What all can you do with Tarot cards?

Many people think that tarot cards are only used for divination or as a tool for self-examination with your own questions. Tarots, however, offer a huge number of different uses.

Let's first start with good stuff suitable for beginners and then move from there to more detailed ideas.

Tarot stories suitable for beginners:

- Pick up one card a day and read it in the morning and again in the evening. Think about whether you came across the meaning of the card of the day in some everyday situation. This way you learn cards at the same time and get to use your new wonderful deck every day.

- Shuffle the cards, for example, while watching TV or listening to music. Then start arranging the cards in their correct order. When the deck is in order, you can shuffle it again and repeat the same loop as long as you like. At the same time, you will also learn to recognize cards from a new deck, get to know your own deck, create an energetic relationship with it, and constantly improve in shuffling.

- Tarot decks can also be "tuned", i.e. their edges can be cut, colored, etc. Tuning always has its own risks and I don't recommend it with rare decks, but with mass market decks it's quite a fun and meditative exercise. You must have suitable markers for coloring the edges so that the color does not so-called bleed onto the image side of the card and also the material of the cards affects how the color reacts on the card. There are hundreds of deck mod videos on YouTube where you can find inspiration and for cutting the edges you can find, in addition to scissors and corner rounders, for example paper guillotines and other fun tools. However, modding the deck is always a task to be done at your own risk and sometimes it can go into the woods, but it's not really that serious either.

- If you ever lose one card from your tarot deck or one of them gets damaged, etc., you should not throw away the deck under any circumstances. From the remaining cards, you can craft pictures in ready-made frames, glue them to a card and make individual postcards for friends, or even attach them to a string and hang them on a window, wall or even as a Christmas tree decoration.

Things suitable for a more experienced tarot lover:

-If the cards and decks are starting to become familiar, how about astrology and especially Tarot astrology? There is a lot of astrology to be learned in the cards, especially in how there are astrological correspondences in everything in such a large and small arcana. A great tool for learning this is, for example, this Tarot-Astrology Wheel.

For studying the astrology of each card, the Thoth deck is very ideal because it also has astrology visually visible in the minor and major arcana, unlike the traditional Rider Waite Smith deck where astrology is hidden in the background as invisible esoteric knowledge.

You can start building your own birth chart using tarot cards. You can use several decks for this and make the project quite large. You can mark each big arcana card as a representative of the signs of the zodiac in different rooms; Ruler - Aries, High Priest - Taurus, etc. Then you can continue by putting the cards of the correct planets according to your birth chart in their own rooms next to their own zodiac sign cards; for example, the World - in the place of Saturn, the Queen - in the place of Venus, the High Priestess - in the place of the Moon, etc. Then you can still search the deck for the card of the dean of the minor arcana and the court card according to your birthday and put them in the right place on your map. Again, the Tarot-Astrology Wheel serves as the best tool for this. Then, when you have built the whole beauty over time, you can study it for however long you want (if the space allows you to keep the cards on display). How does this exercise better illustrate astrology in general for you? Did you learn something new about yourself? Do you get aha experiences when astrology appears in the form of visual cards you are familiar with?

Pocket-sized and mini packs are perfect for this project.

- You can also get to know Qabala very brilliantly with tarot cards. There are heaps of good books on this topic, but to start with, just a pack and a model picture are enough.

You can start arranging the cards of the small arcana in the shape of the 10 sefira of the tree of life, for example on the floor. Then you can put the court cards in their own sefiras and finally crown the whole beauty by adding the cards of the big arcana in the place of the 22 paths that run between the sefiras. Then this exercise can be taken a step further by forming all four countries, that is, all four different Qabbalistic worlds; according to atziluth, briah, yetzira and assiah, i.e. staffs with their own big arcana, bowls with their own big arcana, etc.

In addition to this visual exercise, in the journey of the tarot cards, you can do the so-called pathworking. There are guided meditations for these from the literature, but you can also choose one of the big arcana cards yourself and while looking at it, fall into meditation on the card's journey. You can jump with the queen into a green meadow or into a dark stormy night to watch the tower fall. You can travel these paths between 10 different sefira and include them as a starting and ending point in your path work. A great fun and versatile and above all educational tarot activity that does not require any fortune-telling skills.

Special tarot stories:

-Tarot cards and also oracle cards are suitable as a tool for many different professions. Writers can use different forces to bring inspiration when writing, for example, a short story. Characters, plot twists and milieu ideas can be drawn from the pack. Since there are thousands of Tarot decks, it's easy to draw inspiration from horror to romance and everything in between. Also, for example, therapists may use different decks in their work, such as oracle cards as conversation starters. If a person has a hard time putting his thoughts into words, sometimes choosing a visual card might work as a good opening so that you can start putting the situation into words from there. Tarot therefore serves as a source of inspiration for many kinds of creative work.

Here were a few examples of what we can do with our lovely Tarot decks without asking any questions or thinking about the future. You can do these tarot things alone or with friends. Only your imagination is the limit.

Have fun playing tarot. Don't take it too seriously but enjoy, feel, learn and grow as a person by accident at the same time.

- Hanni