Lo Scarabeo’s Tarot Experience is a treasure chest of intermediate ideas, activities, explorations, and practices. If you have the basics under your belt, this book will give you lots of opportunities to grow as a reader. As a reader and as someone who owns many decks, I love using more than one deck in a reading. Each deck has its own personality and its own wisdom. Here are some ways I like to use multiple decks. Use one deck to select the significator from. In a relationship reading, use one deck for one partner, one for the other, and a third for the relationship. Use one deck to lay the initial spread and say it represents what is apparent or on the surface level

Anthony Louis’ Tarot Beyond the Basics is filled with really fascinating ideas, techniques, and practices. His application of drive theory to the four suits was particularly intriguing. Here’s what he says: Psychologists love to invent theories about what motivates people. For Empedocles, the two basic drives existence are Love and Strife, which in astrology are embodied by the planets Venus and Mars respectively. Freud expressed a similar idea when he reduced human motivation to the two basic urges: libido (sex) and thanatos (the death instinct). Jung became fascinated with the four humors, based on the four elements, and came up with four fundamental personality types. Each

In Bringing the Tarot to Life, Scott Martin adapts activities that actors use to prepare for performing to tarot. Because tarot is often used for advice, I thought this example might be a good one to peak your interest in this really fun and useful book. A Piece of Advice In this exercise you are writing a letter requesting advice about a personal matter. Before you write the letter, make the following decisions: What is the specific nature of the issue about which you are seeing advice? Select a card that represents the person you think is in the best position to give you advice, and explain why. Give this person a real name, other than its tarot name. What is your

Although this book is specifically written for use with a Marseille Tarot-style deck, I found a lot of useful information that can apply to any reading with any tarot deck. Yoav includes a section on reading symbolic language in the cards. He includes categories that many of us have seen before, such as color and number, but he includes other categories that are less commonly discussed. I found the section of body parts particularly interesting. Although I never had what I consider a formal method of interpreting body parts, I realized that I do casually think about body parts symbolically. For example, I usually notice if a character is wearing any sort of headpiece such as a crown