I’ve previously discussed the importance of divination. It’s a great entry point into the occult arts for a number of reasons. First, it’s a phenomenal way of generating spooky coincidences; if you’re just starting out and trying to figure out whether there’s anything worthwhile to be pursued here, it can help quickly answer that question. Second, it’s a wonderful tool to help refine and deepen one’s personal practice. If you have questions about how to get started or how to proceed – which authors to study, which rituals to combine, which traditions to explore – it can answer those questions. It’s like having a mentor you can fit in your pocket. Finally, it builds your understanding of one or more occult symbol sets; symbols sets that can be repurposed for spell or ritual.
OK, you’re sold! You want to learn divination. The next question is: how do you start?
Start Here
If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend learning tarot.
While no divination system is better than any other, there are subtle differences between them. Each has their own dialect, which can be better or worse at communicating about specific things. This is not so different from spoken languages. The German word Geborgenheit, for example, has no direct English equivalent. It is best translated as “the state of having a sense of security and well-being.” It’s not that English can’t convey this idea, but that doing so is wordier and takes more time.
From this standpoint, tarot cards are a great starting point. They have a large and reasonably well-balanced vocabulary. They’re rich in archetypal imagery, which makes it possible to read them intuitively (without having memorized a book of meanings beforehand). And there is enough occult symbolism baked into the imagery that they communicate in a nuanced way about magic and spiritual topics – from a linguistic standpoint, they have a lot of magic related words.
To read tarot you’ll need to find yourself a tarot deck. I’d recommend one based on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. It’s a deck that has illustrated minor arcana (the equivalent to pip cards), so you’ll have an image to interpret on every single card. It was also put together by initiates of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, so it’s full of occult symbolism – Hermeticism, Jewish Kabbalah, Christian and Egyptian mysticism, and Platonic philosophy.1 There’s a lot to unpack, and the further you progress in studying the occult, the more layers of meaning you can unlock. But really any fully-illustrated deck with imagery that speaks to you will suffice.
For a beginner, I’d recommend you steer away from anything called an “oracle deck” rather than a “tarot deck.” The latter has a standard set of 78 cards, while the former can have any set of cards the author desires. I’d also recommend you stay away from Aleister Crowley’s Thoth deck. Crowley is his own special brand of brilliant-slash-difficult. Some people love him, some people hate him, and it’s worth holding off until you know which camp you’re in.
You have your tarot deck. Now what?
Learning a New Divination System
Let’s start with some tools that I like to use when learning any new divination system. They’re mostly not specific to tarot, but will greatly increase your skill as a tarot reader.
Discursive Meditation
Discursive meditation is a practice I got from John Michael Greer. It’s just a fancy name for “loosely guided free association.” You sit down, relax your body, close your eyes, and spend some time thinking about a topic. You let your mind wander in relation to the topic, making whatever connections it wants to make. If it starts to wander too far afield (say, to your grocery list) you gently bring it back to focus on the topic at hand.
When I’m learning a new system of divination, I like to spend about twenty minutes in discursive meditation on every symbol in the system. That’s a lot! Twenty minutes of meditation on every tarot card is dozens of hours of meditation, even before you factor in things like reversals. But there are a few redeeming caveats. You don’t need to finish meditating on every symbol before you start doing readings. You don’t need to get through it all quickly. You don’t even need to do your twenty minutes in a single sitting; five minutes a day is fine, just come back to the same card again on another day.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and it pays huge dividends in understanding.
Journaling
This is advice you see all over when it comes to occult studies, but it’s particularly important for divination. Sometimes you do a reading and it makes no sense. You’re sure there’s a message in there, but you have no idea what it’s supposed to be. That’s OK!
If you write down all your readings, you can go back after the fact and review them. Once some time has gone by and you know what the actual answer to your question was, you can consider the reading again. How was that answer trying to come through? Which of these symbols have additional meanings you weren’t aware of?2
Without having written the reading down, you will inevitably have forgotten the specifics, and your original interpretation. So write down all the readings you do, even if you think you understand what they’re trying to tell you in the moment.3
Working Through The Living Tarot
If you only ever read one book on divination, make it T. Susan Chang’sThe Living Tarot.4 It’s intended to be used for tarot, but it has an excellent, laddered progression of exercises to build familiarity and fluency with the cards. These exercises can be adapted for almost any divination system. It’s the best way to learn a new system that I have ever come across, hands down.5
System Specific Resources
Tarot
I’ve already discussed tarot at some length. The only other resource I will recommend for it is Josephine McCarthy’s Tarot Skills for the 21st Century.6 I’m a huge fan of Josephine McCarthy generally, and this book is no exception. I wouldn’t recommend it as a first book – her advice on learning the cards mostly comes down to trial and error – but she also starts from the premise that divination is a real thing rather than a psychological tool. Which means she covers questions like “which topics are ethical to read about and which ones aren’t”, which are super important to consider and not discussed as widely as they should be. It also contains an overwhelming array of unique card spreads, which – because McCarthy doesn’t read with reversals – adapt very well into playing card cartomancy.
Playing Card Cartomancy
Cartomancy – divination by reading playing cards – has become one of my most used divination systems. Where tarot is great at conveying messages about spirituality and occult topics, most playing card systems have meanings that are a lot more concrete for daily life. If you want no-nonsense information about your job or your relationships, playing cards are great.
The wrinkle is that there are almost as many methods for reading playing cards as there are card readers. In many cases the meanings for a single card aren’t even remotely related. So trying to find multiple resources that build on each other constructively can be a challenge.
The system I use is almost exclusively drawn from Cory Thomas Hutcheson’s Fifty-four Devils.7 I would also recommend this webpage. It’s a good beginner resource in its own right, and the meanings are pretty similar to Hutcheson’s if you want to start with one and then transition to the other.
Geomancy
I am by no means a skilled geomancer. It’s something I want to pursue more deeply at some point, both because it was incredibly popular in early modern Europe (where most of my favorite grimoires are from), and because its algorithmic nature appeals to me.
For resources I’d recommend John Michael Greer’s The Art and Practice of Geomancy,8 as well as the works of Sam Block (of The Digital Ambler) and Dr. Alexander Cummins.
Regardless of the system you wind up pursuing, learning divination is a cornerstone of magical practice – a means of unraveling the unseen and guiding your journey through the esoteric arts. Whether you’re starting with tarot, exploring the practical clarity of playing cards, or diving into the algorithmic elegance of geomancy, the key is consistent practice and curiosity. By combining tools like meditation, journaling, and structured learning with an open mind and a willingness to learn from both success and error, you’ll develop fluency in your chosen system and deepen your connection to its symbolic language.
Remember, divination is not just about predicting outcomes but about opening a two-way dialog with the web of fate.
- If you’d prefer a more pagan deck, the Robin Wood tarot deck is excellent. It’s based on the Rider-Waite-Smith imagery, but adapts it to be less Judeo-Christian and more primal. Fair warning, it includes a lot of nudity. ↩︎
- This happened to me just recently. I was looking for an item that had been misplaced, and drew a playing card to indicate its current location. I got the Five of Clubs, which – under the system I use – can mean either “barn” or “healthy body.” That was hugely unhelpful. I don’t have a barn (or even a shed or a garage), and I was reasonably certain it wasn’t in my body. I recorded the result and set it aside. I (months later) found the item packed away in a cooler. While I never would have made the connection initially, you can sort of see how that meaning could fit. A cooler is a container to store food and prevent it from spoiling: barn/healthy body. So now I know that the Five of Clubs can mean “barn,” “healthy body,” or – in some instances – “cooler.” ↩︎
- As an extension of this: do readings on questions that have a real, verifiable answer. And then find out what the answer was. If you never put yourself in a position to be wrong, you’ll never get any better. ↩︎
- Chang, T. (2023). The Living Tarot. Llewellyn Publications. ↩︎
- For more multimedia learners, there’s also an online course that covers the same material. ↩︎
- McCarthy, J. (2020). Tarot Skills for the 21st Century. Tadehent Books. ↩︎
- Hutcheson, C. (2013). Fifty-four Devils. CreateSpace. ↩︎
- Greer, J. (2009). The Art and Practice of Geomancy. Weiser Books. ↩︎
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