I know what you’re thinking. The Thoth Tarot is beautiful and mystical, but it’s a lot when you’re starting from scratch. I thought the same thing. When I got mine, I opened the box and fanned out the cards on the bed in front of me, gazing in awe at the artwork and all the symbolism and glyphs and letters … and put them all right back in the box and put it away. It took a chance encounter with a video about the Tarot and the Qabalah, which turned out to be more a crash-course tutorial on how to use the Thoth, to inspire me to try again. I remember one thing from that video and it’s not something the speaker said, but what they did: they used the Thoth just like any other tarot deck. My eye was opened. I can do that!

I don’t mean to say that the Thoth is just like any other tarot deck. We know it’s extra. But you don’t have to use all of the extra every time you do a reading with it. You can use the Thoth Tarot just like any other Rider Waite Smith-based deck, especially to start with, while you’re getting familiar with the look and feel of it. But once you do that for a while, if you fall for the deck like I did, I think you’ll find you want to do more with it because there is so much more. When you’re ready, you can explore your options.

The trick for me was learning to break it down into systems, or approaches, and learning about what attracted me. For example, when I’m reading the Minor Arcana, I use Astrology a lot, and it’s easy because the correspondences are right there. If you draw the 8 of Disks, the Sun glyph is there at the top and the symbol for Virgo at the bottom. When I’m reading Court Cards, I refer to the Four Worlds (and the Four Elements) associated with each card. The Tarot Zodiac Wheel is really helpful – it will show you the astrological connections for Knights, Queens, and Princes, as well as the Minors they rule.

Astrology isn’t the only system that Crowley brought into his deck. You can also work with the Hebrew alphabet, the I Ching, the Four Worlds, Numerology, Geomancy, and of course Qabalah and the Tree of Life. This is the system that I primarily use to work with the Majors, and in fact all of the cards in a reading: I place the cards where they belong on the Tree of Life and look at the relationships between them.

One system I also use is what we could call the RWS comparative method. After all, both the Rider Waite Smith and the Thoth ultimately came from the same place: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They are two interpretations of very similar concepts, and if I look at the RWS version of a Thoth card that has stumped me, its RWS counterpart always nudges me back on track.

This is also a helpful method to use with the more challenging cards in the Thoth Tarot. Look at the 7 of Disks for example. It’s called ‘Failure’, and it looks like it. It’s dark, dank, and stodgy. On its own it’s pretty harsh, but if we compare it to the RWS 7 of Pentacles, there is now some context. We see the potential result of our work (if we don’t change something), or perhaps the result of waiting too long to act.

Some of the artwork on the cards in the Thoth Tarot is alarming, there’s no way around it. They look like doom and gloom, and if you’re already suspicious of the deck, they might put you off completely. The way I read these is as a heads-up – as ‘unless you change your path, this will happen’. The 10 of Swords is called ‘Ruin’. If I only had this card to work with, I would see it as a warning and then look back in the suit of Swords to see where and how the problem started, and this would be my advice. The 9 of Swords is Cruelty – usually towards oneself, and usually in the mind – which is better than Ruin, but still not great, so we look back one more to the 8 of Swords, Interference. Here we find something to work with: clear up misconceptions that lead to self-criticism, for example, and avoid the Ruin that comes with self-defeat.

If you want to work with the Thoth Tarot, the most important thing – above all of this – is to take it out of the box and use it. Don’t wait for a video to fall into your Inbox before you start exploring all the wisdom and inspiration this amazing deck has to offer.

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