Lesson 0: How to Use This Course

Watch the lesson video, then read this

Welcome. This is the course I wish someone had handed me when I picked up my first tarot deck. Twelve lessons, one video each, and by the end you’ll run a full reading on your own with no guidebook open beside you.

How the course is built

• Lessons 0 to 2, the foundation. Where tarot actually comes from, and how a tarot deck is put together.
• Lessons 3 to 10, the cards. The Major Arcana as three lines, then all four suits, then the sixteen court cards.
• Lessons 11 and 12, reading. Upside down cards, then your first complete reading.

Each lesson has four parts

1. Watch the video. That’s where the teaching happens.
2. Read the written module. Shorter than the video, built for review.
3. Do the exercise. Different every lesson, five to ten minutes with your own tarot deck.
4. Take the quick check. Five questions, no grades, just a way to find out what stuck.

Before you begin

• A tarot deck. Any Rider Waite Smith based tarot deck works, and it’s the one every lesson refers to.
• A notebook. Every exercise ends with a dated page, and a year from now that notebook is the most interesting thing you’ll own.

The exercise

Before lesson one, learn the shuffle you’ll use for everything.

1. Hold your tarot deck in your left hand.
2. Cut it into three piles, left to right.
3. Turn one pile around so it faces the other way.
4. Stack the three back together in any order.

That turned pile is where reversed cards come from, and you’ll understand why in lesson eleven. Do it five times now so your hands know it before your head does.