***Read Tarot without being Psychic

You don't have to be psychic to read Tarot and get accurate answers to questions! You can do this just as you are. Well, there are some things to learn...

In 1981 or so I listened to a professor's lectures on 'Consistent Violators of the Laws of Random Distribution.' 'The Laws of Random Distribution' is a lifetime interest of mine. In these lectures, he mentioned Tarot as one of five known consistent violators. It was the only violator one could experiment with at home. So I went out and bought me a deck, luckily the Rider Waite one. I did his experiment, and of course got the same result. It was a question about the life history of the cards themselves, and seven cards would be more likely to appear than their random chances called for.

Obviously, there is something unique about these cards. I had never heard of them before these lectures, but decided to take them up as a hobby because, as a court reporter, all the time I had for anything fun was a few minutes here and there.

I ended up buying a dozen books on the meanings of Tarot before I decided the books are f.o.s. Then I begged my way into attending other people's readings with some psychics (whom I had never met before). I discovered that these professionals did not read the cards per se: They used the colors, or got an idea from just one of the cards. They mostly ignored them. (One psychic used the Gypsy Witch deck, which has the meanings printed on them.) These were people who had clients whom they pleased. When I asked them how they read the cards, they each answered 'I listen to the spirits. You do cards. Don't you hear the spirits?' Uh, no...

This is how I ended up teaching myself to read Tarot. Fortuitously, the deck I purchased when I finally found where to buy Tarot was the Rider Waite one. Also fortunately, one of the books I randomly purchased was Eden Gray's The Tarot. It had accurate detailed information on the 22 Major Arcanae, one of the suits of Tarot. It had fairly accurate beginning meanings for the remainder of the suits, meanings which reflected the illustrations on the cards. (I learned to ignore the reversed meanings as needlessly redundant.) Her book was somewhere to start.

Using no psychic talent that I knew of, I asked questions I knew the answers to, employing the entire deck for each answer, 13 cards at a time—because 13 is equally divisible by 78 cards. The reason I wanted to use the entire deck each time was, of course, to get meanings equally for each of the cards. The reason I asked questions I knew the answers to was to be able to gauge how accurate my reading of the cards was; and also because 'you can't solve an unknown with an unknown,' a concept we learn in algebra even if we learn no algebra. I kept notebooks on each of these spreads for more than ten years. Gradually, I learned not only the cards' meanings, but, more importantly, meanings for combinations of cards. My court reporting background led me to adopt verbatim phrases for these combinations. I learned some other practical things,too, like what inquiries were more compatible with the Tarot process, and what questions not to ask...like 'when?'

Expanding the 11-card layout of the traditional Celtic Cross was fortuitous too: It created three divisions of the spread, the third one being the last card turning into three cards. I discovered the three divisions read as three sentences that repeat and support one another to the degree the information in them is correct! (The first division is the first cross, the 'Celtic Cross,' of seven cards; the second is three cards, one above the other, referred to traditionally as 'the tower,' not to be confused with the Tarot card of that name.) I NOW HAVE A DIVINATION TOOL THAT REFLECTS ITS OWN ACCURACY!

A tool that answers questions (a divination tool) that indicates how accurate the information in the answer is, that is based on logical thinking: This is monumental.

You can do the same thing. You can buy a Rider Waite Tarot deck, study each illustration that you relate to (temporarily disregarding the ones that you don't connect with) and apply two or three of those cards to a subject or question you have in mind. You will eventually get your personal individual meanings for combinations of cards well enough to have Tarot adventures with your own mind. Another article, 'Read Tarot and Develop Insight, Intuition and Creative Abilities—Yes, YOU Can, Here's How' is a sister article to this one: It gives specifics on the process of applying two cards to a given question, the process that I speak of here.

Reading cards for other people is another set of skills you can acquire: That is another article, too, later.

You don't have to be a psychic to read Tarot. Tarot is, or can be, a logic based system any person can learn who can think in terms of themes and patterns.

But of course you don't have to reinvent the wheel, you can consult a genius like me to learn the meanings I discovered.