How to Give Spooky Good Tarot Readings (Reading Tarot Cards Vertically)
So I’ve touched on the idea of reading vertically briefly in my other posts but I wanted to put together one that goes into it a little more deeply.
When I say “read vertically” I mean considering the card as part of other cards with its same number, including the Major Arcana cards. It looks like this:
How to Understand Vertical Themes
Cards of the same number tend to have a similar higher level narrative theme.
Fives are my favorite example for this because of how much this layer of meaning can add to interpreting them. In the Rider-Waite Major Arcana, we have the Heirophant (5) and the Devil (15) – cards about the material world either being in balance or wildly out of balance.
5 of Pentacles is a card of sickness and poverty, 5 of Cups is reflective of losing a loved one or a breakup, 5 of Wands is work/goal oriented conflict with others or a hostile workplace, and 5 of Swords is about the kind of intellect that alienates you from others and arguments you win at the cost of your relationship with that person.
Within the Minor Arcana 5’s, we can see a theme of conflict, of desire and lack. When you take the Major Arcana into account it adds a new dimension – that these conflicts are a result of imbalance (the Devil) and are significant events in a person’s life that challenges them materially and spiritually (the Heirophant).
When 5’s are taken into consideration with the rest of the deck, we see they’re often the turning point from pure enthusiasm to deep commitment, when the crafter devotes themselves to the craft, when the lover must confront their own internal world so that they may try to invite another into it again.
That’s usually a lot more information than the few keywords that came in your deck booklet for each card (or the paragraphs of story if you shelled out for the proper book).
This will work better for some numbers than others but it’s always a useful lens to begin looking at your deck through.
Practice: Take each column and jot down key words, themes, symbols, or other ideas that seem to occur across all of them. Include the Major Arcana if you can but exclude them if it doesn’t make sense for your deck.
Reading Vertically in Practice
Here’s where I think reading vertically really shines.
We’ve all been there, we pull out a set of cards that on the surface don’t seem to be connected at all and you’ve got a querent sitting there patiently waiting for you to shed some light on their situation.
Reading vertically gives you another layer to investigate the cards, one that allows for more free associations than flipping through a book or going symbol spotting. Free association is the bread and butter of intuition work. It’s where your intuition gets to really come through.
The key is that while reading vertically is thematic, it’s still specific. Reading vertically isn’t going to give you themes like “love”, it’s going to give you “you’re at a turning point, you’re out of balance, and you better jump ship or redouble your efforts”.
I’ve often found it’s the layer that makes readings “feel spooky” to people I read for.
Practice: Draw cards at random or go in order and write down initial impressions, where the card falls narratively in its suit, and associations with others of it’s number. Then copy down meanings from the book that accompanies the deck. Compare.
Companion Books Are Useful, But Incomplete
The book that accompanies a deck is not the be all end all of card meanings. Decks have to be personalized in some way to the people who are reading them so there’s an interplay there. The author offers up their meanings, but you have to them meet them with your interpretations. For folks with a more academic bent, Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication speaks nicely to how I understand and teach Tarot.
So that’s why I think it’s so important that people learning tarot do some amount of deep self-directed study beyond memorization of what’s in the book. It’s an incomplete picture otherwise. I offer up horizontal and vertical reading as a way to develop those personal associations and connect cards more deeply with your particular experiences/worldview.
That space between how the deck understands itself and how you understand it is where intuition can really flourish.
I hope this helps! If you have any questions, let me know!
*I do not claim my way is the one true way so take what is useful and leave the rest.
**If you wind up using this stuff in another setting, please credit me. This stuff is my art. Don’t steal, please credit. Thanks!
