The 78 Cards — A Tarot Guide and Journal for the Whole Deck

Seventy-eight cards, one book, and no promises about the future.

Most tarot guides do one of two things. They either give you a keyword list that tells you nothing you could not have guessed, or they promise the cards will tell you what happens next — which nothing can.

This one does something narrower and, in daily use, more useful. Every card gets its traditional meanings, its reversed reading, a plain account of what it actually tends to point at, and one question worth sitting with. Then the back of the book is blank, because reading about tarot and keeping a record of your own readings are not the same activity, and only the second one teaches you the deck.

What is inside

• All 22 Major Arcana — a page each. What is on the card, upright and reversed meanings, what it tends to point at, what it is commonly misread as, and a prompt.
• All 56 Minor Arcana — grouped by suit, two cards to a page, plus a note on how each pair reads together.
• A suit introduction for Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles — what the suit governs, its arc from Ace to Ten, what it means when it dominates a reading, and where it gets misread.
• How the Minor Arcana actually work — the number grid that lets you make a sensible guess at any card in any suit.
• Five spreads, with layouts and method: one card, past-present-next, the week ahead, a decision spread, and the year.
• How to ask a better question — the four question shapes that do not work, and five that do.
• Reversals, and the honest argument about whether to use them at all.
• Where readers genuinely disagree — the Strength and Justice numbering, the suit elements, the court cards. Named, sourced, and not smoothed over.
• 25 pages of journal — daily draws, full readings, monthly reviews, a year page, and one page for the cards that keep coming up.

What it is not

It does not predict anything. It will not tell you what is going to happen, whether he will call, or whether to take the job. It is not a substitute for a doctor, a solicitor or an accountant, and it says so on page 2 and again at the back.

What the cards are genuinely good for is being seventy-eight structured prompts that make you say the thing out loud. That is a smaller claim than this market usually makes, and it has the advantage of being true.

What you get

• 100-page PDF in US Letter
• The same 100 pages in A4
• A READ ME

You will need your own deck of cards — any Rider-Waite-Smith deck, or any of the many based on it.

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