Spiritual Life
How to Read the Tarot
A Practical Method Using the Rider-Waite Deck
The Rider-Waite Tarot is one of the world’s best-known Tarot decks, but its real richness lies in far more than a set of conventional meanings assigned to seventy-eight cards. Its detailed imagery provides a symbolic language through which intuition can learn to perceive relationships, possibilities, warnings, and guidance.
In How to Read the Tarot, Swami Nirmalananda Giri presents the distinctive method of Tarot reading he developed through decades of personal experience with the Rider-Waite deck. Rather than asking the reader to memorize fixed interpretations, he teaches how to study the symbolism of each card, become sensitive to the details that draw the attention, and allow intuition to reveal what is significant in a particular reading.
His approach differs in important ways from many familiar Tarot systems. It does not depend upon elaborate spreads, reversed-card meanings, or rigidly memorized definitions. Instead, the cards are approached as pages in a symbolic book: a question is carefully formulated, a card is revealed, and its imagery is read attentively and intuitively. The book gives practical instruction in preparing and handling the deck, asking effective questions, interpreting unexpected details, keeping a record of readings, and developing confidence in intuitive perception.
The greater part of the book then explores the Rider-Waite deck card by card, with color illustrations and detailed commentary on the symbolism and possible divinatory meanings of the Major and Minor Arcana. Particular attention is given to visual elements that can easily be overlooked but may become decisive in an actual reading.
Underlying the entire method is a conviction expressed throughout the book: Tarot reading should develop perception rather than replace it. No list of definitions can exhaust the possible meaning of a card. The goal is to become increasingly capable of allowing the cards to “speak” through awakened intuition. The book’s concluding words return explicitly to this principle: continued reading of the cards itself becomes a teacher, while calmness, attention, meditation, and intuition deepen the reader’s perception.
A book to live with
Why Read This Book?
Learn an intuitive method rather than memorizing rigid card definitions, developing the ability to recognize what matters in a particular reading.
Discover a distinctive alternative to conventional Tarot spreads, treating the deck as a symbolic “book” whose pages can answer carefully formulated questions.
Explore all seventy-eight Rider-Waite cards through their imagery and symbolism, with detailed interpretations of both the Major and Minor Arcana.
Develop a more attentive relationship with the cards themselves, including practical guidance on preparation, questioning, interpretation, record-keeping, and cultivating intuition.
Experience the writing
From the Book
Featured excerpt
Let the Cards Speak
The interpretations I will be giving of the individual Tarot cards need not be memorized exactly or slavishly adhered to. Rather, you should carefully and thoughtfully read this book through a few times (three should be enough, but each person is different) to get it set well in your subconscious. Then forget about it and let your intuition work on it and bring the meanings to mind whenever you need it. Of course you can keep this book at hand for reference from time to time.
The important thing is that the cards “speak” to you through your intuition which will become increasingly sensitive to the message of the cards.
Excerpt twoReading the Tarot “Book”+
Each card is a page of the book, and you read the book by holding it in your left hand and with your right hand reaching forward and taking a segment of the cards away and putting them behind the cards in your left hand. The card whose face is now up and visible is the page you read.
When I was a little child I used to have a daydream fantasy of a book whose pages were blank, but when I wanted to know something, I would open it up at random and everything I wanted to know would be written out on the page. Perhaps I was intuiting my future, because this way of reading the Tarot is exactly like that. I cut the cards, but get the same result as turning pages of a book.
This method is much more efficient than the “spread” approach. When I used the Celtic Cross spread doing readings for others, to lay out the cards took time and then often the question was something that could be answered by one card. After adopting the “book” method, I would just turn over a thirty-minute hourglass and tell the client: “As long as that sand keeps running, ask all you want.” And we could cover a tremendous amount of questions and get much fuller answers quickly. For example, suppose a question is: “What is the wisdom quotient of my answering this letter?” If I am told to answer it, then I ask: “What should be the character or tone of my reply?” Before that I might have asked: “What is the character or tone of this letter I received?” Or even: “How should I regard this letter?” With this method you can quickly cover various aspects of a single question. If you keep laying out spreads for every single question a tremendous amount of time will be wasted to no purpose.
Excerpt threeThe Nature of Divination+
Certainly divination can reveal the future, but it does so within the context of its real nature and purpose: Diagnosis.
It reveals the character and the future of something in order for the consultant to know what to do regarding it in the wisest way. Even the indication of the future is to enable the consultant to understand its nature–which includes its possibilities or inevitable developments. Divination reveals the aspects of a situation and its possible developments and the consultant decides what to do, or not to do, about it. The cards are not fatalistic, and a good diviner can at times discover how the consultant can change situations to his advantage. So divination is a tool by which a consultant can take charge of his life and direct it as much as is possible. Divination is not fortunetelling at all. It is all about shaping our own fortunes (futures).
