Tarot By Heart

By Wren Thorne

Learning to read Tarot without having to look up each car's meaning is the hallmark of a professional reader. But, if you've struggled to memorize from Tarot guides, or wanted to make your readings more personal, Wren Thorne has condensed the wisdom of the cards into an easy to follow guide. By the end of this short, friendly volume, you will be able to read Tarot cards without a net, and know all the meanings by heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eastlake & Roanoke
• Release date: Aug 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9780990393726

Book preview

Introduction

Iasked for my first set of Tarot cards, because I'd read that you needed to be gifted them (something now I'm pretty sure is an urban myth, and I happily buy my own). My father obliged, and so I set myself down with a new Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck and a used copy of AE Waite's classic The Pictorial Key to the Tarot and tried really, really hard to memorize it (again, because I, somewhere, picked up the idea that was the thing to do, if I wanted to be a real Tarot reader).

Waite's dry, esoteric text, with its incomprehensible academic references to Thelema and obscure—and, occasionally, made-up, whole cloth—religious philosophies scrambled my mind. Not a word of it stuck (and I was a weird child who learned the presidents and VPs, in order, and all of Jabberwocky for fun). Still sure I needed a photographic memory of the official, sanctioned meaning of each card—which was not happening—I gave up, for the moment, anyway. I carefully wrapped my deck in a vintage scarf and put them on a shelf.

Over the years, I'd return to the shelf, pull out the deck and quickly decaying paperback and try again, only to become frustrated again. I'd put them away, then, half a year later or so, try again. It was a cycle. Try, give up. Try, give up.

Something about these cards, for lack of a good metaphor, called to me. I'm too much of a scientist-type to give credence to the idea that this calling was the result of my part-Romany heritage, but aside from the fact that the card images—the watercolor and ink drawings done by Pamela Coleman Smith—fascinated me, and I never tired of flipping through them, I can't figure out why I kept circling back to Tarot.

But I did. I went back, over and over again. I couldn't quit them.

I couldn't get them, either.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not, for the life of me, get down the choreography between what I saw in the cards and what books said the cards meant (over time, I collected other Tarot guides and broke down and looked things up as I went). There was a disconnect I couldn't place—or deny. It was like someone was calling me on the phone, but I kept answering the TV remote or the curling iron.

It took a serious bout of physical illness to break through. I had an intractable migraine and debilitating fatigue. In my misery, I found myself, again, flipping through my Tarot deck. I liked the feeling of the cards in my hands. There was something about the heft and smoothness that