The Trick to Reading Etteilla tarot

I am sure I have written here before about the Etteilla tarot decks and the difficulty which the tarot community have in Reading them. This difficulty is rather ironic because these tarots represent much more what fortune telling was like with tarot cards before the golden dawn got hold of it.
Personally I love these decks and own the last deck produced of this type, which is marketed under the title of the Book of Thoth. Of course we must remember that the fallacy that tarot cards were invented by Egyptians was brand new at this time and allow a certain poetic licence in these cards production! I love this deck also I must confess that for most of its time with me sat in my wardrobe because I have unfortunately bought into the popular idea that this deck is difficult to read. And indeed it is, if you are only used to tarot decks of other traditions and don't the little trick I am going to reveal here. That's right, yet another huge chocolate secret blown open to the public on this blog!
It's taken me forever to find out the secret. What I had already noticed of course was that you cannot simply read these cards the way you would any other tarot deck. I personally have to read them differently anyway because reversals are built into the system with this deck. It is a pitch deck and so you cannot just look at the pictures and define that way the way you often cam nowadays. The deck does have key words on each card. I know that some people think that these are unhelpful, and frankly these people will be gratified rather difficult nature of the keywords on the cards. If you are not able to understand French you're starting on the wrong foot anyway! If nothing else this deck is definitely one which requires work to understand, like all good magical and divinatory Systems.
So anyway we come to the secret, and I'm afraid I can't tell you where I got it from, as usual I read it on the internet and only realised it's truth afterwards when I had clicked away from the site.
The secret to raising this deck is this: Layout a good number of cards, say 5 by 3, and then read them in the wrong direction. No seriously. If you try to read the layouts from left to right you will just get gobbledygook, if you read it from right to left then what the cards have to say suddenly becomes stunningly clear. That cunning old Fox, designing a tarot deck which has to be read the wrong way round!
Another trick is to read the cards in threes, and this seems to be quite a common method of understanding this deck. Personally I'm finding I only do that when it feels right. Otherwise I'm a treat the layout as moving from the past to the Future, or whatever feels right at the time. Hey I'm a witch, you can't expect me to stick to rules to rigidly!