When you first begin your tarot journey, do you memorize card meanings?

[Christgal1983]

When you first begin your tarot journey, do you memorize card meanings?

If you do memorize card meanings, what are some tips you can give me as to how to memorize the meanings of the more difficult cards.

The Court Cards. The Aces, etc.

[DanielJUK]

There are different ways of learning tarot and the key is finding what suits you personally. Some people love learning information and studying that way. So it's one method of learning by memorising everything.

When I was starting out, I wanted to learn every meaning I saw, but in the end it was unhelpful. It wasn't helping my personal understanding of the cards or using them practically. So my suggestion is aiming is to learn the structure of tarot and the basic idea of each card. I think keywords are a better way of doing this or learning the "core idea" of the cards. You don't need to learn an entire book. Also we all have our own mnemonic techniques, so maybe there is a way that you can remember the ideas of the cards. For me, keywords did become very useful and making my own 3 keywords for each card. So I would read up on each card and then decide my own summary of it in keywords.

 

It is worth going through a learning book or course, to get a good foundation of all the cards. Also include practically using them, just learning the theory and meanings doesn't help you get confidence in reading. For that, some people do a daily card draw, others small readings, some people journal their readings. It doesn't matter if you are not totally sure on every card yet but using the cards in readings as much as possible really helps you learn them. Like a daily card forces you to think about what the card means that day. So perhaps the best learning is a mix of learning and using the cards but this changes between a person and what works best for us 🙂 

 

edited to add: With the Courts and Aces, what is the difference between them? That's the thing to learn. Courts are difficult when you are a beginner but think of them like people you meet or those top trump cards. What is their personality and characteristics? Is one compassionate? One a great thinker? There is a great court card area of the forum to go through and think about who represents each card here

[Natural Mystic Guide]

2 hours ago, Christgal1983 said:

When you first begin your tarot journey, do you memorize card meanings?

Yes, I did.  I created several study decks.  These had the card image on one side.  I pasted a white sheet on which I wrote the meanings and keywords on the back side of the card.  I punched holes in a top corner of the card and strung the all together on one of those chains made of little balls.  I took a study deck everywhere. Whenever I had spare moments, I worked with the images and meanings.  Naturally as time went on, I became very familiar with the meanings of individual cards and began to develop my own personal associations.  I felt, though, that having these study decks was foundational to my development as a Tarot reader -- as someone who knew that I wanted to go 'pro' from the beginning.  That was more than 25 years ago.  I still come up with new understandings of individual cards.  I find this thrilling.  Best wishes.

[2dogs]

I tried but the tarot system doesn't click with me, I prefer images of things I understand and that stimulate my own ideas. There are many differently themed tarot decks so you would probably find some easier than others, but also all sorts of non-tarot "oracle" decks and even decks not intended for reading in this way such as the Vatican Art Deck.

[Nemia]

Memorising can sound or feel like rote learning, like drilling, and most people don't like that and it doesn't help them to free their imagination and intuition, which you need when you want to read the cards and not only look the meanings up in a book, trying desperately to square them with your question and overall life situation. 

 

What you really need is to UNDERSTAND the card meanings. The better you understand their meaning, the easier it is to work with them intuitively. 

 

Intuition doesn't come easy. Compare a new driver to an experienced one, remember your first cake and compare it to the 150th cake you made - intuition comes into play when you are so sure of what you are doing that you don't really have to think about it. When your tools are familiar to you like your hands, and you use them with ease. 

 

There are no shortcuts, you need to learn how to use the cards before using them. But learning them, getting to know them, is a fun journey (that actually never really ends). 

 

There are very good books with card meanings, and I remember that I found Andrea Green's book about card meanings quite good - but there are many, so don't take my word for it. Don't confuse yourself with ten books, I'm sure you'll get a good recommendation here on the boards. 

 

However, I'll recommend three books that are not lists of card readings, but give you hints how to make the meanings meaningful to you. 

 

1. Mary K. Greer, Tarot for Your Self. A workbook, a classic, a book that helps you connect personally with the tarot. I still keep my old copy, filled with pencil scribblings. 

 

2. Andy Matzner, The Tarot Activity Book. This is a very playful book with lovely ideas for playing with the cards. Without feeling as though you're swotting for a school examination, just having fun and getting to know them. 

 

3. Alison Cross, Tarot Kaizen. This book is similar to Matzner's approach, but it relies on the Japanese concept of kaizen: constant improvement through careful little steps. I loved her ideas. 

 

Have a look at all three books, and pick one that seems most enticing to you. 

 

And the last tip: don't wait for the Day of Perfection to do your readings. Start reading for yourself now, start reading for friends, for celebrities (they'll never know), historical or fictional figures. Was Aragorn attracted to Eowyn behind Tolkien's back? What did Mammy really think about the O'Hara's? What was the secret behind Cleopatra's legendary charm, and how did she feel about the men in her life? 

 

Let the tarot tell you stories. That's the fun part. 

 

After that comes the work part: journal your readings. Whether it's a digital note or a simple college block, write down the date, your questions, the name of the deck, and if you used or made up a spread, sketch it quickly. And then write down what you found out, what the tarot told you. Writing it down really brings it into your consciousness, and you can look at these notes years later and see your learning curve. 

 

So read, read, read. Read the cards, read books, read what you have written yourself. 

 

It's a wonderful journey, I wish I could start it again! 

[Misterei]

11 hours ago, Christgal1983 said:

When you first begin your tarot journey, do you memorize card meanings?

If you do memorize card meanings, what are some tips you can give me as to how to memorize the meanings of the more difficult cards.

The Court Cards. The Aces, etc.

Yes. Absolutely.

I find memory hangers. For example--before memorizing each individual card of the Wands suit--I memorized that wands are fire and the esoteric associations of fire element.

Memorizing the courts i started with Zodiac. Wands courts as fire signs [Aries, Leo, Sag]

This give me a framework that i could begin to hang individual card meanings onto this frame.

If you think of it as building a memory palace--you start building the house with foundation and framing [suit & number]. Then later add the roof and walls [individual and specific card meanings].

 

I teach various exercises for memorization in my classes--but this is the basics of how i learned back when i was 15 and just getting started.

4 hours ago, Nemia said:

Memorising can sound or feel like rote learning, like drilling, and most people don't like that and it doesn't help them to free their imagination and intuition, ...

LOL as an ex dancer I LOVE drilling. Dancers practice the same combo 1001 times until we remember it. Musicians practice the same scale 1001 times until they can play it perfectly.

 

I see drilling as supporting intuition, imagination, and creativity. A good musician can improvise--and drilling every scale 1001 times is what gives him or her the capacity for improv. Likewise as a dancer. I could improvise to live music b/c I had spent hours drilling steps and counting how the steps fit into a measure of music.

 

I realize this isnt for everyone. We all have different learning styles as you say.

 

The modern trend seems to be against memorization as if rote learning is inferior. In an age where more and more of my own memory is getting outsourced to AI and google search--I have become a bit of a fanatic about honoring the value of actually memorizing things.

Edited November 29 by Misterei

[AtelierCarousel]

The difficulty is not memorizing the keywords but when you want to do it in such a short time, that there is fear you can't make it fast enough, or you just won't ever "get it". If you give yourself all the time in the world, there is no "not memorizing".  I think if you have difficulty with certain card meanings, you have not made normal research. Just googling "Page of Wands" and collecting everything from all reputable Tarot blogs you find already gives you all the basic understanding you need. The rest is just adding to the research until you have a sense of "getting" the card.

 

It's not a "memorization" or "not understanding" problem, but a "not working" and "not giving yourself enough time to study" problem. 

 

You have to do this like any other serious study in school or university, where you actually sit down and write stuff down and make drawings and collect info to "understand" a subject, whatever the subject is. Its no different with the cards. Just take a white sheet of paper and start collecting information on one card, and then on the next, and the next. Just start collecting and writing down your thoughts. It's just that. And it does take a long time. Months at least. There is no shortcut. 

 

But there is another angle to this, that leaves people stranded. It is when you have ADHD or generally a  "pattern brain" vs people who are good at intellectually memorizing words. Then, creating a Tarot workbook can be a daunting task. 

 

I have AUDHD and a pattern brain, so I had to come up with a "visual way" to study Tarot and create my research workbook that does not involve thick notebooks with written text in them. Instead I created a visual database for each card in Notion. (or use other software, anything where you can create a database that has a "gallery view" to show database content)

• I created a note for each Tarot card, for the "Fool", for example and put in an image of the RWS card,
• I gave this note a "tag", "Fool", for example. 
• Then I do random "rabbit hole" googling and I find images that "fit" to this RWS card. Like I found an image of a fresco by Stefano da Ferrara, "Foolishness" in the Casa Minerbi Del Sale. I put that as another note into the Notion database and also give it the tag "Fool". Or there is a medieval painting by Bosch, "The Wanderer". In it goes with the tag "Fool".  
• And every time in your day you come across other images of details you saw on cards, you can pop them into the database. It becomes like a little collector's obsession
• You can also add pages with your own drawings of what you think the card represents, that you then tag as "Fool"
• or add a color, or a symbol, fool cards of other decks, a photo of a plant that appears on the card, etc
• Then you can create a page where you place and filter the database to show only images with that one tag. This way, you get a visual library of images associated with this card. 

Eventually, you notice the similarities and differences of the "Fool" tagged images you collected, and you "get" the character of this card. This works great for visual people and gives you a sense of the card that goes way beyond keywords. Just by doing this fun activity, you end up memorizing the card.

 

You can potentially just have folders on your hard drive, of course, but I think this is less effective and works against how humans cognitively access information. When you create your own little "Gallery" for each card, then you are forced to work with each card's image details and automatically memorize them because they are not just "abstract words", but a collection of images of meaning you "discovered", that you can sort and arrange, like people do with any other collection of stuff they collect and store at home. 

 

The real magic happens when you then add more tags, for example tag each entry in the database with its element, or add colors as tags, or elements on the cards, like "dog". Once you do that, you get a really practical database that you can filer to see for example "all cards that have a dog on them", or all cards that are associated with the element "water"  Just doing that really helps to memorize the cards. 

 

I would think you could also create individual pages for each card in Canva for free. You would have to paste all your associations into one page and you would not have the power of tagging and filtering, it would be more like a moodboard, but that might also help. 

 

You can start with your favourite cards and eventually then land on the hard ones. But you will discover each card the same way, even those that are a complete mystery at first, only by googling whatever you find for each card. Eventually, no card will be a mystery any more, just by doing your regular homework, just like with any other study. 

 

What is it that makes you not sit down to study each card? 

 

 

Axis

 

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[Rose Lalonde]

Yes, I memorized basic meanings to get started. Not memorizing is like someone telling me they want to write poetry but don’t want to memorize what individual words mean. Vocabulary memorization can be dull but if you try to write poetry in a language where you haven’t learned what the words mean, there’s no art or reason. 

 

To carry the simile further, the more time and familiarity you have with the language, the better your poetry can be. Like what @Nemia said.

 

Others already have some good tips for memorizing, but for courts, we have a 60 quirky court cards section here you can read and take part in. Link below. And for aces you could take one like the Ace of Wands, then lay out the other 9 Wands minors and look them over. The Ace has all the potential of the suit, so it can represent the start of the kinds of things you see in the other Wands cards. How are they different than what the Cups cards show, for example. Figuring it out is fun, I think.

 

https://www.thetarotforum.com/forums/forum/65-60-quirky-court-cards/

Edited November 29 by Rose Lalonde

[gregory]

No I didn't. I read up a lot, and I worked through Linda Cowles' excellent playbook. I fully got to grips with the meanings as I see them when I created my own deck. I don't feel there is only one set-in-stone set of meanings so I would not be in a position to memorise them anyway. Context is important. I'm big on looking at the pictures.