The Musings of a Confused Man

Jarred,

I james from Fr. Jake's place. I'm rather interested in tarot; can you recomend a good book for beginners?

Hi James. First of all, welcome to my blog.

To be honest, I'm hesitant to recommend a good beginner book. I'm not sure I know of a good beginner book. It's been so long since I started delving into tarot (and my learning was more experiential than book-based anyway), that I find it hard to determine what would be good for beginners.

One of the books that I originally started with was Tarot for Beginners by P. Scott Hollander. I seem to recall it being a pretty good book.

Another choice would be Rachel Pollack's Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom, which spends more time examining the common symbolism for each card more than Hollander's book.

However, as I said, I think that learning tarot is more an experiential thing than a book learning thing (though many "traditionalists" in the field will surely disagree with me). As such, focusing on an study of tarot that is more focused on practice and/or your own interaction with the cards works for me. To that end, I offer two approaches.

The first is more in line with a traditional understanding of tarot -- in fact one that sees tarot as not just a method of divination, but as a spiritual discipline and tool for enlightenment. If you're interested in going in that direction, I would encourage you to check out Builders of the Adytum. They offer a correspondence course that goes through the tarot in great detail. I've taken part of this course myself, and even with my more free-form, intuitive approach to tarot, I found what I learned greatly improved my own understandings and abilities to work with the cards.

The other option I would offer is best applies if (1) you're mainly interested in doing tarot readings and (2) you're not hung up on the "right" or "traditional" way of doing tarot. In that case, my advice to you would be to buy a tarot deck and play with it. If you go to Aeclectic Tarot, you can browse images of many of the decks out there on the market. Look for one whose images "speak" to you. Then buy that deck, take it home, and spend a great deal of time just looking at the cards. As you look at each card, ask yourself what you notice about it. Ask yourself how it makes you feel. Ask yourself what impressions it brings to mind. As you do this, you'll be learning how to understand your deck and how to interpret the cards for yourself as they come up in a reading you do.

Good luck. And I hope you stop in again!