Tarot for Beginners: Rider-Waite

You bought the deck. Now learn to read it, one lesson at a time.

Most tarot books hand you 78 meanings and leave you to memorize them. This one is a course. In thirty short lessons you learn to look at a card the way a reader does: who is in the picture, what they are doing, where they are looking, and why that scene carries the meaning it does. By the end you can lay out a spread, connect the cards and tell the story they suggest in plain words.

What is inside: 30 lessons in six parts, from opening the box to a thirty-day practice plan; All 78 cards of the 1909 Rider-Waite deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, each on its own page with what you see, why it means this, upright and reversed readings, good pairings and a small exercise; A Beginner's Trap, a Try It exercise and a Check Yourself quiz in every lesson, with 148 answers at the back; Five spreads explained step by step, from three cards to the Celtic Cross and a year wheel, with worked readings; A workbook of 12 practice readings, 40 card pairs, a one-line summary of every card and a glossary.

If you want to understand the cards rather than look them up, start with Lesson 1.