Tarot cards, oracle cards, and other cartomancy methods.
How long have you been reading tarot?
I wanted to make a poll for this but it doesn't seem to be an available post format in this community.
Are you just starting out with tarot? Been reading for years? Comment below!




I'll do it myself first - it's been just over a year for me. I started learning on the Galaxy Tarot app on my phone (I cannot recommend it enough, very useful before you get your first physical deck). Rachel Pollack's 'Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom' is a newer resource for me, I read the entire book once and now I'm planning to commit to some more systematic learning and journaling with the book.
I actually really loved that "Galaxy Tarot" App too... Haven't used it in a couple phone upgrades though so unsure as to the quality of the latest build.
15 or so years. But I didn't have my own deck until roughly 12 years ago I guess?
That's a long time! How did you read when you didn't have your own deck? Were you sharing cards with someone?
Borrowed cards and lots of book reading.
I see! It would be good to make another thread for book recommendations, you probably have some to share.
I could do that. Might take some diggings. Haha.
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That's a lot of experience!
I am way, way out of practice because I haven't done a reading in years. I did a fair number for friends in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but I've been mostly housebound since 2001 and had a baby in 2003 and just kind of stopped doing readings because I can't read for myself without getting tangled up and because I didn't want a small child mangling any of my decks.
Mostly, I used three decks, the Rider-Waite, the Hanson-Roberts, and the Sacred Rose. I prefer the Sacred Rose, but many people I read for weren't comfortable with it. The Hanson-Roberts deck was mainly a thing for me because it was very conservative in imagery and smaller than a standard deck. The smaller size makes it much, much easier for most people to shuffle and meant that it fit better in my purse.
My preferred layout is the reflected Celtic cross, and I treat readings as more meditative than predictive.
I have somewhere between twenty and thirty different decks. I pick up new ones when I find them at a price I can afford, so I haven't gotten many new ones in the last decade. Most of them, I've never tried reading with because I tend to get lost the farther things go from the Rider-Waite imagery/interpretations. I'm not very good at going from symbol to meaning unless I have a text based guide.
In the late 1980s, I picked up a copy of The Feminist Tarot. I like how the book is structured-- It has the authors' interpretations and the classic Rider-Waite interpretations together on the page so that a reader can look at both and pull out the things that seem to fit best with everything else in the reading. I prefer the authors' interpretations of the court cards for every suit except swords (there, they go heavy into the suit being the Patriarchy which tends not to connect to anything sensibly in the readings I've done).
We seem to have a lot of experienced readers here! And you have quite the collection of decks. I think I would easily get lost with more abstract decks. Interesting that your book connects the suit of swords with patriarchy the most. It's my favourite one and the one I feel most connected to. I tend to disregard the gendered symbolism. As a non-binary person, I find it false and unnecessary at best, and hurtful at worst. Thank you for taking the time to share! I hope you find time and opportunities to get back to reading if that is what you want.
I strongly suspect that, having been written in the 1980s, The Feminist Tarot is pretty thoroughly iffy in terms of recognizing the possibility of being non-binary or asexual or trans or... Well just about anything beyond a very narrow range. I don't remember any references in that direction, but I'm not optimistic that, had there been, they'd have been positive.
It also doesn't address race at all unless one counts the fact that it decouples the court cards from indicating people with particular physical features.
I tend to assume that personal interpretations matter more for reading than 'official' interpretations do. Our culture, our knowledge of the world, everything changes constantly, and at every point in time, there are ways in which we're being terrible to various people and grounds.
I agree completely and I'm very glad you think this way.
I'm just starting out in tarot. I've had my decks for a while (both were calling out to me), but I've started to learn using my Guilded Tarot deck a few months back. It's been a bit slow going, but that's because I have to make sure that my brother isn't around when I'm working with my deck or reading my book because he's highly against tarot and I don't feel like getting a long lecture about the alleged evils etc. from someone who is close-minded on that front ha ha.
Speaking of which, what are the best spreads that some of you experienced people recommend for beginners?
I'm sorry to hear that you have to put up with that :c I hope you find yourself in a better environment to learn tarot soon. Would you be willing to try out a tarot app? It could at least be easier to hide.
I'm by no means the most experienced person here but I do have some spreads I like! The three-card Past-Present-Future spread seems to me like a good beginner choice from classic spreads. I think my favourite low card number spread is a four-card 'Problem' spread. I'm going to post a graphic I made for it (sorry for the self-promotion) but it comes from the Galaxy Tarot app, I don't think I've seen it anywhere else but maybe it is well-known or traditional. Here's what it looks like:
Same here! I wasn't like this until he became super religious ha ha. I'm like, it is what it is I guess! I just have to make sure he doesn't see my cards. I've already got lectured once when he saw that I have a zombie deck, so I'm trying to avoid the same lecture. I would be interested trying a tarot app! There's so many that I'm not sure where to start with them. I see that you like the Galaxy Tarot app, so I'll have to check that one out.
Thanks for the rec! I don't mind the self promotion lol. It looks like a good one! I've been using a five card spread, The Cross of Truth, when I've been able to work with my cards.
I have a tarot spread I made that is so poetry when it's done, but I have no idea how to make a graphic like this to represent it.
You could try drawing it out on a piece of paper and posting a photo!
I'm going to post a verbal representation of it.
Imagine a butterfly. The body is 4 cards tall. This represents who you are at this point in time. The top right wing is 7 cards. The top left wing is 7 cards. These represent your family and friends, and your career or job. Where the "wings" touch the "body" is there you are most influences by them. Read those together. The bottom "wings" are 5 cards each. These represent your spiritual influences and your worldly influences. Where the "wings" touch the "body" is where you are most affected, so read those cards together.
I made this as a way to take a big overview into my life. I think it touches on the biggest influences, and gives a good picture of what's going on. I have done this spread for 2 people, and once for myself. The two people said it was really good, and accurate.
Use your best judgement for timing influences in it. For me, the further from the "body" on the "wing" you are indicates less of an influence, or something coming into your life, whereas closer to the "body" seems to be current and/or on its way out of your life.
I've been working with tarot for many years, since before there was an internet and you had to go to local occult-ish shops and hope they had decks to look at, or you could buy the Rider-Waite or a few others at Waldenbooks. 30 years or so, I think, with some long fallow stretches. I started with Rider-Waite, picked up Thoth and a couple of others; noticed I was memorizing phrases instead of learning to read the cards. I got my Robin Wood deck after many years of only reading Morgan's Tarot (which is not a tarot deck) about 13 years ago.
Nice, you too have quite a history with tarot. It's very interesting to me how people got into tarot before it was so easy to acquire decks and resources online. Was is mostly through an earlier background in spirituality or just stumbling upon the subject somewhere?
I had an interest in the occult; not sure I could call that a "background in spirituality" as I was a teenager at the time. I was in an occult-friendly area - I lived in the SF bay area, so even though I was in a moderately-conservative suburb, spirituality and occult resources were not far or hard to find.
Finding specific ones was hard - you'd hear about this or that special deck, or silk cloths heavier than handkerchief weight for doing readings on, or wooden boxes with nice symbols on them that were big enough for a deck of cards - and those were hard to track down.
Yes, sorry, I might have phrased that a bit better. Thank you for answering!
I was interested in "the occult" from the time I was very young (think 6 or 7 years old, but a reading comprehension much older) . I found a book on palmistry at the local library. I really wanted to know more, but I knew my parents would freak about it, so I left it there, and said to the party of myself that was jumping and screaming for more information "be patient. " and over the years with successive talks with my parents, I finally got them to look into the subject a little and are that what I wanted was not so terrible after all. (I took my time figuring out what I wanted, turns out I like the crafty stuff, the cooking stuff, the kitchen stuff, the garden stuff, the tarot stuff, now looking at Oracle cards) I started coming out of the broom closet in the early part of 2000.
I got my first deck when I was in my early 20s. I have been reading every since. In the past 15 years, I have had days where I don't think about my cards, and days where all I want to do is read with them.