Liz Dean's guide to reading the tarot, 240 pages on the cards, the spreads and how to work with them. A companion for anyone opening their first deck, or returning to one that has sat unread. Held in UK stock and shipped by Royal Mail.
On pre-order, ships late August.
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The Ultimate Guide to Tarot is a 240-page beginner's tarot book by Liz Dean, published by Fair Winds Press in 2015 (ISBN 9781592336579). It covers the tarot cards and the spreads used to read them, written for people starting out with a deck. The Guilded Veil stocks it in the UK and ships it by Royal Mail.
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.
Yes. It is written as a beginner's guide and opens with an introduction to the tarot and its history before working through the cards one at a time. Liz Dean also writes for readers who already have some experience behind them and want to deepen their interpretation, so it stays useful well past the first year.
All 78. Every card of the major and minor arcana has its own entry covering the symbolism in the image, the upright meaning, the reversed meaning and the links out to astrology, Kabbalah, numerology and the chakras.
It does. Each of the 78 card entries gives the reversed meaning alongside the upright one, so you are not left guessing when a card turns up the other way round.
The classic spreads are all here: the Celtic Cross; Past, Present, Future; the Astrological Week, Month and Year Ahead; the Chakra Spread. There is also a mini-layout for each of the 22 major arcana cards, which gives you a short reading to try as you learn each one.
The book works through the 78 cards of the major and minor arcana, which is the standard structure of a tarot deck, so it sits alongside whichever deck you read with. It also includes step-by-step guides to attuning, cleansing and protecting a new deck.
It is a trade paperback of 240 pages measuring 8" x 10" x 0.75" (20.3 x 25.4 x 1.9 cm), with full colour illustrations throughout. It is published by Fair Winds Press, ISBN 9781592336579.
Liz Dean is a professional tarot reader and Angelic Reiki healer at Psychic Sisters in Selfridges in London. She has studied divination for over twenty years and is the author of The Golden Tarot, The Ultimate Guide to Tarot Spreads and The Big Book of Tarot Symbols among others. She is also a former co-editor of the UK spiritual magazine Kindred Spirit.
Yes. We are based in the UK and send everything by Royal Mail, so there are no import fees or customs charges to deal with on a UK order.
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