How Tarot Works
What tarot actually is, what the 78 cards are for, and why a reading is a mirror rather than a fortune-teller.
A tarot deck is 78 cards in two families. The 22 Major Arcana mark the big, archetypal turning points of a life — birth, love, loss, awakening. The 56 Minor Arcana speak to everyday matters, split across four suits the way a regular playing deck is. Together they give the reading a vocabulary broad enough to describe almost any situation.
The most useful thing to understand up front is what tarot is not. It is not a machine that predicts a fixed future. A reading is a mirror: you bring a question or an open moment, the cards land in positions that frame it, and the images give you a new angle on what you already half-know. The value is in the reflection, not in a verdict.
So the skill you're building isn't memorizing 78 meanings — it's learning to read the conversation between the cards: how the suits mix, whether the Major Arcana show up, where a card confirms your hunch and where it gently argues with it. Everything else in these lessons serves that one skill.