I got my first Tarot deck in 1975, when I was 13. I remember one winter day wandering around Crown Center, in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, with my friend Vanessa: a multilevel mall, lots of glass and blond wood. As was our teenage wont, we ran around up-escalator and down like mad things, coming to rest by a card shop. A boutiquey place, hardly more than a stall, it mostly sold playing cards. But it also sold Tarot cards, for which I had been shopping.
Vanessa had her own cards: the Morgan-Greer deck, a commercially available deck that had been illustrated by a friend of her mother's. I really liked her cards, but all the shop had was the Marseilles deck, so that was what I bought. I approached the clerk fearfully, as if I could be prosecuted for buying the Tarot. But the person - I can't remember if it was a man or woman - just looked at me, curiously, kindly enough. I paid my money, $12 or $14, a lot for me. Then I possessed the Tarot.
In a nearby bookshop, I paged through the two books on Tarot they had. I finally settled on A.E. Waite's book, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, impressed by its pictures and scholarly tone.
I took my Tarot deck home, played with it a bit, doing readings mostly for myself. But I always had to have my book at my side. I became disgusted by my lack of retention of the card meanings, and one day perhaps six months later - it was summer by then - I laid out all the cards on my bedspread and, taking up the book, looked at each card one by one and recited their meanings, right side up and reversed, until I had them by heart. Much to my dismay, I didn't remember all the meanings the next time around. But I practiced and did readings, trying to avoid looking at the book as much as possible, until I could read without the book. Much more impressive to an audience.
A few years later, when I was in high school, I actually found a Rider-Waite deck, in a seamy little store down in Westport, the most self-consciously hip district of Kansas City. Reading with them was a great relief. It's a lot easier to learn cards when your deck and book match.
I was lucky in my choice of deck and book. The Rider-Waite deck is, I think, the best deck for a beginner who wants to learn the true Tarot. At the time of the deck's creation, in the first decade of this century, A.E. Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn, thoroughly researched all existing decks he could find. He worked out a Tarot cleanly based on Western occult symbolism, leaving aside personal tics and preferences more than most Tarot designers since. Most other decks now extant are based on Waite's work.
Waite's deck does have a Judeo-Christian ceremonial magick bias. To me, this is a drawback, because I'm a witch. On the other hand, the symbolism has the virtue of internal logic. In Waite's Tarot, the symbolic meaning of the card designs is most important, decorativeness secondary, and a lily one place means the same thing as a lily somewhere else. To me, this is a big plus, and not one found in every Tarot deck.
Also, Waite's symbolism has the virtue of being familiar. Like it or not, the culture surrounding us in the United States is a Western, Christian one, and if you, like me, were raised in it, you will have sucked in Western symbolism. That being true, you'll apprehend the symbolism of Waite's deck more easily than, say, a Tantric-oriented or Native American-oriented deck, unless you've studied those symbol sets. Waite's deck isn't heavy-handedly Christian, or I wouldn't recommend it.
Plus, Waite's deck is a version of the true Tarot, the Tarot that came to us from medieval Europe, without layers of additional meaning laid on top. I deplore European culture's abuses as much as anyone, but one of the points of witchcraft for me is to dig up some of its hidden strengths. If you're an Anglo, the traditional Tarot has the symbolism your divining ancestors came up with. Of all the decks now bouncing around, Waite's is one of the ones that stays closest to the Tarot heritage.
That's not to say it's the one I use. I read with two decks, one the Morgan-Greer deck, which is based on the Rider-Waite deck but which has pictures more like illustrations. (Smith's designs are a little wooden, and the standard Rider-Waite coloring is bland, though I have seen a brighter recolored version.) My other deck is the Secret Dakini Oracle, which is not Tarot at all but is based on Tantric symbolism. The Dakini Oracle is gorgeous, has a sense of humor and gives me readings that are quite spiritual in nature - which is not always what I'm looking for.
I recommend the Rider-Waite deck to beginners, though I don't use it myself, because it's the best deck I've found to learn standard Tarot symbolism. For myself, I'm glad I started out with it, learned the basics and then went on to follow my taste.
For you - you know best how you learn. If your interest holds better if you follow your taste from the first, by all means do so. Let your instincts and intuition guide you in choosing a deck. When you deck-hunt, look at several decks, and flip through all the cards. Color and drawing style are important, as well as symbolism. Choose the deck that feels right.
If you really mean to use the Tarot, your deck choice is a serious commitment, so don't choose too quickly. I had a friend who bought the Aleister Crowley deck, only to have a dream in which the Great Beast himself visited her, scaring her out of her wits. She got rid of the deck by taking a long walk and depositing the cards one by one in separate dumpsters. She was convinced the deck was evil, and she's never read Tarot since. Lots of other people, most of whom aren't evil, love the Crowley deck, and that's their choice - my own complaint is that its colors are muddy. Suffice to say deck choice is a very personal thing.
If you plan to do much Tarot reading, you will want to get a full book, not just the pamphlet that comes with your deck. An actual book will give you a full list of card interpretations, plus a few layouts, at length, with the author's advice interleaved, as opposed to a pamphlet's telegraphic style.
Waite's book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot is one of the best books on Tarot I've read. (At least one other prominent Tarot book steals much of its text from his.) It provides a good history of the Tarot, without any historical mystification. It also gives the most thorough list of meanings I've seen for the Major Arcana (the 22 symbolic cards, such as The Fool) and the Minor Arcana (the 56 cards in the suits pentacles, wands, cups and swords), both right side up and reversed. These meanings aren't just Waite's preference but are the result of research into the interpretations of the occultists and fortune-tellers of his day.
In Waite's book, however, unless you go for that kind of thing, you have to skip a lot of occult miasma and infighting of this type: "Grand Orient says truly that the Hierophant is the power of the keys, exoteric orthodox doctrine, and the outer side of the life which leads to the doctrine; but he is certainly not the prince of occult doctrine, as another commentator has suggested. He is rather the summa totius theologiae, when it has passed into the utmost rigidity of expression." And the expository style of 1910 takes getting used to. But Waite's book, when avoiding high-flown occult theory-dropping, clearly limns the Tarot.
One caveat: As I mentioned, it's a lot easier to learn if your deck matches your book. If you don't choose the Waite deck, and you can find a good book whose illustrations match your deck, get that book.
Once you've learned the meanings of the cards themselves, you might check out a book with a more personal approach, Mary K. Greer's Tarot for Your Self. A workbook, Tarot for Your Self gives you a lot of different techniques for laying out the cards, working with them in a journal and using them to figure out your life. It encourages you to create your own spreads and might embolden you to take the cards and make them your own, where Waite's tone is more: "These are the mystical keys of the Universe." To work with the Tarot effectively you must have a relationship with the cards that, while respectful, is also intimate.
Another thing I did, which I'd recommend to you, was to take a class. I wish I'd done it sooner. The major things the class taught me were, first, to really look at the cards, and, second, to trust my own interpretations.
What I mean by its teaching me to look at the cards is that I'd been using the cards as mnemonic devices, links to the meanings I had in my memory. But the designs of the cards themselves contain meanings. It's worthwhile to spend some time trying to interpret the cards from their designs themselves, rather than from your books. This may sound self-evident, but it was a revelation to me.
Trusting my own interpretations was another vital step for me. It's what made me into a real card-reader, rather than someone who looked up card meanings, whether in a book or in my head. My own interpretations had of course always seeped into my readings - how else? But after a reading, I'd go back and check card meanings against the book, and if there was a discrepancy worry that I'd told the querent the wrong thing.
Card reading, however, like any divination, is a psychic activity. In my experience, the true thing you need to tell the questioner about a card is the thing that springs into your mind as soon as you focus on that card. It can be the opposite of every other interpretation you've ever given that card (though it probably won't be) and still be right. That springing of interpretation is your psychic sense at work.
This psychic sense is what allows you to read for people without knowing what their questions are. For a long time, I've read in this fashion - asking the questioner to frame a query in mind before shuffling but not tell me that query. It works. I think it works better than if the questioner tells me the question. If I don't know the question, I'm far less likely to put my own logical gloss on the card layout, to give the usual advice for the given situation. Instead, I have to use my psychic sense.
In other words, the less you know of a question, or of a questioner, the more your psychic sense does the work of interpretation rather than your conscious mind. This pattern is why many Tarot books tell you that you shouldn't read for yourself or your friends. I often read for myself and my friends, but to do so well, I need to lean over backward to keep my mind open to psychic information, rather than letting what I thought about the subject before I laid out the reading take over.
I recommend a class for any beginning Tarot reader because it will help balance out your own native tendencies, which come to the fore when you're left alone with the cards and a book. Me, I have three planets in Virgo, and as you see, left to my own devices, I stuck rigidly to my book. The suggestions of my teacher helped me loosen up and draw on my psychic side. Conversely, if you're not very disciplined, a teacher will incite you to study and practice.
If you're considering taking a class, if possible check out the person teaching it first and make sure you can learn from him or her. If you feel a violent antipathy for the teacher from first sight, you'd better take another class.
However, you can learn things from a lot of people, and you can't expect your Tarot teacher to be an Ascended Master. My own Tarot teacher, though knowledgeable, was pretty weird. I found out many years later that ol' Vernon had had a crush on me and was driving around town with his lights off following me from place to place. I learned a lot about the cards from him nonetheless.
Now, of course, I'm rich and famous from my mastery of the cards. Think again! I don't read for money; I find it taxing (pun or no pun), and not taking money lets me say "No" even if the would-be querent has the price of admission in hand. I wouldn't even say I'm a Tarot expert; I certainly haven't read every Tarot book printed, or taken every Tarot class. I do think I'm a good reader, because my read-ees have told me so.
But the Tarot has enriched me. Every time I unwrap the silk from my cards, I learn something. The Tarot challenges me, on occasion humbles me and rarely reassures me just because I want reassurance. It has helped me and those I've read for make innumerable decisions, important and less so (like, should I go to that party?). The Tarot is what first connected me to my psychic sense, for which I'm more than grateful.
And the Tarot, in itself, is beautiful: a tapestry of symbols, a book in which, after you've read it, you can reshuffle the pages and read it once more, to find a new story.
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