yet, intuition is also a skill you can build. There are a lot of good tips, book recommendations, and courses in this article: 18 Ways to Develop and Strengthen Your Intuition.
2. Acceptance of uncertainty and “what is”
People who are comfortable in situations where they aren’t in control and where outcomes are uncertain have an advantage in reading tarot. The random nature of a tarot reading requires an openness to whatever appears and an ability to interpret the images on the table as they are, not as we wish them to be.
3. An ability to see patterns and integrate disparate information
Great tarot readers go beyond keywords in books to tell the holistic story inherent in an entire spread of cards. They look at the whole picture and see how the pieces fit together in a meaningful way. They take apparently contrasting images, symbols, and information and find meaning within them.
4. Translation of symbols into practical language
Tarot is a language of symbols, and a great tarot reader translates these symbols into everyday language. The true value of a tarot reading is how accurately it applies to the person asking the question, and how much insight they walk away with. Ways to develop symbolic proficiency include dreamwork, free association, active imagination, and stream-of-consciousness journaling. Most important, however, is simply paying attention and really seeing things. Tarot is really just “say what you see.”
For example, in the Tarology trailer, notice how Enrique Enriquez finds tarot all around himself in NYC:
5. Non-linear thinking
A great tarot reader engages in non-linear thinking. Rather than thinking in a straight line from point one to point two, a non-linear thinker can jump around and make connections in unlikely places and between seemingly unrelated pieces.
It also helps to have a flexible brain that doesn’t see everything literally and rationally. Here’s another example, borrowing from EE. When he used to write a free email newsletter about 10 years ago, in order to get on the mailing list you had to answer just one question:
What’s the fastest letter in the alphabet?
There wasn’t a right or wrong answer. The only requirement was you had to be able to explain why you chose the letter you chose. Exercises like this help train your brain to think in a way that’s different than everyday logic. (PS If you’re interested, this is EE’s latest project.)
Now you try
A nice way to practice reading images is by drawing three cards randomly and then writing a sentence or two, or even a short story, to tell the tale. This activity doesn’t require any knowledge of the cards. All you need to do is look at the cards, see the images, and tell the story as you see it. (Italo Calvino wasn’t a tarot reader and he wrote an entire book using this method.)
It’s important to draw the cards at random because this is the heart of your tarot practice. This practice of random creativity—of welcoming an image that’s given to you instead of you producing it with intentional effort—will become a valuable gift. It frees you up to accept life as it is and work with that, rather than postpone your joy to some future moment when everything is “just right.”
If you don’t have a deck of tarot cards for the exercise I proposed above, you can use the three cards below.
In honor of my beloved tarot teacher, the poet Enrique Enriquez, I used my Tarot of Marseille Millenium Edition (by Wilfried Houdouin of Marseille) for this one.
Here are the images we have been given:
Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.
It has a wider “unconscious” aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained.
As the mind explores the symbols it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.
—Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Part I. The Importance of Dreams