Beginner Tips for Interpreting Tarot (with Real Examples)
There’s this game called Powerpoint Karaoke. In the game, someone makes up a short series of powerpoint presentation slides. They will give the whole presentation a title, and then pick related or unrelated images to go on the slides. Another person has to give the presentation to the audience - basically improvising along the way the best they can to turn a random topic plus random images into a coherent presentation. Reading tarot is a lot like doing Powerpoint Karaoke. The title of the presentation is the question you ask, and the cards are the slides. The better you are at stringing disparate images into a coherent narrative on the fly, the better you will be at making sense of tarot spreads. For each of these tips, I will illustrate it with a real question that I am genuinely asking my tarot, the card I pull, and how I interpret it. 1. Ask clear questions. It is ten times harder to interpret an answer when the question was muddled in the first place. Your questions can be general, or specific, but it’s best to only ask one question at a time. I think about the wording of my question for a while before I actually answer it. I might think at first, “How is this new creative project thing going to go? Should I start it on the New Moon, or am I going to be an unproductive mess this week? Is it a bad month to start it? Why have I been so unproductive?” I’ll take that and cut it down - for instance, removing my own speculations about myself and how it will go and all of the different options. If that stuff is relevant, it will come up in the cards. I end up with a straight-forward question that is open to lots of different answers: “Is it a good move to start working on my new creative project at the New Moon?“ Example: Is it a good move to start working on my new creative project at the New Moon? Ace of Pentacles. Ooh. This seems like a good omen to me. It is not particularly hard to interpret because it feels very on the nose, because Aces are about beginnings. And it indicates that whatever I do could eventually become profitable, even though that’s not explicitly my intention. 2. Get rid of any preconceived notion of what the answer will be. Sometimes you turn over the exact card you are anticipating - like me the time I flippantly asked my tarot deck what my persistent headache might be from and thought, “I’m probably just dehydrated and it’s going to be Temperance or some shit like that.” But other times the card you get will not fit into the mold of what you are expecting. The answer you get is not always going to be the answer you want. Sometimes you are just looking for a “Should I keep going with this story or scrap it and start something new?” but that assumes that one of those options is the correct answer. Your cards may think that you should keep going with the story, but change it in some way. Or maybe you should scrap it and not start on something new right away. If you are expecting a purely yes-or-no type of answer, you may feel confused by the result you get. I often ask questions that could have a whole range of answers, instead of expecting a specific type of answer, so instead I might say, “What should I write about?” Example: What should I write about? The Chariot. This card is about overcoming obstacles, and maintaining control. It’s not really at all what I was starting to write about recently. This is definitely a card where the interpretation isn’t obvious to me. I’ve just been sitting here and had flash of realization that I think maybe I was asking the wrong question - ironic for an example about having preconceived notions. But this actually illustrates the “having preconceived notions” thing perfectly. I asked it what I should write about, and the flash of realization I just had about the message of the Chariot is, “You worry too much about what you should write about, when you will only succeed by actually putting in the effort of writing. Stop worrying about the content - write about anything as long as you are actually writing instead of pacing and contemplating.” So yeah - sometimes the answer you need is not the answer you want. 3. Read interpretations of the cards online. Yes, this is obvious. But it needs to be said because a lot of people have strong, contrary ideas about how tarot should be done. You don’t have to read only the pictures, or have a list of associations memorized, or expect the answer to come purely from your intuition. Lots of sites online offer long and detailed explanations for each tarot card upright and reversed. Often cards can have several meanings, and while reading on a few different interpretations a meaning may jump out at you as obvious. Example: What’s going to happen this week? The Moon. This card always seems hazy to me, so it’s a good one to look up. This site says, “On the New Moon, set your intentions and plant the seeds of opportunity so they can grow,” which feels relevant given that the New Moon is this week. This site says, “The towers on the opposing ends represent the forces of good and evil, and their similarity in appearance can allude to the difficulties that we face in distinguishing between them,” which frankly sounds like America to me right now. It also says, “the negative energies must be released and turned into something constructive.” I wouldn’t necessarily gather all of that just from relying on my own ideas about what this card means, but seeing it written here feels very apt for what Americans are going through - both last week and I guess maybe the upcoming week.
4. Generate a bunch of different ideas for what the cards might mean. If the answer doesn’t seem obvious or immediate, write down three or four things you think it could be saying. Write down all of the associations that spring to mind, even if they seem stupid, and then whittle them down later. You may have some intuitive sense of which interpretation is correct, or one interpretation will grow on you the longer you sit with it. Sometimes the answer may have shades of all of the interpretations you came up with. Example: What is the best way to spend my Sunday? Three of Pentacles. For me, this could go a few different ways. I asked my deck once what someone thought of me and got this card. So I associate this card with that person. It is that person’s birthday today, so it may be indicating that I should actually reach out to them. I have some good reasons for not doing that though. Or it may be a much less personal interpretation, telling me to do something collaborative. The more that I think about it, the more I think it may also relate to the first card. I’m drawing a connection here because the suit is the same. I’ve kept my ideas about my new creative project entirely to myself, but maybe before embarking on it I should get feedback from someone else on the aspects of it I’ve been struggling with. I think that’s the interpretation I’m going to go with. 5. Ask your cards silly, simple, or non-consequential questions. If you only ask serious questions where you really need an answer, you may feel way more pressure to interpret the cards correctly. As practice, it can help just to ask casual questions like “What should I eat for dinner?” and see what it says. In fact, I’ll do that right now just to show how I would interpret it. Example: What should I eat for dinner tomorrow? Six of Wands. The meaning of this card is ‘success’ and ‘praise’ and things like that, so it kind of reminds me of how I would always choose lobster on birthdays, or after my choir concerts, or middle school graduation and those types of events when I got to pick what to eat. It is definitely a celebration food for me. This is actually a card that is like ‘the answer I want but not the answer I need,” because I don’t know where I’m going to get lobster for dinner tomorrow. Maybe seafood in general will do, because I have salmon I could make. Overall - interpretations are very personal. In the examples I’ve included, someone else may not draw the same conclusion just from the card and the question because they don’t have all of that background knowledge about me to draw from. One of the best things to do when interpreting tarot readings for yourself is just to know yourself - and be able to look at yourself honestly.
