In this guide

You sit down with your first deck. The booklet gives each card a single keyword. A friend tells you to ignore the booklet and just “feel the energy.” A podcast mentions that the original tarot had no occult meaning at all. Three different starting points, three different futures.

Which Tarot Tradition Should You Learn?

Which Tarot Tradition Should You Learn

Choosing a tarot reading course is really about choosing which tradition you want to enter. The decision determines how you see the cards, how you build a reading, and how you talk about what you see. There is no single correct path. There are only paths whose doors open differently.

Every course teaches one of three major systems or a blend of them: the Marseille tradition, the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) tradition, or the Thoth tradition. A fourth path, the purely intuitive or “secular” approach, borrows from all of them. The course you choose will shape not only what you learn but how you learn to think about the cards.

Where the Three Traditions Come From

Where the Three Traditions Come From

Every course teaches one of three major systems or a blend of them. The Marseille tradition comes from the European card culture — the simple deck of the fifteenth century, read emblematically and numerically. The Rider-Waite tradition comes from the English occult revival of 1909 — the deck of Waite and Smith, read narratively and symbolically. The Thoth tradition comes from the Golden Dawn and Crowley — the deck of 1944, read through the Kabbalistic and the astrological correspondences. The three traditions are the three worlds of the modern tarot, and each course is an entry into one of them.

A Brief History of Tarot’s Occult Rise

Tarot was not invented for divination. The earliest surviving decks, such as the Visconti-Sforza (c. 1450, created for the Milanese court), were playing cards for a game called tarocchi. The trumps pictured allegorical figures: the Emperor, Justice, the Hanged Man. Nothing secret. Nothing magical.

That changed in 1781 when Antoine Court de Gébelin published Le Monde Primitif, claiming tarot was a remnant of Egyptian magic. He was wrong about the Egypt, but his error launched an occult industry. Jean-Baptiste Alliette, writing under the anagram Eteilla, produced the first explicit divinatory system in 1791 (the Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommé Tarots). He assigned meanings to each card and created a specific spread. He also insisted his system was based on the lost Book of Thoth. It was not. It was original.

In the 1850s, French occultist Éliphas Lévi connected tarot trumps to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, a link that would become foundational. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) formalized the system: the twenty-two trumps became paths on the Tree, the four suits corresponded to YHVH, and each pip card received astrological and elemental attributions. Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith published the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1910. It was the first deck to illustrate every pip card with a full scene, making it possible to read without memorizing separate meanings. The RWS tradition was born.

Aleister Crowley, a former Golden Dawn member, collaborated with Lady Frieda Harris on the Thoth deck from 1938 to 1943 (published posthumously in 1969). Crowley’s system integrated Thelema, astrology, alchemy, and the Qabalah into a denser, more abstract framework. The Marseille tradition, meanwhile, persisted as the original pattern used by cartomancers in France and Italy, rarely commented on in English until the late twentieth century.

Each tradition thus carries a distinct intellectual and spiritual history. The course you choose inherits that history.

What Each Tradition Asks You to Learn

Each tradition asks for a different learning. The Marseille tradition asks you to learn the emblems and the numbers — the language of the simple deck, the art of reading the symbols without the scene. The Rider-Waite tradition asks you to learn the images and the stories — the language of the scenes, the art of reading the narrative. The Thoth tradition asks you to learn the correspondences — the Kabbalah, the astrology, the elements, the art of reading the structure. Each tradition thus carries a distinct intellectual and spiritual formation, and the course you choose is the formation you enter.

The Three Major Tarot Systems, Explained

A Marseille-based course teaches you to read the cards as a system of numbers, suits, and elemental interactions. The pip cards (aces through tens) show only the symbols in repeated patterns: five cups, four swords, nine wands. The teacher shows you how to count the cups, note their arrangement (are they upright? spilled? symmetrical?), and combine that information with the card’s number. The court pages, knights, queens, and kings are read as people or as aspects of the querent. The trumps are fixed narratives, but the pips demand arithmetic.

The learner’s challenge in a Marseille course is memory without a picture book. You must internalize the meaning of the number four in the suit of Swords before you can read the Four of Swords as a card of rest, retreat, or truce. There is no drawn bed, no window, no stained-glass knight to remind you. Courses in this tradition often begin with heavy work on the numbers one through ten and the four elements. The payoff is a reading style that feels clean, precise, and rooted in logic.

An RWS course builds on the illustrated pip. Pamela Colman Smith’s scenes contain layers of symbolism: the white rose in the center of the Ten of Cups, the dog howling at the moon in the Two of Swords. The course teaches you to “read the picture” first, then to overlay the Golden Dawn correspondences that Waite embedded (the astrological signs, the Hebrew letters on the trumps, the colors). Many RWS courses begin with the Major Arcana only, moving from the Fool’s journey through the World. The learner develops a narrative sense: each card tells a story, and the spread becomes a sequence of scenes.

The challenge in an RWS course is different. The pictures are seductive. It is easy to rely on the visual crutch and never learn the deeper structure. A good RWS teacher forces you to connect the image to the number, the element, the planetary ruler, and the kabbalistic sphere.

A Thoth course demands the most prior study. Crowley’s deck contains astrological symbols on every card, alongside alchemical, Egyptian, and Thelemic references. The Magus trump shows Mercury, the caduceus, the wands, the elements, and the serpent. A Thoth course typically spends weeks on the correspondences alone: planetary hours, zodiacal degrees, the Sephirotic paths. The pip cards are not just painted: they are mathematically arranged according to a complex attributional system. A Thoth reading is as much a chart as a story.

Courses that claim to teach “intuitive tarot” borrow from all three but reject the need for memorized correspondences. The instructor guides you to look at the card and describe what you see, feel, or remember. This approach is common in modern secular or therapeutic tarot. It lowers the barrier to entry but also strips the deck of its historical weights. An intuitive course may never explain why the Three of Swords in RWS shows a heart pierced by three swords, or why a Marseille reader calls that card “sorrow.” It does not need to. The image speaks for itself.

How Courses Actually Teach: Spreads, Practice, and Lineage

The courses teach through the same elements in different proportions. The spreads — the layouts of the reading — are taught in every tradition, but the Marseille courses emphasize the numerical spreads and the RWS courses the narrative ones. The practice — the reading itself — is taught through the supervised sessions and the daily draws. The lineage — the school and the teacher — matters more in some traditions than others: the Marseille is the tradition of the public schools of the European card readers, the RWS and the Thoth are the traditions of the initiatory orders and their successors. Courses that claim to teach ‘intuitive tarot’ borrow from all three, mixing the spreads, the practice, and the lineage into a personal method.

What a Tarot Course Actually Looks Like

A course is not just a syllabus. It is a set of practices. Compare the typical assignments across traditions.

A Marseille course student might spend a week on only the Aces, learning to read them as the root of each element. Then a week on the Twos, then the Threes, until the numbers are automatic. Readings are done with the pip cards face down, turned one at a time. The teacher corrects not just the meaning but the way the student holds the cards: the reading surface, the cutting of the deck, the order in which cards are placed.

An RWS course often jumps straight into the Celtic Cross spread by week two. The teacher walks through each position (the Self, the Crossing, the Past, etc.) and shows how the card’s image maps to the question. Students practice by reading for each other, often swapping decks. The aim is fluency with the 78 cards as a single narrative vocabulary.

A Thoth course may begin with the 22 trumps only, and only after the student has completed a self-study of basic Qabalah. The teacher assigns a journal: for each trump, write a paragraph on the astrological attributions, then a paragraph on the imagery, then a three-card reading using that trump as the center. The pace is slower. The depth is greater.

How to Evaluate a Tarot Teacher’s Credibility

Lineage matters more in some traditions than others. The Marseille tradition has a living oral lineage: teachers like Philippe Camoin and Alejandro Jodorowsky (who restored the Marseille pattern in the 1990s) pass down techniques learned from older cartomancers. RWS and Thoth are more text-based, though living teachers who were students of students of Waite or Crowley still exist. A course that names its teaching lineage is giving you a claim of authenticity. Whether that matters to you depends on how you view authority. Some readers want a direct link to the Golden Dawn. Others are happy with a well-written manual.

Common Misconceptions About Tarot Courses

The common error is treating the tarot course as the source of the power — the certification that makes the reader. The course is the transmission of the method, and the power is in the practice. Another error is assuming all courses teach the same thing under different names; the three traditions differ in the deck, the symbols, and the formation, and the course that blends them is a different formation from the course that teaches one. And the lineage matters: the Marseille is the tradition of the public schools, the RWS and the Thoth the traditions of the orders — and the course you choose carries the lineage, whether it says so or not.

Common Tarot Learning Myths, Debunked

“You must memorize all 78 meanings before you can read.” No tradition requires this. Marseille courses teach you to derive meanings from number and element. RWS courses teach you to read the picture. Thoth courses teach you to read the correspondences. Memorization comes through practice, not before it.

“Intuitive reading is not real tarot.” That is a gatekeeping claim. Intuitive reading is a legitimate approach, though it is historically recent (no earlier than the 1970s). It works, provided the reader is honest about not using the traditional systems. The tension arises when an intuitive reader claims authority based on a deck’s occult pedigree.

“Marseille is just for beginners.” The opposite is closer to the truth. Marseille reading requires a high degree of abstract thinking and pattern recognition. Many experienced readers find it harder than RWS. It is simpler in imagery, not in practice.

“The Thoth deck is too hard for most people.” The deck is dense, but a good Thoth course breaks it into digestible pieces. The difficulty is real, but it is not insurmountable. Many readers start with Thoth and never feel the need for another deck.

“You need a teacher to learn tarot.” You do not. Many self-taught readers are excellent. But a course provides structure, correction, community, and depth that a book alone often cannot. The choice comes down to your learning style and your access to a good teacher.

FAQ

The Best Tarot Tradition for Beginners

Which tarot tradition is best for a complete beginner?

The Rider-Waite-Smith tradition has the gentlest learning curve because every card is illustrated. Beginners can start reading immediately by describing what they see. Augment that with a course that teaches the numerological and elemental foundations.

How do I know if a tarot course teacher is credible?

Ask them which tradition they teach and who taught them. A credible teacher can name their lineage or at minimum their own study path. Also ask for a sample lesson or a syllabus. A good teacher is happy to explain their method.

Do I need to buy a specific deck for a course?

Yes, if the course teaches a specific tradition. A Marseille course will require a Marseille deck. An RWS course expects a Waite-Smith deck or a close clone. A Thoth course demands the Crowley-Harris Thoth deck. Using the wrong deck makes the course harder.

Can I take a course online, or do I need in-person instruction?

Online courses work well for all three traditions, especially if they include live video sessions where the teacher can see your spreads and correct your handling. Recorded-only courses are fine for theory but weaker for feedback.

The tradition you choose is not a brand. It is a language. Learn the language your mind wants to speak. Once you know one, the others open. For a wider look at how tarot decks relate to these traditions, see our guide to the Major Arcana symbols. If you are still unsure which path to walk, our full tarot reference hub breaks down each system with sample readings and historical notes. And for the deeper context behind the Golden Dawn attributions that shaped the RWS and Thoth traditions, read our history of tarot.