Read the Picture

You have a tarot deck, or you are about to buy one, and the little booklet in the box is 78 lists of keywords. This book teaches you to read the cards the other way round: look at the picture first, say what you see, and build the meaning from there.

It is written for a complete beginner. It assumes you know nothing, explains every term the first time it is used, and takes you from "what are these 78 cards?" to laying out a spread and giving a calm, honest reading for yourself or a friend.

What you will be able to do

• Name any card and say what part of the deck it belongs to: the two kinds of card, the four suits, the numbers and the sixteen court cards.
• Read any single card with a four-step method: see, meaning, place, say.
• Turn a vague worry into a question the cards can actually help with.
• Read three, five or ten cards together as one answer, not a list of separate meanings.
• Decide what to do with upside-down (reversed) cards, and with a reading that makes no sense.

What is inside

• All 78 cards, shown large. Every card is a scan of the original 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, with the details that carry its meaning numbered on the picture and explained beside it. Each entry gives the meaning in plain words, upright and reversed keywords, and a sentence you could say out loud. The 22 Major Arcana get a page each; the 56 Minor Arcana are two to a page.
• The deck as a system. The whole deck on one page, how to tell which card you are holding, the four suits, what the numbers mean in every suit, and a number-plus-suit grid that explains 40 cards at once.
• Reading cards together. A thirty-second scan of the whole table, then how to join cards into a single sentence, with before-and-after examples.
• Reversals. Four things an upside-down card can mean, and a worked example. You are also told you may skip them.
• Spreads laid out on a table. Six three-card spreads, two five-card spreads and the Celtic Cross, each with its positions explained.
• Five complete readings. Each one goes from the question, to the cards laid out, to every card read step by step, to one joined-up answer. They run from three cards to a full ten-card Celtic Cross.
• Help when you are stuck. What to do when a reading makes no sense, the six cards people dread and what they really mean, how to read for a friend, and where tarot stops.
• Practice. A two-week plan, eight exercises, and answers with the reasoning behind them.
• Look it up. Six cheat sheets covering every card, a reading record to print, a glossary and a card finder.

An honest note

This book treats tarot as a way to reflect and to start a conversation. It does not claim that cards predict the future, and it says plainly that a reading is no substitute for a doctor, a therapist, a lawyer or a financial adviser. The people and readings in the book are invented teaching examples. Where the deck's designer, A. E. Waite, and modern teachers give different meanings for a card, the book says so.

It teaches the Rider-Waite-Smith pictures, so it suits that deck and the many decks that copy it. It covers no astrology, Kabbalah or crystals. You need your own deck to practice; none is included.

Your files

• Read the Picture (PDF, 126 pages, US Letter). The whole book, with bookmarks and selectable text. Reads well on a tablet or laptop and prints on US Letter or A4 with "fit to page".
• Cheat sheets and reading record (PDF, 7 pages). The six cheat sheets and the blank reading record from the back of the book as a separate file, so you can print them without printing the book. The pages are for printing and writing on by hand; they are not fillable forms.

This is a digital download. No physical book or deck is shipped.