Transcription
Stop memorizing other people's tarot card meanings. Instead, do this. You're about to learn all 78 tarot cards in just two techniques.
There are so many books and videos and resources out there that will give you all sorts of tarot card meanings, including my new book. But that's not enough to give a solid reading. You need to know why the cards mean what they mean. And in this video, you're going to learn the deeper meanings, not through memorizing other people's tarot card meanings, but through understanding the inner system of tarot. What makes it not just a superstitious tool of fortune-telling, but a full psychospiritual technology of personal inquiry, mystical understanding, and spiritual growth.
By the end of this video, you're going to have everything you need to pull a card and really know the message, whether you're reading for yourself or for others. So get your notebook out because we're starting now to learn these two techniques that will teach you the entire tarot deck.
You need to understand the structure of the tarot. So if you don't know yet, the tarot is divided into two sections: the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana, that means greater secrets, and the Minor Arcana, meaning lesser secrets. To summarize a lot of esoteric material, the Major Arcana essentially show us the underlying spiritual shifts and patterns underlying our daily experience. The Minor Arcana show us how these patterns manifest in our daily lives. With 78 total cards, 56 cards are in the Minor Arcana and 22 cards are in the Major Arcana. You're going to learn a technique to easily uncover the meanings of all 56 Minor Arcana, and you're going to learn a second technique to easily uncover the meanings of the 22 Major Arcana.
Let's start with the Minor Arcana. How do you read the Minor Arcana? I'm going to teach you the suit symbol method. To use this method, you're going to need to know a little bit about the four elements of the tarot. The Minor Arcana is divided into four suits. I'm going to teach you the suit symbol technique so you understand the system that is the Minor Arcana of the tarot. You'll need to know a little bit about the four elements to use this technique, so let's go through them now.
Our earliest records of the four elements stem from a Greek philosopher mystic named Empedocles. He essentially got enlightened by laying down very still in a cave, kind of like yoga, and then started telling people all about these four elements. Esoterically, the four elements symbolize four worlds of emanation of reality and teach us how the universe is created and destroyed, but that's for another video. In the tarot, they represent four common areas of questioning of personal inquiry. By the way, you can download this for free at taromysticismacademy.com/ebooks. I have a bunch of free guides that will coincide with this video and some of my other free videos. I will link that in the description below.
So once you've downloaded that, let's look at our four suits. The first suit is the suit of Wands, and it represents fire. Fire represents your career, your ambitions, your creativity, your desire, and mostly your higher purpose, what you're meant here to do. The suit of Cups represents water, which symbolizes relationships, emotions, intuition, family, love. The suit of Swords represents the element of air, which represents our mind, our ego, society, our sense of ourselves, but also conflict. The suit of Pentacles or discs or coins, as it is in other decks, represents the element of Earth, which shows us our materiality, our bodies, our money, our stuff, our wealth, the physical world.
So to summarize, the four elements show us: How do we get paid? How do we get laid? How do we stay unafraid? And how do we enjoy life's parade? That's all you need to know to start reading the Minor Arcana of the tarot. This is called the suit symbol method. It involves combining the meaning of the suit and its corresponding element with the scene of the card. This works perfectly with Rider-Waite-Smith based tarot decks, which is what 95% of today's tarot decks are based off of, but it works with other traditions too. And if you want more on the RWS deck, y'all know I have many videos on that.
All you have to know to use the suit symbol method is to remember that the suit symbol represents the element, symbolizing all that that element is connected to. To understand the meaning of the card, you look at the relationship between the suit symbol and the scene. This gives you the meaning. Let's take the Eight of Swords for example. If we know that the suit of Swords represents the mind, then we can see these swords as representing aspects of this person's mind. We see that this woman is bound and blindfolded right in the middle of these swords. She is literally trapped by these swords. You could say that she is trapped by her own mind. See how easy it is?
Using the same technique for the Five of Cups, we notice somebody is looking downwards at three cups that are spilled and two cups standing up behind him. If we know that cups represent emotions and relationships, this could represent literal relationships that are done. Relationships that have been spilt could represent a card of loss, grieving, mourning, or breakup.
So that technique covers the numbered cards of the Minor Arcana, but what about the court cards? If you have any struggle reading the court cards, pay attention because this is going to make it so easy. We're going to use the same suit symbol method. All you have to do is remember that the suit symbol represents the element and all that it's connected to, and combine it with the scene of the card. Let's look at the Page of Swords for example. We have this youth that looks like they're standing on a hill, and it's almost like they're looking back and forth, or they're readying themselves for something. What do we want to do first? Notice the suit symbol. We have a sword. What does a sword represent? Ego, conflict, thought, ideas. Look how they're holding it. They're holding it with a readiness, a readiness to fight. They are wielding their ego. They are wielding their capacity for conflict. They are wielding their ideas, and they're searching for something. This is somebody who's excited to get their ideas out into the world, excited to learn, but also unafraid of conflict. All of that I just got from combining the suit symbol with the scene.
By the way, I have an entire free mini-course on this method that you can access here or by clicking a link in the description that goes through all the cards using the suit symbol method.
So now that you know how to read the Minor Arcana, let's move on to the Major Arcana. What most people don't understand about the Major Arcana cards is what they really represent. Tarot is a contemporary expression of a unique synthesis of various spiritual and mystical traditions, including Hermeticism, Alchemy, Neoplatonism, and more. Many of these Western esoteric traditions stem from a general philosophy of emanation. The idea was essentially God, the Divine, the ultimate truth, the absolute. Nothing but the truth, so help me God, creates, becomes, or is the world through emanation, meaning that God or the Divine sort of reflects or pours itself beyond itself into lower and lower manifestations of itself. This started way back with Plato and probably even before him, but this YouTube video is not a history class.
So what does this have to do with tarot? Well, every single Major Arcana card is an expression of emanation. It expresses how the Divine becomes the material. It expresses the very popular Hermetic axiom, "As Above, So Below." For more on Hermeticism and mysticism like this, check out my videos in the description. But what does this have to do with reading the tarot cards? Literally everything. Whenever you pull a Major Arcana card, the reading is showing you how the Divine is manifesting for you in your life, how the above is literally becoming the below. As I told you, we're going into the deeper meanings. This is not your mama's tarot lesson.
Each one of these Major Arcana cards represents the emanation of divine to material in a different way. But how do you know which way? How do you know what they mean? Well, luckily for you, I've created a guide that goes through every one of the Major Arcana cards and shows you the relationships between the Divine and the material. You can download this at taromysticismacademy.com/books or with the link in the description. Once you've downloaded that, let's begin.
As I said, each of the Major Arcana cards will represent to you a relationship between the Divine and the material. Another way to look at this is that each Major Arcana card represents its own little creative process. They each create differently. For example, The Fool represents how something comes out of nothing. The Fool represents somebody walking off a cliff, literally into possibility, or as Arthur Edward Waite would say, "Spirit in search of experience." So The Fool represents something coming out of nothing, and this can be anything. To really understand The Fool, you're going to want to write and think about how you, as an agent of the Divine, as a manifestation of the absolute, have created something out of nothing.
The Magician, on the other hand, represents the movement from the subject to the object. You, the subject, your consciousness right now observing an object, this video. If you're still watching, and thanks if you are, in The Magician card, we see a ceremonial magician draw the energy from the Divine into manifestation. The objects are the four suits on his table. The subject is, in one sense, him as the Magician, but in another sense, the Divine itself. The Magician thus represents how we mold our realities by reaching our energy outwards into objects of our experience. So whether that's through our talents, our gifts, our abilities, our knowledge, people, places, and things, it's all about how we manipulate the objects of our life to create the life we want. It's all about manifestation.
Speaking of manifestation, if you want to manifest more tarot knowledge, I invite you to hit the Subscribe button and hit the notification bell so you know when I put out more videos on tarot, mysticism, and beyond.
Let's move on to The High Priestess. The High Priestess represents the conscious going into the subconscious. So very simply, she represents the subconscious, whether that's the intuition, the divine feminine, secrets, or the unknown known. Literally in the card, you can see the energy going from above into below. She is a personification of the subconscious threshold between conscious experience and unconscious secrets. Pretty much every Major Arcana illustrates the movement of energy from literally above to literally below. By following the imagery on the card and the words that I offer you, you'll have the Major Arcana in no time. For more detail on the Major Arcana cards, see the video in the description where I'll go through all the majors.
What are your thoughts? What have you found effective? Comment on this video and let me know what has helped you and what you would like to see more of.
Now, there's so much more I'd like to teach you. Tarot goes way beyond tarot reading. It's connected to astrology, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, personal growth, energy work, healing, mystical experiences. It's literally a map of how we can become enlightened, and that's what I teach at the Tarot Mysticism Academy. If you're really serious about tarot, if you want to learn to confidently read for yourself or others, or if you want to learn these mystical disciplines to achieve more freedom, greater levels of peace, more love, and more fun in this life, then I definitely recommend Tarot Mysticism Academy. I have over a dozen courses, one-on-one coaching, all sorts of programs, a mastermind where I help people do all of this. I was self-taught for many years, and I got pretty far, but it really wasn't until I met my mentor where my life totally transformed. Some of these things you really can only learn from a mentor, and if you feel called, I'm excited to work with you. You can find more information at taromysticismacademy.com, and I look forward to seeing you in the next wormhole. Much love.