Choosing Your Deck . . .

Choosing your Tarot deck  is a very personal process. There are hundreds of Tarot card decks on the market today and picking the one that is just right for you can seem daunting.

First you must know what you want to use your deck for. Is it to be your divination tool? Are you going to use it as a tool in meditation? Should you purchase two decks, one for divination and another for meditation, or will it serve both purposes?  Should you select the single deck or the book and deck set in the fancy box? Do you want to become an intuitive psychic reader or a card reader? And finally, what will your budget allow?

I would suggest that if you are at the beginning of your journey with the Tarot that you purchase only one deck to begin with. I would also suggest that you buy the single deck rather than the boxed set. Each deck comes with a small instruction book enclosed which will get you started.

In choosing your deck, keep in mind that all decks do not necessarily have detailed pictures on the Minor Arcana cards.  Some decks show only the suit and number

with identical backgrounds in the Minor Arcana. Six wands, four cups, eight swords, two pentacles etc. For the  reader this can be a barrier to the intuitive process.  This style of deck, I believe, is for those who do not read intuitively, but memorize the card meanings and do not want to go beyond that. This is fine, if that is what you want. One can still give a good reading using this method and, perhaps even become intuitive at some point. When a reader relies on memorization alone this is a card reading, but it is not an intuitive psychic reading.

For this reason it is important for you to see the deck or at least some of the cards in it, especially the Minor Arcana. Choosing your deck is very much an intuitive process and, the more cards you can see in any particular deck,  the easier that process is. Some shops will have on display decks which you can look at. Others will have a book you can look through that has some cards from each deck pictured in it.  By visiting a Psychic Fair in your area you will perhaps be able to talk to one or more of the psychics and, have them show you the deck or decks they use. The internet is also a good place to view the various decks.  In Parts III and IV of this course, I will be discussing the various decks in my collection. I hope that this will help in your quest for a Tarot card deck.

The structure of the Tarot . . .

Most modern day Tarot decks contain 78 cards, divided into two parts. The 22 card Major Arcana and the 56 card Minor Arcana.

The Minor Arcana is further divided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, each containing Ace to ten and four court cards, usually called Page, Knight, Queen, and King. There are variations, but these are the standard cards. 

Each of the suits have an over-all meaning. Wands stand for the physical aspects, Cups the emotional aspects, Swords the intellectual aspects and Pentacles the material aspects of life. When giving a reading this gives you, the reader, a key to what the cards are saying. 

Because so many of today's modern Tarot decks have been derived from the 1910 Rider-Waite deck by Arthur E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, I have used it as the standard in this course.

The titles of the twenty-two Major Arcana cards are printed on each card, but there can be variations from deck to deck. The most confusing difference is where number eight-Strength and number eleven-Justice are reversed, as in the deck of Marseilles.

Arthur E. Waite changed the number order based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. An interesting sequence appears in Waite's numerical system with XI Justice, XII The Hanged Man, and XII Death. For divination purposes it doesn't matter which order your particular deck follows. The numbering of any deck is up to the creator of that deck.  The oldest cards in existence, the Visconti and Visconti-Sforza decks have no numbers.

Although the Minor Arcana cards do not have their titles printed on them as the Major Arcana cards do, they do have titles.  These titles give an intuitive reader clues to the deeper meaning of any particular card. 

The Tarot Deck is very much open to the interpretation of the individual reader. The following chart is one I have devised from my years of study of the Tarot. It combines Muriel Hasbrouck's Birth Cycle Formula dates, with the signs of the zodiac, and the titles I have given to each individual sign. In the final two columns are my interpretations of the positive and negative qualities of each ten day period and their attributes.