r/LearnTAROTwithLea
Everyone is welcome to talk and ask questions.
Thank you, Ladies & Gentlemen.
Hello, Tarot Ladies and Gentlemen!
This is a guide to the first basic step you need to start reading tarot: learning cards’ meanings one by one. Although it is a fundamental step, I see many beginners who don’t take it seriously: maybe when they start reading they leave the whole task to a gust of intuition, or they hope that if a card is not really clear, placing many more cards nearby it, or a pile of clarifiers above and under it, will suffice to fill and amend the empty spot of significance.
Be sincere: I know you do it. I simply know because at the beginning I did the same — eh, lol. That was a serious error I later understood I had to repair at all costs. A tarot reading is like a building, and a solid system of cards’ meanings is its foundations. If you want a building that reaches toward the sky, you need solid foundations — intuition is not one, as it is variable, depends on the moment, and is not exactly replicable every time.
Leaving the mastery of your readings to intuition alone basically means leaving them to chance, and therefore remaining unreliable.
Please understand me: I’m not saying intuition has no value — quite the opposite; it is a great skill every reader must have. I’m just saying intuition works best when used over a solid base of knowledge, and that it will then expand in many fruitful and unexpected directions.
Now, let’s try to break down the necessary passages to acquire and absorb a card’s meaning.
1. Familiarize with your cards
This can sound a bit obvious, but the relationship to your physical deck has its important part. The very first step to master your deck is to know what it contains! Take your cards, stare at them one by one, or also lay them all down on a big table and watch them unfold their geometrical rhythm. Absorb their images and colors into your deep memory. You will form a strong mental relationship with both the images themselves, wherever else you happen to see them, and you will also energetically charge your deck, which, if you go after strange things like me, it’s not really a detail.
2. Find a reliable system of meanings to follow and stick with
Are you new to tarot and solely relying on your deck’s booklet? That could be a terrible idea.
Now, there surely are well-authored decks with very cured booklets, but this is definitely not always the case. In many instances, the booklet that comes with a commercial deck is a careless copy-and-paste from the worst tarot websites, and, sadly, that’s one of the biggest things that can throw your whole practice into the nettles.
Know that books on tarot have been published since the late 18th century — that’s about 250 years of written knowledge. I don’t want to scare you, so let me break the process down with a few simple directions.
If you use a RWS deck, it’s mandatory for you to learn what Waite – the W of the acronym and creator of the deck – wrote about it in his work “The pictorial key to the Tarot,” a text now in the public domain and fully available online.
If you use a Marseille deck (TdM) there are many useful sources: older occultists (French writers above all) and many respected contemporary authors. Avoid the cheap “the only book you need” pamphlets sold online for a couple of euros, PLEASE. You’re building some high level knowledge and extraordinary skills. They are really worth to spend some more coins than that.
Very important thing, whether you use one deck or the other: some historical study of tarot’s Italian origins and historical context will enrich your understanding and give you valuable insights.
Once you find a system suited to your kind of deck, you must stick with it, especially at the beginning. It is possible that you will deepen your knowledge of tarot and change your system or calibrate it many times as new notions arrive, but in this first phase what you need is solid ground, not uncertainty. One, reliable map to move your first steps. You will benefit of certainty much more than vagueness in this initial phase.
3. Make sure your system is truly adequate to represent the whole universe
Another tip for testing the goodness of your meanings: get sure they’re not confined to the psychological. No guys, this is not gatekeeping. It is a very important point to prevent all your future practice from being compromised.
You do tarot readings to understand the world. Both the one inside you, and outside you. If your meanings consist only of an introspective vocabulary, your cards won’t be able to describe real life in its entirety. We are not self-sufficient, closed bubbles. Even psychology agrees.
When you ask cards about something, yes, even about the most introspective issue, it’s absolutely possible they will show other persons, facts, actions and various dynamics that somehow play into the matter. If your cards only speak of emotions and personality parts, you can be seriously missing some core part of the message. Beside also the great possibility that your readings come out plainly wrong.
Let me do a clear example: you ask what’s wrong with the management of your small company. The cards point to your dishonest partner who is sabotaging you and emptying the company's coffers. But, thanks to your smurfs tarot deck’s booklet, , you read the cards (as best you can) as your own guilt-ridden, repressed relationship with money. This does not make you a good card reader at all, know that. And less than least solve your problems.
4. Make sure your meanings don't remain only intellectual, but are alive
→ Learn the real “taste” of the cards. ←
The lived experiences, what happens, and events are never merely dry intellectual facts . They have the colour of experienced qualities, that is, a lively emotional connotation.
Death and Hermit in a relationship reading can both variously signal a breakup, but they mean two very different ways of breaking up. The Hermit wisely considers the situation and uses all his emotional control to make a discreet and civil step back. Death, by contrast, is a violent and bitter breakup full of hatred instead – even when that hatred is hidden or one person is ghosting the other. Do you feel the difference? Those two scenarios give tell opposite stories, even if the outcome is the same. Those feelings bring you to are an important part of what cards want to tell you. Follow this suggestion, and you will soon arrive to hear from your readees that you “described it all like a movie.” Trust me.
So, how do we move beyond conceptual descriptions and acquire the lived quality of the cards? We must relate them to the reality they represent. There are no shortcuts here, you need practice for this. Good feedback comes from noting your cards and later comparing them with what actually happened. The quickest way to do this is the card-of-the-day practice (see par. n. 8).
5. Some Tarot and NLP...
Find a concise description for each card—one that, when you’re reading, instantly recalls everything you know about it. Create a sensorial depiction of that label whenever you can.
Yes, I know this sounds a bit boastful, but it isn’t: you really can do it. Let me give an example: the Knight of Coins/Pentacles. In my system he means a great worker and a helper. I imagine him as a good, very resolute boy who is always trotting about and keeping busy. You might ask: is he a positive person? I’d answer in half a second: yes, he’s a helper. Is he practical? For sure, he works a lot. Is he a still figure? Not at all, he’s trotting on a horse. Does he hide himself? Surely not, he’s active and straightforward. Is he proactive? Absolutely. Is he poor? Definitely not. Is he confused? Not at all. And so on.
You see, a single image or sensation can encode a great number of details and even produce new elements as you need them that you’ve never thought of before. The more correct information you can extract, the more fluid and detailed your readings will be when you read cards together, and the easier it will be to retrieve specific details.
6. Make every card memorable by relating it to a mood, an episode or a person in your life
This is another great expedient to tie and enliven your cards through your mnemonic web of connections: find something you’ve lived and experienced that correctly represents each card.
The Empress won’t be just a powerful, slightly impulsive woman anymore if you relate her to the vibrant, sweet, luminous, loving figure of a young mother you’ve met or been.
The Pope won’t be merely the chorus of tradition and marriage if you connect him to the sage master who changed your life.
In this way cards become living, vibrant figures of energy, not silhouettes or meaningless catchphrases. And when you’ll read for someone else, you will know what they mean for your readees as well.
7. Compare each card with the others
You can compare every Minor Arcana card with all the other cards in its suit, with other cards of the same rank, or with any of the other 77 cards in the deck.
When you do this, use every possible disposition: shuffle the order of comparison, and also work with reversals: apply reversals to the first card only, then to the second only, and then to both.
Do some brain-stretching: compare a card with those expressing similar concepts (for example, Death with the 5 of Swords reversed, or the 4 of Swords with the Hanged Man). Also look for the differences between them — sometimes those distinctions are very subtle.
8. The card of the day, and the card of the moment
The card of the day is the best practice to learn quickly and to get fast, verifiable feedback. Write your first interpretation down or otherwise remember it. Revisit it before you go to sleep or at the end of the day (I keep a deck specifically for the card of the day and leave it face down with the drawn card on the bottom.)
The “card of the moment” is probably new to you; it’s simply a reminder to carry your deck and pull cards about anything, anytime, even about silly things. Remember: experience comes from the number of times you’ve flipped cards, not from the number of books you’ve read (although books necessarily multiply the value of practice.) In short: read cards as often as you can. The more you do it, the sooner you’ll see that oddities and apparent contradictions are not mistakes but part of how the tarot normally expresses itself. So if you want to learn the tarot’s language, speak to it as much as possible as well as learn its grammar.
9. Journaling
The best tarot book is your own.
Write everything down, or save everything to the cloud, it doesn’t matter, but be sure to leave a trace of all your practice. Your trials and errors will be your best teachers and an enormous well of information on what you did and went through. This is especially true if you are a spiritual practitioner.
10. NEVER confuse what a card says with advice on what to do - problems cannot be their own solutions
This is one of the most basic logical errors you can make, and the direst one, because it can completely wreck the structure of your reading and often lead you to say exactly the opposite of what you should.
Where does this error come from? From applying tarological methods everywhere, indiscriminately. Tarology is a deep, valuable discipline — but using it mindlessly is ruining whole generations of readers. Tarology is exploratory: it proceeds by expanding your reflection on single cards, and within that breadth you will naturally include deep considerations about a card’s shadow side and, eventually, advice on how to counteract a problem. That is masterful work, and you must learn how to do it. But none of that works on a three-card spread for “Will I pass the next exam?” or “Will I get the job?”
Let me give an example to highlight the logical flaw that wrecks many beginner readings.
A readee asks: “What’s actually wrong in my rapport with colleagues?” and you draw the 3 of Cups.
Meaning of the card: joy, happiness, pleasure, proximity, partying together, celebrating. And you start replying: “You should be more friendly and cheerful, blah blah blah…”
Now this 3 of Cups, as requested by your question, explains why your relationships with everyone at the office are bad. This card depicts the problem itself, not its solution. Here the cards are saying that being overly friendly and cheerful may just be the problem itself, rather than the remedy. Yes, the example is quite sneaky; since this card is positive and happy, it can push you into the trap even more. Notice how a wrong reading made you conclude the opposite of what the cards intended. My main advice: if you need to give guidance, pull additional cards. Don’t invent advice or infer it from cards that are speaking about something else.
Hope this script has helped you a little bit to proceed into your tarot journey.
Hello you all. I will try to take this post to the essential, since I've made another one some days ago that probably was deleted for being too long. Hope this one stays, because I just wanted to warn people of a very incorrect practice they are surely unaware of.
r/inclusivetarot and r/tarots are run by the very same people, and they are profiting from you through a system of multiple accounts.
About inclusivetarot: the mod team is full of alts. Do you remember that Valerio Lundini, “the Pope of Rome”? An Italian guy who is also a web/game developer. Then, there has been another mod, u/DesignerCool221. He’s also into the IT field, and he is Italian too. Then, one month ago, this new mod, u/soulishere1, arrives. Guess what...? He is a web/game developer too. 3 guys, all into tarot, all also into IT, and, curiously, all mods of the same still relatively new and small community...
Strange, isn't it? Three persons or rather the same one…? Notice that the mods list goes between public and private very often - let’s say, every time there is some drama happening there - so you will need a little research on usernames to verify this. I’m stopping here at the evidence I have, but if you hang out there, you could notice there are other different accounts who comment with the same style and same vibe, and really sounds to be the same person as well.
Why alt-accounts, you will wonder? Well, this is just a clever commercial move. When you have many alt-accounts, there are more possibilities that the same client asks you do to the same reading again. Very simple. They change their speech style, they change their deck, and the poor client never realizes he’s paying the same persons again and again for the very same reading. And of course, with every new reading they will look to be better readers, since they take advantage of the infos the client already told them…
Now, u/BIGepidural who just took control of r/tarots. I realized he's very likely the same person. How do I know it? Well, now it's not my intention to go personal or do my personal apology, as these guys really like to build up defamatory campaigns against other readers and competitor subs (many ones, me included.) If you've followed all the story, and have been able to read their posts which they delete after some days, you will realize he's telling the very same arguments with the same words... Make your own opinion, then.
Don't get fooled. Real accounts have a history and a personality, and they don't need to split. You can realize who a reader or speller is by looking up at what they say and do around, if you want a genuine idea of their level. Maybe this can be a useful hint for you not to fall prey of greedy clones. Be careful guys.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tarots/comments/1t15imx/alert_re_reader_plz_read_asap/
Look at this... Same defamation campaign goin on at my damage. No buddies, I'm still here, because the only one thing I've threatened anybody of is to proceed legally. Which I'm definitely doing BTW.
Remember: why do they multiply themselves? Because they can do the same reading again and again to the same client. I've provided evidence of this on my later post. They always failed to provide evidence of what they are telling about me, instead... except vague 3rd person screenshots that anybody could have written.
Let's see who still remain at the end of the game.
Hello you all! I'm Lea, a true Italian professional cartomancer with many years of work on psychic lines and privately. I read tarot the old style: just you, me and my deck.
No AI, no generic fluff, nor prerecorded nonsense at all: my readings are real, and they answer to your questions. Ask me anything.
Since I'm back on Reddit, for all this week all kind of readings are at 10 €.
My only shop is at ko-fi.com/leacartomancer.
The way of reading I prefer is by far through live written chat, as tradition goes, but since our time zones can be much different, I can offer you written reports to be integrated with the needed follow up. I will always send you a picture of my cards and a clear explanation of what I see.
I also do Tarot mentoring.
Please always contact me through DM before proceeding or for any eventual question. Thank you!
(No health/pregnancies - payment is always in advance)
Hello you all! I'm Lea, a true Italian professional cartomancer with many years of work on psychic lines and privately. I read tarot the old style: just you, me and my deck.
No AI, no generic fluff, nor prerecorded nonsense at all: my readings are real, and they answer to your questions. Ask me anything.
Since I'm back on Reddit, for all this week all kind of readings are at 10 €.
My only shop is at ko-fi.com/leacartomancer.
The way of reading I prefer is by far through live written chat, as tradition goes, but since our time zones can be much different, I can offer you written reports to be integrated with the needed follow up. I will always send you a picture of my cards and a clear explanation of what I see.
I also do Tarot mentoring.
Please always contact me through DM before proceeding or for any eventual question. Thank you!
(No health/pregnancies - payment is always in advance)
The High Priestess is a figure that occultists often equate with Isis. In the Conver deck, one can see that her collar is fastened with an explicitly phallic shape: the phallus is a central element in the myth of the goddess Isis.
Now, when turning the card upside down, I realized there seem to be two lit torches in the veil surrounding her head. Torches, too, are an important element in the cult of Isis: they were used in her nocturnal processions (for example, in the Navigium Isidis on March 5th) to symbolize the passage of Osiris from death to rebirth. Coincidence? Pareidolia?
If you build defamatory campaigns against other readers, continue to publish their private chat without blurring names, harass them with a full team of collaborators, and even blackmail them saying you have all their data... well, at a certain point even Reddit takes action.
Just wanted to update you, in case today you don't find that sub alive anymore. Cheers, guys.
Astrology and Tarot: many different systems of correspondences and no unanimity about them between authors. So, well, I tried to compose my own. Please, be benevolent with me as I’m not really into astrology. I know very well what I’m saying here is incomplete and may be wrong, so I encourage the experts in both fields to correct it and enrich the discussion.
So, Majors as a portable device for astrological divination. Centuries before our modern oracle decks. Maybe we all already had an astro-oracle hidden in our tarot deck and we didn’t realize it...
Consider that Tarot, as scholars have demonstrated, was born around 1440 in Italy (some say Ferrara, some Bologna, some others Florence). At that time, divination of any kind was common. The wealthy didn’t move without consulting astrologers, and the lower classes had geomancy, which, unlike astrology, didn’t require sophisticated tools: no ephemeral tables, just a stick, some sand, paper and ink. Geomantic figures were then transposed on an astrological scheme of 12 houses, so that you could cast real horoscopes without having astronomical data. Like when today, on social media, readers draw cards to do forecasts for every sign; same concept.
Remember also that, in Humanistic and Renaissance Italy, with all its revival of classical (and magical) knowledge and concealed neopaganism, the knowledge of and practice with planetary forces was definitely a thing; in general, also, to use images as a support for meditation was not uncommon at all.
So, my hypothesis is this: what if the set of Major Arcana were intended (amongst all its other possible functions...) as a complete and handy device to comfortably cast astrological divinations? To do this you would need the following elements: the 12 houses, the 7 planets, and some other indicator. Can we find all this stuff inside the Majors’ set? I think so. Some cards display clear astrological symbols after all. Here’s a possible scheme. Notice that for the first 12 Trumps I considered both the houses and the zodiacal signs.
The 12 houses
Then, we can recognize the seven Planets:
Then we have three cards left. We could relate them to the three elements always used in old astrology: the two nodes and the Part of Fortune. May I suggest it?
I composed my birth chart with this method, and it’s been a really interesting figure to meditate on...
Thoughts?
Alright guys, I had to write this here too. Please notice, I don’t want to address and blame the totality of verified readers of r/inclusivetarot. I see many new names there, and they are people I know nothing of and whom I don’t want to address at all. This post is about some persons I directly interacted with, but whom also happen to be the real core of Inclusivetarot. So, to all of you new verified readers, may this post just be an useful warning, so that you can open your eyes and finally understand why something in your community is seriously off. After all, there’s a reason why there were 1.2K weekly visitors in January, and now there are some 300 less.
First of all, the mod team is full of alt-accounts. Do you remember that Valerio Lundini, “the Pope of Rome”? An Italian guy who is also a web/game developer. Then, there has been another mod, u/DesignerCool221. He’s also into the IT field, and he is Italian too. Then, one month ago, this new mod, u/soulishere1, arrives. Guess what...? He is a web/game developer too. 3 guys, all into tarot, all also into IT, and, curiously, all mods of the same still relatively new and small community.
Strange, isn't it? Three persons or rather the same one…? Notice that the mods list goes between public and private very often - let’s say, every time there is some drama happening there - so you will need a little research on usernames to verify this. I’m stopping here at the evidence I have, but if you hang out there, you could notice there are other different accounts who comment with the same style and same vibe, and really sounds to be the same person as well.
Why alt-accounts, you will wonder? Well, this is just a clever commercial move. When you have many alt-accounts, there are more possibilities that the same client asks you do to the same reading again. Very simple. They change their speech style, they change their deck, and the poor client never realizes he’s paying the same persons again and again for the very same reading. And of course, with every new reading they will look to be better readers, since they take advantage of the infos the client already told them…
But, notice, this is not the only way they can already know your infos. Let me explain this, and here I kindly ask people around to back me up. There appeared a post this winter, I don’t remember if it was on r/tarotpractice or r/tarotpractices, which I guess has been removed by now.The author of this post stated quite openly and very casually, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, that among card readers communities people always share information about clients with one another. The wording of the post was so ambiguous that, instead of referring to a bad general custom (which actually is only general amongst group of totally lame readers, since pros don’t need this stuff at all) it was phrased like it was openly addressing and blaming the people in that particular sub where the post was published. So much that some mods there, of course, got mad at him. Well, this unknown author was a previous mod of Inclusive tarot, one that I know very very well. There should be some comment there from me too, if anybody can retrieve the post – I’m talking because I know things. So, yes, client’s privacy, one of the ethical pillars of a card reader, seems not to be a thing for someone at Inclusivetarot. Someone past, and someone present as well. Please follow me.
Consider this. Sorry to go personal now, but what I’ve experienced has been the biggest proof of their radical falsity and bad faith, so my own story is the better example to show you who they are and how much freely they mistreat and damage people. I had some big issues with them, because at the time I was a verified reader there they had some private chat of mine, that, firstly, this last mod I knew very well had no regret sharing amongst the mod team, and, secondly, the mod team had also no problem to post publicly, to enforce their daily usual soap-opera drama. Notice that even if they blurred my name, they directly tagged the person I was talking to in the chat... So, huh, guess what happened...? The other person immediately replied by publishing the entire chat, with names well visible. Blurring names to keep things unrecognizable, but then at the same time tagging counterparts to make things totally recognizable…! (Later u/st0leurmilk realized the whole situation and kindly took the leaked chat down. Thank you again, Milk.) What a nice protection of collaborators’ privacy, from a sub that makes integrity and safe boundaries their flag. They leaked my material without permission and without any measure to safeguard my privacy: blurring my name was nothing, since they also tagged the other person..! If you’re a verified reader there, be careful. Take your stuff for yourself and never share it. Especially if it is very sensitive.
And, lastly, I want to spend some little words to the treatment they reserve to anybody who happens to disagree with them. Disagreeing is normal, and of course if you are mature and reasonable enough you tend to solve it, admit your faults, or al least to get over it and take it for yourself. They simply don’t, guys. They are another kind of persons.They only care to maintain that fake image of fairness, and to do this they create scapegoats for the occasion and destroy opponent's’ reputation. This happened with me, with Milk, and I guess with a pair of previous mods they sent away, so we have quite a pattern here. Of course, if you only hang out there you don’t know these stories, as they like to sing their rotten false-saint rhetoric to their public every day, and ban anybody who dares to ask questions.
But please, take notice of my story again, which sadly didn’t stop at the chat leaking. Have in mind again that it all started when they decided to publish my private stuff, so, basically, they started the whole of it, I’ve just found myself taken in the middle. Well, after that, instead of apologizing, they started bullying me and accusing me of misinformation, just because I said around they actually did leak my private material. Then, since after this I seriously started to complain and yelling at them, they made a long post where they accused me of threatening them physically and of doxx attacks… Two quite serious accusations, indeed. Especially for a professional reader like me. It’s all in the comments in some posts pinned on my profile, if you want some evidence. The original post has been deleted, and the author has later been accused of infamous racist claims (scapegoating, again?) and sent away.
Now, guys. If you want some more evidence of their bad faith, go and ask them to prove you I threatened them so badly. I really invite you to make this test, whether you are their client, or collaborator, or you intend to be one. Since they are so integer and like to prove every claim with honesty, it should not be difficult to provide clear evidence that I really threatened people with criminal intent. Do it, and see what happens… I really invite you to test what kind of persons you are going to deal with. Notice that what they did to me, an ex verified reader and collaborator, can be done to you in any moment, depending from the bad mood they wake up in in the morning.
Very lastly, some other first-hand knowledge I have of how that sub really works. I really cannot prove this point, but, if you have eyes, and if you already work with them, this can nail something somehow. It can be the missing piece you need to understand the general atmosphere there. Lundini, the community creator, has this image of silent mod, one that stays idle for long and only speaks rarely. In reality, he is just a mean guy with an incredibly tyrannical character who likes to use everyone at his convenience and dispose of them when he’s done, without regret, and all behind the scenes. Being him also into very low vibes practices, he spreads negativities around him, both indirectly, AND directly. I mean, he sends spells to his own collaborators, he has no problems at all in doing that. That’s the reason why all the people around him sound so incredibly nervous and out of their head… It’s not casual, it’s not the stress of managing the community, not at all. It’s all due to the same core and foundations that community is built upon: low, mean and selfish energy. So, if you work with them, and have had too many headaches recently, now you know the reason why: you’ve been drained by an unhealthy and vampyrical environment.
So, ponder what I told you and draw your conclusions by yourself...
It would be nice to expand this conversation with all the many persons who have a first-hand knowledge like me. You’re welcome to add your point of view and witness. Thank you all, guys.
