Practical Tarot's Quick Start Guide to Learning and Reading the Cards

by Barbara Moore

This Deluxe edition includes both Practical Tarot's Quick Start Guide to Learning the Cards and Practical Tarot's Quick Start Guide to Tarot Readings.

Learning the Cards is designed to help you create basic card meanings efficiently and effectively. This Guide does not give you card meanings; it shows you how to create card meanings…your own meanings. If you are completely new to the cards, this is an excellent way to get to know your deck.


Tarot Readings will help you understand the process of interpreting a tarot reading with ease and confidence. This Guide details my process of conducting a reading. You can use this to read for yourself or for someone else. In this section, emphasis is placed on the step called “Scanning a Reading,” as this is one of the most neglected practices in the craft of tarot reading. Ironically, it is a process that helps create coherence in a reading and consequently is exactly what a new tarot reader needs to pull their readings together.

Genres: Tarot

31 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 8, 2011

About the author

The tarot has been a part of my personal and professional life for nearly twenty years. I first discovered the Tarot in college. Right from the start, the tarot intrigued me with its marvelous blending of mythology, psychology, art, history mystery, and magic.

My education in the tarot has been and continues to be broad and enlightening. I am grateful to have been blessed with the opportunity to study under renowned tarot scholars Mary K. Greer and Rachel Pollack. I have also had the privilege to share the wonders of the tarot with all manner of wide-eyed, would-be tarot readers.

I enjoy giving a voice to tarot cards by writing the books that accompany decks. I have had the good fortune to write books and booklets for several decks, including A Guide to Mystic Faerie Tarot (Llewellyn, July 2007), The Gilded Tarot Companion (Llewellyn, September 2004), The Enchanted Oracle (Llewellyn, September 2008), The Mystic Dreamer Tarot (Llewellyn, September 2008), and Shadowscapes Tarot (Llewellyn, May 2010). Recently, I finished writing a new edition of Tarot for Beginners (Llewellyn, November 2010).

My articles on the tarot have appeared in several tarot publications and in Llewellyn's New Worlds of Mind and Spirit.

Over the years, I have been very active in the tarot community. I am a founding member of the Minnesota Area Tarot Symposium and have spoken at tarot conferences around the United States. In July of 2010, I had the pleasure of attending the Tarot Association of the British Isles (TABI) Annual Conference as keynote speaker.

In addition to teaching tarot classes and providing personal readings, I currently work as a consultant for tarot publishers Llewellyn Worldwide and Lo Scarabeo. I also contribute bi-weekly posts to Llewellyn's Tarot Pathways blog. I am very excited to be working on designing several forthcoming tarot decks as well as another book for tarot newbies on spread design.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike many beginning books on the Tarot (including other books by this author), this one doesn't tell you what the cards mean. In the first part of this guide, Moore focuses on teaching readers a set of five techniques for beginners to learn card meanings for the first time and for more experienced readers to become acquainted with a new deck or review what they know about their current decks. Moore summarizes her techniques, then leads the reader through them. In the second part of the book, Moore helps readers make the transition to doing tarot readings. She doesn't demonstrate any particular spread, but guides readers through the process of setting up a reading and then scanning the spread for general themes. Reading the individual cards, often the focus of other tarot guides, is barely mentioned.

Moore has done a fine job of boiling an intricate topic down to a manageable amount of information. Of course, one reason this guide is so short (my Kindle app is having trouble coming up with a page count, but I'm guessing this is about 30 pages long) is because the reader will be doing all the "work": coming up with their own meanings for the cards instead of reading them from the book, teaching themselves what a spread is saying—but that's hardly a bad thing! Because the author is teaching a technique rather than listing definitions, this book isn't tied to just Rider-Waite-Smith decks; it could easily be used with Thoth-type decks, and possibly even with some non-tarot oracle decks. Moore doesn't mention reversals until the part about doing readings. Beginners following her suggestions will probably have read other authors' takes on reversals by then, but it seems an odd omission for an introductory guide to the Tarot. I agree with Moore that scanning readings for themes isn't as emphasized as it should be, and I think she's done a good job of outlining an approach that Tarot readers can use for any reading. This is a good, simple guide to learning the Tarot.

[Tea and Spite · Rating 2 out of 5]

LMAO this may be quick to read, but it'll take at least a week to get through all the various activities intended to teach the basics of the cards. (September Update: Almost 2 months and I've given up. Seriously, this is nuts if you want to do the activities in any sort of detail.) Go with Moore's Tarot for Beginners instead. Sitting down with the book and your deck and going through the descriptions one by one, noting where your image differs and how that impacts the meaning, will be much faster and you'll also have all the rest of the information Moore gives. Primarily, you'll have the chapter on reading the cards, which is effectively an enhanced version of the second book in this series.

Alternately, Llewellyn's Tarot Made Easy kit, which includes their own classic tarot deck and Moore's Your Tarot Your Way is a fantastic beginner set. Its ethos is similar to this book's in that you go through several exercises to determine your own interpretations, but there are fewer of them and it has its own set of descriptions and keywords to get you started. Either option is a better use of time and money than this.