1. There is no shame in looking up the meanings in the Little White Book that comes with the deck, as you go along.
2. There is also no shame in making a further study, because it can help to illuminate a particular school of tarot - Golden Dawn for Rider Waite and Crowley for Thoth, for example.
However my belief is that divination is really about opening up the inner eye and seeing the invisible so there are other strategies which can help with this.
3. A technique which rightly or wrongly I associate with Mary Greer is to describe the card. Try to avoid seeking to interpret but literally just describe. This technique is surprisingly powerful and is also telling when different people describe the same card differently.
4. Pamela Colman Smith's own advice was to assume the position of the characters on the card. This gives an automatic idea of what is going on.
5. There is also nothing wrong with a bit of whoo, and I personally often think of sentences beginning 'I see...' whether this is for a flat description of a card or a more interpretative view.
6. Aces are cards which can give particular difficulties and can be interpreted how you like really. Sometimes they are very good at giving a picture of what would happen if, say, a sword or some money was thrust into a situation. Sometimes they're seen as something new.
7. Court cards can also be difficult. They can be people, behaviour or attitudes. The way they are facing can be telling. Again assuming their position shows what they feel like.
Some people have difficulty putting together a whole reading and relating cards to each other. Before the trend towards spreads with set positions readers would draw a relatively large number of cards and just see what was going on. This is the approach I tend to favour.
8. It can be helpful to use a borderless deck for this - I learned with Morgan Greer myself. Like this the different cards become part of a whole scene.
9. If you have difficulty with this it can be useful to think 'Once upon a time...'
10. You can see it either as a progression in time or as distance in space from the querent. This is made more apparent if you designate a significator card to mean the querent.
11. Use social skills and non-verbals to see what is going on. Are the people in the cards looking towards or away from each other? What kind of place are they in? Are they happy or sad? What will happen if they carry on as they are? And so on.
12. A final technique which comes from the Tarot School of New York is the voice in the card technique. When we read tarot we are not necessarily represented by the people in the cards because it communicates with us symbolically. We might be a chair or an arch, for example. In this technique you let your eye hover over the card and see which detail catches your eye, and that is the card speaking to you.
Happy reading!
