Home / Learn / Tarot for beginners

Guide 02

Tarot for beginners

Starting tarot takes a deck, a little curiosity, and ten minutes a day. You don't need a mentor, and you don't need to be "gifted." This guide covers the practical first steps: choosing a deck, getting to know it, and doing your first reading. For the full study path after that, see how to learn tarot.

Updated July 2026·4 min read·Escapement LLC

What tarot is

A tarot deck is a set of 78 cards, each carrying a picture built from a shared vocabulary of symbols: a figure, a scene, a number, often a suit. People put that vocabulary to different uses. Some read for divination. Some use the cards for journaling, self-reflection, or creative work — draw a card, and it hands you a question you wouldn't have asked yourself. All of these rest on one learnable skill: knowing what the cards say. Everything else is style.

Your first deck

Get the Rider–Waite–Smith or one of its many descendants. It was published in 1909 with art by Pamela Colman Smith, and it's the deck most beginner books and apps are written around — including this one. The practical reason to start there: Smith painted a full scene on every card, minor cards included. In older decks the Five of Cups is five cups; in hers it's a person in a black cloak mourning three spilled cups while two still stand. The picture teaches the meaning. A large share of modern decks keep her scenes and change the style, so anything described as "RWS-based" will work with nearly any learning material you'll come across.

You may have heard that your first deck has to be a gift. It's a nice tradition, and only a tradition: there's no rule behind it, and buying your own deck is completely normal. If a deck's artwork pulls at you, that pull is worth more than the tradition — buy it.

What you can skip

Beginner tarot advice accumulates equipment and prerequisites: silk wraps, crystals, a dedicated table, moonlight cleansing rituals, memorizing all 78 meanings before you're allowed to shuffle. If ritual appeals to you, keep whatever parts feel right — ceremony can help you focus. None of it is required; the cards work fine straight out of the box.

Meet the deck before you study it

Before any lessons, spend one evening just looking. Take the deck out and sort it into five piles: the 22 Major Arcana (cards with a number and a name but no suit — the Fool, the Tower, the Sun), and the four suits of the Minor Arcana — Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles, each running Ace to Ten and then Page, Knight, Queen, King. Flip through each pile slowly. Don't try to memorize anything yet — just notice: which cards you like, which ones unsettle you, where the same symbols keep turning up. This one exercise puts the deck's whole structure in your hands, and structure is what makes the 78 cards learnable — the case the study guide makes in full. The major vs minor arcana guide covers how the two halves differ in a reading.

Your first reading

Do it on day one. Don't wait until you feel ready — that day has a way of never arriving.

1. Shuffle until shuffling stops feeling momentous.
2. Ask an open question, something like "what should I know about work right now."
3. Draw one card, face up.
4. Describe the picture out loud before you look anything up. Who's in it? What are they doing? What's the weather? Your description is usually half the meaning already.
5. Then check the card's meaning — in the booklet, an app, wherever — and see how it lands against your question.

That's a complete reading. When it feels comfortable, add two more cards for a past–present–future spread; how to read a tarot spread shows what each position does. Bigger layouts can come much later.

Mistakes that stall beginners

• Memorizing before reading. Meanings stick when they're used. Read from day one and study alongside, in a sensible order: one suit at a time, majors after.
• Reversals on day one. Skip reversed cards entirely at first — flip anything upside-down and read it upright. There's plenty of time for reversals once the deck feels familiar.
• Yes/no questions. The cards deal in situations, motives, and trajectories. Open questions give them room to say something.
• Deck-hopping. A new deck every month resets your visual memory each time. Stay with one deck until you can read it without the booklet.
• Permanent booklet dependency. Looking meanings up is fine at the start. If it's still every card after months, switch from looking up to being quizzed — answering from memory is what makes meanings stick.

Common first questions

Can I read for myself? Yes, and you should; most of your learning will happen there. Self-readings come with a known hazard: it's easy to read what you want to see. The describe-the-picture-first habit is the antidote.

Do I have to believe in anything? No. Come to the cards however you like — as divination, as psychology, as a thinking tool. The deck doesn't check your credentials at the door.

How long before I can read without looking everything up? With short daily practice, simple spreads in two to three months. The study guide covers the timeline and the study order that gets you there.