I've been working with my cards seriously for approximately three and a half years. Even after that time, I don't feel proficient with them, and there's still a lot for me to learn about them. This is a basic description of my tarot cards and what the tarot means.
Websters Dictionary-
tarot card(n.)-
Any of a set of usually 78 playing cards including 22 cards depicting vices, virtues, and elemental forces, used in fortunetelling.
-The tarot tells the future: False. The tarot is a deck of 78 cards, used to gain guidance and advice, not to fortell the future, like so many people believe.
-The tarot is satanic: False. It does not deal with the devil, spirits, or any other external forces. It is purely internal, dealing with your subconscious mind.
-It's fake: False. While there are many people who claim to "read" the tarot and tell the future with it, most of them are fakes, not the cards themselves. The cards are very real, if the person reading them is real. They can give you advice about a situation, and describe in some detail the past of a problem, but they are not the all-knowing thing most people believe them to be.
More About the Tarot
The Tarot is divided into two seperate decks of cards: the Major Arcana, which contains 22 cards, has no divisions, and is numbered from 0 to 21; and the Minor Arcana, which contains 56 cards, and is divided into four suits of 14 cards each. The four suits of the Minor Arcana are swords, wands, cups, and pentacles.
Each card in the deck has it's own special meaning. According to traditional Tarot decks, each card actually has two meanings: An upright meaning, and a reversed meaning. This means that the cards mean different things if they appear so that the picture is facing the reader, or facing away from the reader. You "read" the cards by shuffling them, and then laying them out in specific patterns, or layouts. Each place in the layout has a special meaning, and the layout can consist of any number of cards. You then interpret the combined meaning of the card (upright or reversed) and it's position in the spread. The entire layout combined gives you your answer.
I normally use a layout called the "Celtic Cross" spread. It uses between eleven and fourteen cards, and is good for most situations.
I use a deck titled The Celtic Dragon Tarot. It's not like most traditional decks in two specific ways. First, there is no "reverse" meaning of the cards, unlike in most decks. Secondly, two of the cards, The Tower, and The High Priest, are different than traditional decks because the traditional versions of those cards would not fit with the Celtic mythology.
These are some of the cards in the deck, my favorites, either because of the meaning or the art of my specific deck. Hold your mouse over the card for the name, Arcana, and meaning.
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