I was wondering if anyone has something that they could say about the different levels of tarot cards. For example, some reviews of cards state that they are good for beginners. What cards do you use for readings? Are they for beginners? Have you used them long? If so, did you at some point transission from one "beginner" deck to an "advanced" deck? I am wondering as I am looking for a more advanced deck but have not found one that "speaks" to me. Any words of advice?

-EG

EAch card deck speaks to each person differently .. I would recoment anyone who is interested to just go see what is out there... look them over see what pictures interest you.  There is a deck out there that just makes me feel blaa I cant htink of the name but it has all professor looking men on it ... very stuffy ...

Reider deck is a good one for beginners ... but thats up to the individual ..

I grew up in a gypsy style home I suppose ... very free spirited !

I use to play with a deck of cards and would do like some children do magic tricks ..I would read everyones future .. or predict something ..it was a family fun thing.. I woiuld put on a bandana on my head and a lot of different scarfs ....I would tye them around my waiste and dance like a belly dance .. I entertained my famlily at family events with my made up plays and dances............and my card "tricks"
when I was about 8 or 9 they made me stop said I was getting to old to believe in this stuff .. but i would secretly do this for my best friend and a few older ladies in the neighborhood ...    I think it was because of the energy I got from the entertainment and the cards I would play with.... that deck of cards my grandmother kept all these years! ..........

so go out look around see whats out there see what talks to you.  

If you want to read like your defining stuff from a dictionary I dont know how to help you ..it just dont work that way for me.

Hi Eaglewind,

Your question is a very good one. I think Deb's reply was excellent. I just thought I would add a way that I moved on to more complex decks (although I totally love Rider-Waite & even though it's often thought of as a good "beginner" deck I think it's far more complex than it looks - several layers on meaning in the imagery & special relationships between Major Arcana cards etc...)

I found that when I connected to a more complex deck it always strongly corresponded to something I was interested in - in my personal life. For instance, I was deep into studying Jung's archetypes & theories on dreams & personality types & I fell in love with the Jungian Tarot deck.

I started seriously studying magick & the occult & fell in love first with Aleister Crowley's writings (Not just his esoteric writings either. I discovered that "The most wicked man in the world" wrote some of the most beautiful love poems I've ever read!) So I purchased the Thoth deck.

I love art history. I am attracted to the period & style of Art Noveau. And I really love the Art Noveau tarot. Another tarot deck that I am going to purchase is the Tarot of Prague. It's an amazing deck. The imagery is very fairy tale-ish & I adore fairy tales.

For my birthday last month I received a new deck which I had never heard of, Tarot of the Old Path. Although I am not Wiccan but I am kind of pagan, the cards speak to me for 2 reasons I think. One is that the artwork is beautiful & also look "fairy tale" inspired. Another reason is that herbs & flowers are prominent on many of the cards & I love the language of plants, trees & flowers. Oh & the artists incorporated a silver metallic sparkle (usually in the eyes) on several cards. So that when looking at the characters depicted on the cards, they magically sparkle. It makes one feel mysteriously connected to the cards. It's really cool!

So I feel that if you can find a Tarot deck which relate to your personal interests. These decks will more than likely resonate with you deeply on several levels. Also, you will not tire of them because you are attracted to them for several reasons.

I do not advise purchasing a deck to use for readings simply because the artwork is beautiful. I have done this in the past myself & often found that I never really connected with the deck & use them infrequently unless a Querent specifically asks for them.

Crowley's Thoth deck was intimidating at first but this made me want to use it more & more because they challenge me. I wish to learn what they hide from me. It's actually a very playful deck imho even though it looks dark - this is not entirely true. However, Crowley's Thoth deck is profound. I still find it speaking to me & still discover new meanings & see the cards in a different light each time I read from them. For this deck I do highly recommend getting at least 1 good book which will explain Crowley's vision & foundation for this very special deck. A good resource Don Lilo Duquette's, Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth.

On a side note, all the Marseilles Tarot decks I have touched, freak me out. I don't know what it is about these decks that I find repulsive but I cannot tolerate looking at them for very long. They honestly make me ill. I also cannot stand The Mother Peace deck. I don't care for cards which almost entirely exclude a whole sex? It's all women & the deck bored me. Yet my friend LOVES this deck!

The Italian decks on the other hand I absolutely adore. I just recently found an Italian deck & a French deck which are smaller than regular Tarot cards & the art work was charming. I kept going back to them in the store & was even ging to attempt to open a pack up to get a better feel for them. Then I realized that a store camera was directly over head & decided not to do it!

I used regular playing cards in the beginning for many years. Then I purchased Rider-Waite. I had an old looking Italian deck from Italy which had been a gift.  I cannot recall their name. Those disappeared after a Halloween college party! Next I purchased The Jungian Deck. Then The Chinese Tarot deck - extremely beautiful - but I don't connect with them for readings. I do use some of the cards as a meditation tool. In my disappointment I found myself attracted to the Art Noveau deck which I do use in readings. Then a couple of years ago I purchased Thoth. I hadn't bought any new for years & years. Then last month when I was gifted with Tarot of the Old Path. Although I adore this deck, it's fairy tale quality made me think of the Prague deck which I have been eyeing for a year now. So they will be my next deck.

I think when to buy a new deck it depends on how much money you wish to spend & then what happens when you begin reading with the new deck. Another thing I do is I don't immediately read any literature on the deck. Not even with Thoth. I personally find it's best to shuffle the deck over & over. Do mini-practice readings. Pick out your favorite cards. Meditate on a few of them. Find the cards which you don't care for so much or those which you feel challenged by. Meditate on those too. Keep touching them & *feeling* them intuitively before reading any "official" interpretations. Just a suggestion.

Have fun finding your next deck!

Ciao,

Paulette

WARNING VERY LONG POST - you will soon get to know me and know I like to write PhD theses for answers!

As a reader/collector I like to buy anything unusual. I have the RW (well, the Universal Waite, which is a nicer version of the same artwork), Crowley Thoth and 1JJ Swiss, which covers all bases regarding the different types of imagery. Of these, far and away the best one for beginners is the Rider Waite, since the artwork is clear and the whole deck is pictorial, as opposed to the intensity of Crowley's imagery and the opacity of the traditional pip cards.

There are several "orbits" around the Rider-Waite deck which is the main gist of my article here, and then I'll suggest a way of going deeper into generating the meanings of cards in non-standard imagery decks.

I have several RW "clones", such as the Morgan Greer and the Sharman Caselli. The former is the one I found had a pulse as I got it out of the box; the latter is the one I would use with newcomers to the tarot because it has the most benign imagery (even Death is standing against a cloudless blue sky). I bought the latter for my counsellor as a thank you present for getting me out of my almost suicidal depression. Donaldson's Dragon deck is also nice though I haven't used it much. I use the Morgan-Greer when I read on eBay.

Moving into the next orbit around RW are the Goddess deck (a curious mixture of a modern interpretation of the Major Arcana, fairly standard RW imagery for the "pip" cards and Prince/Princess/King/Queen Courts, with of course the Princess and Queen superseding the Prince and King since it is a goddess based deck), the Archeon (which is intense and dreamy and not dissimilar to the imagery used in the Icewind Dale computer games, which is why I fell instantly in love with it despite it having a wicked reputation and actually becoming so charged for one person that it started to burn their spreadcloth) and the Druidcraft (the best traditional pagan-inspired deck I've seen yet; I love the Cernunnos card but it is full of naked men, which is a bit offputting to me). The Tarot Nova I buy when I want to buy people a tarot present - it's cheap (£3.50 for the mini version, £6 for the standard size) and the pictures look like something you'd get on notepaper, which is good for people who don't "do" the occulty stuff.

Another ring out would be theme decks. I don't have any of these since I am into "unusual" decks rather than wanting any of the Shakespeare, King Arthur, Egyptian etc etc decks on offer. They all seem kind of like RW dress-up that Tarot Passages complains about. I'd like to do my own Shakespeare Tarot, in fact, being a big fan of the Bard, but I'd need to read his plays and their stories from cover to cover to do this, so I'd need a spare century or two. Maybe in my next life! Also I'm disappointed at the lack of any genuinely Eastern European decks (OK there is the Tarot of Prague, but that was more German/Austrian-influenced), maybe that should be my next project as it would be easier to accomplish than Shakespeare. A lot of modern Eastern European figurative art - or even Socialist Realist art - would make a good modern tarot deck, rather than just having the King of Wands dressed up as a Russian tsar.

Moving out another ring, there are the cards that keep the RW meanings but have significantly different artwork, like most of the Lo Scarabeo output. Ironically the first deck I bought was the Avalon tarot, which is an Italian comic-book artist's interpretation of the Morte D'Arthur and almost as bad as the Druidcraft for bare breasts (though no naked men this time). I went through it card-by-card and made a political oracle deck out of it for reading for my friends as they stood for election in May. Also there are lovely art decks like the Fairytale Tarot, Tarot of the Secret Forest and The Golden Tarot of Klimt, which I use when I need to get inspiration from the pictures rather than the standard meanings.

Another step out would be the decks that change the suit names. Again I'm not keen on these; I do mostly read by intuition and artwork, but maybe this is something for later when I've mastered the traditional suits.

I am working on my own deck using Terry Donaldson's Step-By-Step tarot: I'm looking at the meanings he gives for the cards, and then writing down the first lyric or verse or quotable quote that springs to mind; and then drawing a picture in the style of my own political comics for that quote. (Concentrating on the Minors/Courts as I find them the more interesting part of the tarot). OK, they involve politics, but it's a personal deck as it weaves my own life into some of the cards. For the Majors I'll be doing photo collages, already have an ace idea for Strength - the picture of that guy on Tianenmen Square facing down a tank...classic image.

Unless people work well with imagery already or have used oracles before, I would suggest beginners buy a Morgan-Greer or Rider-Waite and practice with it. However, I also recommend Wilma Carroll's method, which was when she got frustrated with the tarot books on the market (or lack thereof), she just put them away and looked at the cards themselves and came up, not necessarily with her own meanings, but with a kind of intuitive-based system that meant that the imagery itself spoke to her. Most decks on the market use Rider-Waite meanings, but more and more people are stepping away from the traditional imagery and using scenes from plays, stories, mythology and in my case modern life (and I want to do a deck based on my other fictional comic books as well - I'm gonna be very very busy!!!), which means that WC's method (unfortunate initials) is going to become more important as a method of learning tarot.

I practice looking at the images in a deck by "dowsing" for lost objects: what you do is lay out cards for the four compass points N E S W, and then a middle row (Situation, Advice, Solution, Outcome): I do it with a non-standard deck and the image at each compass point tells me what is there already, and the middle row tells me how to go about finding the object in question. Last night I used the Fairytale tarot: I drew a card with fire on it for North, where I had a box of matches. South was a Russian prince, where I had several books on the Soviet Union, Stalin, etc. East was a picture of the Frog Princess - it's a bit of a long story that one, suffice to say I had a dream about it and my bed is in the east - and in the west was a picture of a faery ball - just before I laid the cards out I had been meditating on some of my comics, which showed me at a Conservative party drinks party at conference last year, and the book containing them was in the west. For the Solution, the card I pulled was the Magician - I eventually found what I was looking for underneath a book about Aleister Crowley (my room is a complete mess, as you might have gathered). So focussing on the imagery I was able to expand the meanings of the cards from their general RW-style keywords; that's really my advice to a beginner once they have gone as far as they can go with the basic RW cards and meanings.

NB - don't try the above trick with Crowley-Thoth, it doesn't work. I'm shelving that deck for the moment until I can find a decent book that will explore that deck more thoroughly, though I love Frieda Harris' court cards and am plagiarising some of the artwork style for my own personal deck!!!

I don't own my own cards yet, as I'm still having trouble finding a shop in my city which sells this kind of stuff, but I've always wanted cards with similar illustration styles to those of the trading card game Magic: The Gathering.  I love the gritty, realistic, detailed style of the artwork, with the fantasy touches to it.  A fairly good example of the more recent illustrations is here



Also, I've always had an affinity with Asia.  Perhaps some manga styled illustrations or a deck from Asia would resonate more closely with me.