You have learnt the cards and their meanings and you know how to lay a tarot spread but how do you actually give a tarot card reading for someone else? These tips and rules should help you conduct your first tarot reading! 1. Discuss beforehand with the client what you both expect to achieve from the reading. For you, this means explaining how the tarot works and what the cards will and will not predict. You need to express to your client that the tarot will predict what is most likely to happen in the future and why these events will happen. Tarot will also provide the best course of action to either encourage or discourage these future events. You will need to explain that a reading may not provide the client with the answers they are specifically searching for, but it will give them guidance in an area of their life that they need at that time. You need to advise them that the cards may not answer a question at all! The client is simply not to know the future at that time. You will also need to make your client aware that both negative as well as positive information may be communicated through the cards and they have to be comfortable with that before proceeding with the reading. 2. When it comes to the reading, decide what tarot spread you will use. Will it be a Celtic cross or something more specific to the interpretation of what...

There are lots of arguments about the Minor Tarot Deck and some readers ignore them, preferring only to use the Major cards. Certainly the Major cards appear to be more dramatic, focused, specific and emphatic but when a reading includes the Minor cards this heightens the meanings of the Major cards, putting them into the right perspective. Without the Minor cards a reading can easily be too overwhelming, plunging the questioner into a major soap opera. Correctly used, the Minor cards add vital light and shade, touches of everyday reality and also many small but vital features not touched on or brushed over by the big-hitting Major deck. For beginners though, the 56 Minor cards can be a daunting prospect to learn and to read, without referring to a crib sheet, so here is a flying start. The 21 Major cards are unusual and their main aspects quickly remembered. Once you have grown used to these cards, look again at the cards from 1 (The Magician) to 10 (The Wheel of Fortune). The Fool stands apart and cards 11 through 21 represent more evolved states. The 10 human conditions which are represented in the first half of the Major deck are repeated in each of the four suits pip cards (which are of course 1 to 10). Thus the Magician is represented by each Ace, the High Priestess by each 2, the Empress by each 3 etc. When you know the Major cards 1 to 10, you also know 40...