Memorizing the Tarot Deck
A lot of people on the forums I haunt have been asking how to memorize the seventy-eight tarot cards.
This can be both very simple and complex. A lot of readers get more from putting their intuitive processes over the designations assigned to each card. Personally, I benefitted a lot more out of studying and memorizing the tarot deck.
This blog post is a companion to my video Memorizing the Tarot Deck at https://youtu.be/vJ7Kyner0o0
This is an overview of what has worked for me and what has worked for other readers that I know.
Spend Time with Your Tarot Cards
This is my first piece of advice. Everything else will expand on this one piece of advice. Spend time with your tarot cards.
As always, be kind and patient with yourself. Take the stress off of learning the tarot within a fixed amount of time, and you might just find yourself learning more quickly.
One trick that I learned from intuitive readers is to regularly look through your deck. Look at every card. Look at anything that stands out to you. Make sure that all seventy eight cards cross your line of sight from time to time.
Reading for yourself every day is an extremely helpful practice. This can be one card. There seems to be a sweet spot around a three card reading. I'm fond of a five-card horseshoe spread.
I agree with the common advice to keep your daily reading near that three card sweet spot. Find out what works for you.
I also put a 24 hour time limit on my day ahead reading. “What should I think about during the next 24 hours?”
Online Courses
You do not need to pay a lot of money for online tarot courses. I am going to give a lot of praise to a course that helped me below.
My general advice is to keep an eye on sites like Udemy for inexpensive courses. If they include any sort of quizzes, that is even better.
I gained an incredible boost after taking Sal Jade's Tarot Card Success – The Complete Tarot Reading Course. This is not sponsored in any way. If you keep an eye out then you can often get that course for under $20 USD, and sometimes even under $15 USD.
This course focuses on the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition and even the Rider-Waite-Smith deck itself. It also only contains upright designations for each card. That was more than enough to get me an excellent start. As of the time of this writing, it is a nine and a half hour long series.
Although I recommend this one, you can also find other courses at nearly any budget.
Sal's course quizzes you regularly, so I began taking notes. Writing those notes helped me pass the quizzes easily. I also began to notice how much I was memorizing the deck by simply writing the meanings down.
The parts of those notes relevant to my practice also became a first step in creating my own, personal study guide.
Make Your Own Study Guide
Creating your own study guide is a great way to spend time with your tarot cards while not actively reading them.
I suggest creating a first draft that you create either digitally or on an inexpensive notebook. Once you know what your own guide should look like, create a hand-written physical book. This can be similar to a book of shadows, if you like. This book becomes your own journey through tarot. It becomes the way that you teach yourself.
On a tangent, I advise having a comfortable pen for your finished study guide. I am a fan of felt-tip Sharpie brand ink pens. Find a pen that feels good to you and gets ink on the page without needing to press hard.
Read Books
Choose your books by reading reviews, blurbs, or even the free snippets at Amazon. I'm a nerd who prefers very nerdy and technical books. Tarot Deciphered by T. Susan Chang and M. M. Meleen is my most valued book on the subject.
Many other people may prefer more personal and intuitive books such as Mary K. Greer's Tarot for Yourself. Llewellyn and Red Wheel/Weiser are consistently publishing new books with modern perspectives.
Audible has some great books mixed in with many low-quality tarot selections, including Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees of Wisdom.
Podcasts have been made to look deeply into each card as well.
Other Interests
Don't forget that you're still the person you always have been. Take time for any other hobbies, interests, and people that were already in your life.
Continue being the same person you have always been. Read for yourself once a night. Enjoy some quiet time with your studies.
Spending time with tarot is ultimately the best way to commit the cards to memory. A little time every day will do a lot more to help you than a fast burnout.
Be kind to yourself. Be patient with yourself. Celebrate every small victory as it comes.
About Andrew
Andrew is a home recording enthusiast, former comedian and occasional amateur stage magician.
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