Meet the Deck
What a tarot deck actually is, how it is built, and why you already know how to read it.
Seventy-eight small doors
A tarot deck is a set of seventy-eight pictures arranged with a purpose. Twenty-two of them are the Major Arcana, the big themes of a life: beginnings, choices, endings, renewal. The other fifty-six are the Minor Arcana, the everyday textures of living, split into four suits.
Nobody reads a deck by memorising seventy-eight meanings. You read it the way you read a friend's face: you look, you notice, you let the picture speak first and the book second. Everything in this course builds on that one habit.
The four suits
Wands are fire: energy, will, creative heat. Cups are water: feeling, relationship, the inner tide. Swords are air: thought, truth, the cut of a decision. Pentacles are earth: body, money, home, the slow work of making things real.
When a reading leans heavily on one suit, that is a message in itself. Five cups on the table means the question lives in the heart, whatever the words of the question were.
Court cards, briefly
Each suit has a Page, Knight, Queen and King. Read them first as energies, not as people: a Page is learning, a Knight is moving, a Queen is holding, a King is deciding. Later you will meet them as people too; for now, energy is enough.
- Take your deck and separate the Major Arcana from the four suits. Spend two minutes with each pile, just looking.
- Pick one card that makes you uneasy and one that makes you smile. Write a sentence about each. That is your first reading.
Practice what you learned with a free daily card.
