The Ultimate Guide to Tarot by Liz Dean, 240 Pages, Cards and Spreads

The Ultimate Guide to Tarot: A Beginner's Tarot Book by Liz Dean

The Ultimate Guide to Tarot is a 240-page beginner's tarot book by Liz Dean, covering every card of the major and minor arcana with its symbolism, reversed meanings and correspondences, alongside the classic spreads.

There comes a moment, somewhere in the first year of reading, when you realise the little booklet that came with your deck is not going to be enough. You have learned the names of the cards, you can tell the suits apart and still the spread laid out on the cloth in front of you refuses to become a sentence. What you want then is not another deck. It is someone patient enough to walk you through the whole of it.

Liz Dean has read tarot professionally for over twenty years, at Psychic Sisters in Selfridges in London. She has written more on divination than most of us will ever own in decks. This is the reference she built for the beginning. It moves from the history of the cards, through every one of the seventy-eight and out into the spreads you will actually lay on your own table.

Each card has its own entry: the symbolism drawn out of the image, the upright meaning, the reversed meaning and the threads that run off into astrology, Kabbalah, numerology and the chakras. The illustrations are full colour throughout. The appendices gather all of those correspondences into tables you can keep a finger in while you read.

The spreads are here in full. The Celtic Cross; Past, Present, Future; the Astrological Week, Month and Year Ahead; the Chakra Spread. There is a mini-layout for each of the twenty-two major arcana as well, which is the sort of detail that comes from someone who sits down with the cards every day.

And there are the parts that tend to get skipped elsewhere: attuning to a new deck, cleansing it, protecting it, making a space worth reading in. Small rituals, set out step by step, that turn a stack of printed card into a practice.

What Dean keeps returning to is that a good reading asks three things of you at once. You have to know what the cards mean. You have to know how to lay them out. And you have to trust whatever rises in you when you look at the image. The book teaches the first two patiently enough that the third finally has somewhere to stand.

The book

• Trade paperback, 240 pages
• 8" x 10" x 0.75" (20.3 x 25.4 x 1.9 cm)
• Full colour illustrations throughout
• Fair Winds Press, first published 2015
• ISBN 9781592336579

What is inside

• An introduction to the tarot, its history and what reading it offers you
• Interpretations for all 78 cards of the major and minor arcana, upright and reversed
• Symbolism and correspondences for astrology, Kabbalah, numerology and the chakras
• Step-by-step guides to attuning, cleansing and protecting a deck and to setting your space
• The classic spreads, plus a mini-layout for each of the 22 major arcana
• Appendices of card correspondences, including the Tree of Life pathways and crystals