Three decks live in the locked drawer of our reading room: a Marseille, a 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith, and a Thoth painted in wartime London. Studying tarot effectively means mastering the system beneath the images: the 78-card structure, the numbered trumps, the suits, and five centuries of layered meaning. None of the three was a gift.
Study tarot effectively with a documentalist’s method: learn the 78-card structure, the correspondences, and the practice habits that make symbols speak.
The Tarot Was a Card Game Before It Was a Mirror
The dates on those decks matter because they split the history in half. Around 1440, in the courts of northern Italy, card makers added a fifth suit of triumph cards, the trionfi (tree-ON-fee), to the ordinary four of cups, coins, swords, and batons. The Visconti-Sforza decks, painted for Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti about 1451, are the finest survivors of that moment. The Italian name tarocchi appears in documents from the 1510s, and the French turned it into tarot (TAH-roe). For two centuries the cards were shuffled at tables where fortunes were wagered, not told.
Divination arrived late and announced itself loudly. Étteilla (eh-TAY-ya), a self-taught Parisian who published under his own name spelled backward, Alliette, produced his first manual on reading playing cards in 1770 and a full tarot system by 1785. In 1789 he printed the first deck designed for divination, decorated with the Egyptian imagery he claimed as his source. Étteilla is “Alliette” spelled backward, a detail that should adjust how seriously you take his claims. He also sold his decks, and his pamphlets are the ancestors of every little booklet that comes in a tarot box today.
The nineteenth century made the cards a cipher. Éliphas Lévi (ay-LEE-fas lay-VEE), born Alphonse-Louis Constant in 1810, published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie in 1855 and 1856, declaring the tarot the “Book of Thoth,” a key to the Hebrew alphabet and the Tree of Life. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, refined that project in an internal document called Book T, assigning each of the thirty-six numbered Minor cards to a zodiacal decan and each Major card to a Hebrew letter. Then, in December 1909, Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith published the Rider-Waite-Smith deck through William Rider and Son, London. Smith gave every pip card a scene, and reading changed permanently: a beginner could now see a story without knowing a single correspondence. Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris followed with the Thoth deck, painted between 1941 and 1943, denser still.
Each layer made the cards richer and the study longer. That is why a method matters.
What the 78 Cards Actually Are
That history left the deck layered like sediment. Study works best when you dig in order.
The skeleton is simple. Seventy-eight cards break into twenty-two trumps, the Major Arcana, and fifty-six Minor cards. The fifty-six divide into four suits of fourteen: ace through ten, plus page, knight, queen, and king. The suits carry the oldest meanings: cups for the clergy and the heart, swords for the nobility and the intellect, coins for the merchant and the body, batons for the peasant and the will. The Golden Dawn later fixed the element assignments, cups to water, swords to air, coins to earth, batons to fire, and those mappings now sit under most modern decks.
The Major cards carry the heaviest freight. Lévi’s claim, though historically dubious, proved generative: if each trump corresponds to a Hebrew letter, the sequence becomes a written language. The Tower, associated in the Golden Dawn system with the letter Pe, which means “mouth,” is a useful example. Lightning strikes the tower, the figures fall, and the letter’s name is speech: the card reads as the shattering of words, a defeat brought on by what was said. None of that appears in the painted pasteboard of 1450. It was added, layer by layer, by readers who treated the cards as a system.
Even the order resisted settling. The Marseille deck places Justice at VIII and Strength at XI; the Rider-Waite-Smith swaps them. Neither is wrong. The sequence stabilized slowly, and the differences still tell you which tradition printed your cards.
The Working Method: What We Actually Do at the Table
The skeleton takes weeks to learn. Fluency takes about a year, and it comes from habits, not from booklets. Five exercises carry most of the work, and we return to them whenever a student asks where to start.
First, learn the trumps as a sequence, not as a list. The Fool begins at zero, the Magician acts at one, the High Priestess knows at two, the Empress grows at three. The order is the argument; the individual meanings are local color. Second, draw one card each morning and write one honest line about it at night. A month of this gives the deck a face. Third, read the pips in runs: the Ace through Ten of a single suit in one sitting. The Ace of Cups is the offered cup; the Ten, in Smith’s rendering, is the family under the rainbow. The suit’s whole argument passes between them.
Fourth, compare decks. Draw the same card from two decks and write down what the artists changed, because the differences are the tradition arguing with itself. Fifth, read aloud for another person. Two cards and a real question are enough; the discipline of connecting symbols to a life is what makes the craft stick.
We work on a bare table with a dark cloth under the deck, and we fold the cloth back over the cards when the reading ends. The gesture marks the boundary between the day and the question. The edges of a Marseille deck soften with years, and a well-read deck shuffles with a familiar click. That is not mystical. It is the consequence of a thousand sessions, and the consequence is where the craft lives.
Marseille, Rider-Waite-Smith, Thoth: Three Grammars
The method forces an early decision: whose grammar will you learn? The Marseille deck, standardized in the pattern printed by Jean Noblet in Paris around 1650, keeps the pips abstract, lattices of leaves and curves. Its grammar is number and suit, and the Five of Swords is a problem of five swords before it becomes anything else. The Marseille is the older, harder discipline, and it punishes readers who want the picture to do the work.
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck speaks in scenes. Smith’s Five of Swords shows a man gathering swords in a wind-scoured yard while two figures walk away, and the moral arrives as a picture. This is the standard for a reason: it makes the Minor Arcana legible at first glance. If you call Smith “Pixie,” you are in good company; her friends did. The Thoth deck, meanwhile, is a library that cannot be skimmed. Crowley and Harris packed every card with astrology, alchemy, qabalah, and geomancy, and it rewards study while punishing laziness.
We read the Marseille as the root and the Rider-Waite-Smith as the flowering; the Thoth is the most decorated of the three. None is truer. Choose the one whose grammar you can live inside for a year, and know what you are choosing. We have written a fuller comparison of the Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith systems elsewhere in the library.
What the Cards Are Not
Choosing a deck raises the old warnings, and most of them are younger than the cards. The rule that a deck must be a gift appears in twentieth-century folklore, not in any early manual; Étteilla built his business selling decks in Paris in the 1780s. Our three decks were all bought. The cards are paper. What changes is the reader.
Reversed readings, the practice of treating an upside-down card as blocked or internal energy, began with Étteilla’s school, which adopted it to double the vocabulary. It is a device, not a revelation, and entire traditions read without it. The idea that tarot is dangerous is older but no better founded: the cards were a noble pastime before they were an occult tool, and bishops who banned cards in the fifteenth century were banning gambling, not fortune-telling. The cards have no intention. We have never seen a deck do harm that a reader did not authorize.
One more frame deserves scrutiny. The “Fool’s Journey,” the modern habit of reading the twenty-two trumps as a hero’s autobiography, was popularized by Paul Foster Case in The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, published in 1947. Before the twentieth century, the trumps were a sequence for a game, not a biography. Knowing the frame is recent lets you choose it with open eyes instead of assuming it is ancient.
FAQ
How long does it take to learn tarot? The structure can be learned in a few weeks of daily study. Working fluency, the point where a card speaks before you open the book, takes about a year of regular practice.
Which deck should a beginner study? The Rider-Waite-Smith is the standard because its scenic pips make the Minor Arcana visible. The Marseille is the better second deck.
Do you need to be psychic to read tarot? No. Reading is a craft of correspondences and observation. The psychic framing is a nineteenth-century Romantic addition to a practice that had already worked for a century without it.
What is the difference between upright and reversed cards? Reversals signal blocked, internal, or delayed energy in the traditions that use them. Étteilla popularized them in the 1780s, and you can read perfectly well without them.
The Cards Repay the Structure You Bring to Them
We keep ours in a drawer, unwrapped, waiting for the next question. The method is the whole practice: learn the skeleton, keep the habit, read for someone. When you want to go deeper, the tarot guides in this library cover the decks, the spreads, and the history that a serious reader needs before the next shuffle.