The vocabulary
Glossary
A short list of the words you will run into reading anything about tarot, with what they actually mean stripped of mystification. Plain definitions, no more weight on a word than the word can carry. Half of learning a practice is just learning its vocabulary, and tarot's vocabulary is smaller and friendlier than the books make it look.
These are grouped roughly the way you would meet them, the parts of the deck first, then the things you do with it, then the practices around the table, then the frames people use to talk about all of it. Read it straight through once, then come back when a word trips you up.
The parts of the deck
Before you can read a spread, you need names for what is in your hands. The seventy-eight cards divide and subdivide in a few simple ways, and these are the words for those divisions.
Arcana, the umbrella word for the cards themselves, from the Latin for secret or mystery. A deck has two arcana, Major and Minor, and most tarot writing uses the word mainly inside those two phrases. On its own it just means the cards, in their two great families.
Majors, also called the Major Arcana, the twenty-two named trump cards. They run from zero, the Fool, to twenty-one, the World, and they tend to come up when something foundational is at work. Birth, death, falling in love, the long crisis. Major weather.
Minors, or the Minor Arcana, the other fifty-six cards, split into four suits of fourteen. They describe the texture of ordinary life: the small worry, the meal shared, the work going well or badly. Most of any reading is minors. Most of any life is, too.
Court cards, the four figure cards in each suit, Page, Knight, Queen, King in most decks. They usually represent either a person in your life, a way of being you are moving through, or both at once. Reading them well takes longer than any other category, because whether the card is a person or a role is rarely obvious on first glance.
Pip cards, the numbered cards in each suit, Ace through Ten. The word comes from old playing-card vocabulary; a pip is one of the small marks on a regular card. In Marseille and Thoth decks the pips are mostly just suit symbols arranged on the card. In RWS-descended decks they are fully illustrated, which is what makes those decks easier to learn on.
A quick way to hold the whole deck in your head: majors are the weather, minors are the day, courts are the people you meet, pips are everything that happens to you.
What you do with the cards
These are the verbs and the shapes, the actual mechanics of sitting down and laying cards out.
- Pull, to draw a single card, usually for a question or as a card of the day. The most common everyday act of tarot.
- Draw, functionally the same word as pull, used a little more formally. Drawing three cards. Drawing from the top of the deck.
- Cut, to split the deck into two or three piles before drawing, to randomize the order after a shuffle. Some readers cut with the left hand, some let the querent cut, some skip it entirely. No consensus and no rule.
- Spread, the arrangement of cards on the table. Usually a set of positions, each with a question attached: past, present, future, or what i carry, what is in front of me, what wants to be released. The simplest spreads are three cards; the most famous larger one is the Celtic Cross, ten cards in a particular shape.
- Reversal, or a reversed card, a card that lands upside down in a spread. It is not bad. It is a state, the energy of the card turned inward, blocked, hidden, delayed, or asking a different question than the upright version would. Some readers use reversals, some do not. Both practices are honest.
The people at the table
Querent, the person being read for. Some readers use the word, some find it stiff. In writing it is useful for distinguishing the reader from the read, but at a table you would just say you, or the person across from me, or the friend who came in.
Significator, an older idea, a card chosen at the start of a reading to represent the querent, often a court card matched to their age and temperament. The Golden Dawn used significators heavily. Most modern readers skip them. Worth knowing as a word so you don't trip over it in old books.
The practices around the deck
A whole soft layer of ritual has grown up around the cards over the centuries. None of it is required. All of it is allowed, if it changes how you sit down to the work.
Intention, the question or focus you bring before the cards are drawn. Setting one is just naming, out loud or silently, what the reading is for. It is not a magical act. It is a way of focusing attention.
Deck care, the small practices that keep a deck personal and intact. Wrapping it in cloth, keeping it in a box, not letting others handle it, or, contrary to that whole tradition, letting everyone handle it and trusting the deck to weather its own use. Either is fine. The deck is paper.
Deck cleansing, running a new or much-used deck through smoke, moonlight, salt, or just a thorough shuffle, with the intention of resetting it. Some readers find it essential, some find it superstitious. The honest answer is that it is meaningful if it is meaningful to you, and not if it isn't.
Candle work, lighting a candle during a reading, sometimes choosing a color matched to the question. It does not change the cards. It changes the room, which changes the reader, which changes the reading.
Journaling, the daily or weekly practice of writing down the cards you pulled and what they brought up. The single most useful thing a beginner can do. The deck teaches itself through your own notes over months.
If you keep only one practice from this whole list, keep the journal. Date every entry. Six months of your own handwriting will teach you more than any book.
The decks you will hear named
RWS, Rider-Waite-Smith, the deck published in 1909 with art by Pamela Colman Smith on commission to Arthur Edward Waite, printed by the Rider Company. The world standard for beginner decks; most modern decks descend from its scene compositions.
Thoth, the deck designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Frieda Harris in the 1940s, published in 1969. Denser and more symbolically packed than the RWS, with its own devoted reading tradition.
Marseille, the older French printing tradition that solidified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its Minor cards are unillustrated pips. It is the deck most occult-revival decks descend from structurally, even when their art looks nothing like it.
The frames people read through
These are the bigger ideas, the lenses borrowed from psychology, from old occultism, from myth, that people lay over the cards to make sense of them.
The Fool's Journey, reading the twenty-two Majors in order, zero through twenty-one, as a single story arc of innocence, encounter, transformation, and return. A teaching frame more than a doctrine, and the easiest way to learn the Majors as a group instead of as twenty-two separate cards.
Archetypes, the recurring figures the tarot images draw on: the Mother, the Lover, the Hermit, the Trickster, the King, Death. The word comes from Jung and names the idea that certain patterns of being human show up across cultures and centuries. Tarot images are partly a catalog of them.
Shadow, the parts of the self you have not yet looked at directly. A shadow card in a spread is the one that names the thing being avoided. Also from Jung, and used loosely.
A Jungian frame, reading the cards through Carl Jung's ideas: archetypes, shadow, individuation, the collective unconscious. One of several theoretical frames, and the most common in serious modern tarot books.
Sephirot, the ten emanations on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. You will only meet this word in the deeper occult-revival material, where the Golden Dawn mapped each tarot card onto a sephirah or a path between them. You do not need it to read a spread. You need it to read the old esoteric books without getting lost.
The two words for the whole thing
The cards belong to a much older category, and there is one word the practice tends to keep at arm's length.
Divination, the broad family tarot belongs to: seeking insight through a symbolic system. An old word, including runes, the I Ching, scrying, augury, and many others. In Dylan's hands, and in most modern reflective practice, divination means description of the present rather than prediction of the future.
Fortune-telling, the more loaded word, and the reason it is fraught is that it implies prediction, the cards as a mechanism for knowing what will happen. Most working readers find this framing inaccurate and a little embarrassing.
The cards are better at describing the shape of where you are now than at telling you where you will be. The future is yours to make, in part, by the choices you make after the reading. The cards do not take that away from you.
These are the words. They will start to feel like ordinary language after a few months of reading, the way the vocabulary of any practice does, you stop noticing them and just use them. If you want to keep going, the beginner guide is the most useful next thread to pull. The rest of the work is just sitting with the deck, often, over a long stretch of time.