The Guidebook is a Starting Point, Not an Answer

Almost every tarot deck comes with one. Whether it’s a little slip of paper, a small booklet with a couple of paragraphs per card, a full double-spread for every card like you get with the Fifth Spirit Tarot or the Light Seers Tarot, or a much bigger dedicated book like the one that comes with the Queer Tarot deck. And then there are the books you pick up at Waterstones or wherever. Dedicated tarot texts that go much deeper. If you’ve joined the membership, you’ve also got access to Simply Tarot Fundamentals, which is basically a guidebook I’ve written myself.

I’m not here to shit on guidebooks. They’re useful. But there’s a point where the guidebook stops serving you and starts working against you. And most people don’t notice when that happens.

The Range of What’s Out There

The standard guidebook that comes with a deck gives you keywords, a couple of paragraphs on upright and reversed, maybe some spread suggestions at the back. Brief by design. A starting point.

Then you’ve got books like Tarot: Connect with Yourself, Develop Your Intuition, Live Mindfully by Tina Gong, one of the first tarot books I bought. A nice big double spread for each card, reflection prompts, actions, keywords. Really solid for learning. Radical Tarot by Charlie Claire Burgess goes into a lot more depth, a real exploration of each card and the author’s relationship to them. Tarot for Light Seers by Chris-Anne is almost like a scrapbook for every card, which is gorgeous.

These are brilliant reference points as you’re building your connection to the cards. But they need to be a starting point, not an end point.

During a reading, you don’t want to be pulling out volumes and poring through them trying to find the meaning of a card. I’ve done it. It doesn’t add what you think it’s going to add.

How I Used to Read

In the early days, some cards I’d interpret on instinct. The Empress would come up and I’d just go in: creativity, nurturing, something like that. Then the Knight of Wands would land and I’d reach for the book. But while I was in there, I’d end up looking the Empress up too, see something about the divine feminine, and start talking about the divine feminine instead.

The book had overridden my gut.

And when I look back at those readings, whether from memory or from what people said to me afterwards, the original interpretation, the one my intuition went to first, was the one that landed. The more I shared it, the more it connected. When I switched to the book’s version instead, it was less clear, less real.

The Cards Change With You

Some of my most accurate readings have been the ones where I’ve noticed something in a card I don’t normally notice. Instead of reciting a meaning I’ve read or remembered, I say what I actually see, and that thing connects to the person.

And here’s the thing: when I look back at old readings where I interpreted a card differently than I would now, the interpretation still made sense at the time, for that person. My understanding of the Empress, for example. I used to read it mostly as creativity. Now I read it more around nurturing. Neither was wrong. My relationship with the card evolved.

As with language, our understanding changes, and it’s unique to each of us. That’s the fucking beauty of tarot. Two readers, same three cards, completely different things to say. Who’s right? Both, neither, who knows. The message your intuition tells you is the one that’s right for that moment.

A Live Example

In the video you’ll have seen me pull three cards without touching the guidebook once. Here’s the thinking behind each one.

The Empress landed first. I could see an earth energy, a pregnant belly, something like a wing, fish imagery. Themes of nurturing, of grounding. What I’d say to a client: you need to connect to your senses, connect to the earth, and nurture what you’re building, because it’s going to become bigger than you think.

The guidebook says: divine feminine, prolific, creativity, fertility, motherhood, abundance, unconditional love, unification of mind, body, spirit. A lot of the same territory. But I got there through the image, and I connected it to the cards around it. The guidebook can’t do that.

Next: the Lovers in reverse, in the Light Seers Tarot. I usually read the Lovers as being about self-love. But looking at it reversed, I was seeing two people who are normally very close, very intimate, very passionate. Reversed, that energy shifts. Dispassionate. Not passionate about what you’re working with.

The guidebook says: a break in communication, disharmony, codependency, giving away power. It doesn’t mention dispassionate. That came from the image, and from connecting it to the Empress.

Third: the Ten of Pentacles in reverse. Typically I’d read this as instability in the home or work, a loss of legacy. The image shows a family, abundance, a dog. Reversed: unstable. Connecting all three together, your dispassion in what you’re nurturing will cause instability and a breakdown in the family.

For what it’s worth, I don’t read tarot for predictions. You might, and that’s fine. I might talk more about that in a future week. But regardless, the point stands: the guidebook would never have got me there.

The Problem With Too Much Information

That’s the thing the guidebook gives you that’s almost too much. It gives you so many options that it gives you the ability to consciously edit the answer you want, rather than letting the cards speak and trusting what you’re seeing right now.

There are also certain cards where I have stories I love to tell. And I fucking love telling those stories. But sometimes I tell them when they’re not relevant. I know immediately when it happens, because the client doesn’t connect. They might laugh politely, it gets a bit awkward, and I have to backtrack. Meanwhile there’s been something right there in the card the whole time, and I’ve been ignoring it because I wanted to share the impressive version.

The Challenge

Next time you do a reading, try avoiding the guidebook completely. See what your intuition says. It might not be the same as what you said last time. You might look up the meaning afterwards and think, fucking hell, that’s completely different to what the book says. But if it resonated with the person, that’s what matters.

I can’t think of a time where I’ve trusted my intuition on a card and been wrong. I can think of plenty of times where I’ve gone to the book, or lazily said what I always say for a particular card, and that’s the reading that hasn’t landed.

The guidebook got you here. Put it down and read.

See you next week. Love you.