So you want to learn to read tarot cards?

Before I start this review, I should say that I have nothing to personally gain from recommending the following book. The author has become a good friend and mentor. What's contained in the book is the key to the way I read tarot cards, so I'm essentially giving away my greatest secret. Still, if you want to learn how to read tarot, I don't think you could do any better than to start with this book.

Review: Looking at the Marseilles Tarot by Enrique Enriquez

I approach this review as someone who tried numerous times over the years to learn to read the Tarot. Every time I failed, because most methods rely on having to learn predefined card meanings, and that approach just did not work for me. Thus, the blurb from the publisher, Minds Eye View, for Looking at the Marseilles Tarot – Notes on Tarot’s Optical Language by Enrique Enriquez, intrigued me:

If you've avoided learning a Tarot system because "there's too much to memorize", you'll find yourself pleasantly surprised when you discover that you can start almost immediately, using the simple approach Enrique lays out for you in this easy-to-read and entertaining e-book.

This 33-page e-book is actually the lecture notes from a class that Enrique taught. I will get my negative comments out of the way first: I did not find this book “easy-to-read”, at least not at first. While I could get a sense that there was some great information within its pages, its somewhat academic language almost scared me off prematurely. I ended up sending an e-mail to Enrique explaining my difficulties and asking for some help, and this started a little flurry of e-mails between the two of us. Enrique, so generous with his valuable time, calmed my anxiety with a little series of exercises that got me off to a fantastic start. Please do not let my problem, or this description of it, put you off buying the book. To me, it was a revelation.

Briefly, Enrique’s approach to reading the Tarot involves forgetting about those canned descriptions and meanings that comprise most books on the subject, and using the images on the cards themselves to create a narrative we can apply to the particular situation in which we are interested.

To do this, Enrique recommends using the Tarot de Marseille, and more specifically, the Jean Noblet Tarot, an early Marseille type tarot. The reason, Enrique explains, is that the Marseille tarots are free of the layers of imagery that have been added by more recent authors to ensure copyright or to push personal theories. While you could use any tarot deck, a Marseille-style tarot works particularly well for Enrique’s approach.

Don't be concerned by the fact that the Minor Arcana in such a deck is free of the type of unambiguous images that appear in a deck such as the Rider-Waite. Enrique explains that this can work in our favor, and with a bit of work we can still find meanings in the seemingly abstract nature of these cards. This can be done at a later stage, however; we can start using the cards from the Major Arcana right away to give readings, and work on the Minor Arcana if and when it feels right. I have to say that I did not find this stressed in the book; correspondence with Enrique made this point clear for me.

Using a “traditional” tarot course, one has to learn a set of “meanings” for each card before even thinking about doing a reading. Either that or you have to keep consulting a book while doing a reading. With an understanding of the common-sense approach described in this book, you could start with readings almost immediately.

I would describe this book as good for complete beginners, for those who are frustrated with trying to learn card-meanings and those who want to try a radically different approach to tarot readings. I think it would be more useful to beginners if Enrique added a supplement to this book to include some general advice about the process of performing readings, although the book does contain some examples of readings.

Obtain Looking at the Marseilles Tarot by Enrique Enriquez from http://www.mindseyeview.com/marseilles-tarot.html