Review: 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card

"Mary K. Greer's 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card" (Mary Greer)

In this book, the author many consider the mother of modern Tarot shares 21 methods for drawing meaning from the cards. It's packed with exercises and examples. Some of these will be familiar to anyone who reads cards; many, though, will teach new twists on familiar techniques.

Is 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card the new Tarot for Yourself, destined to be a classic work? Does it deserve a spot on your Tarot bookshelf? For answers to these questions -- and to hear about my own experience with the book -- read on!

The reading process taught in this book distills Mary's decades of experience into a series of simple, approachable reading techniques. If you've ever had the privilege of having a reading with or taking a class from Mary, you've seen many of these techniques in action.

In practice, these techniques tend to blend together into "the reading." In the book, Mary isolates each technique, expanding each one into a chapter. The "quick and simple" application of the technique is described under the heading, "The Way of the Apprentice." The more in-depth application of the same technique is discussed under the heading, "The Way of the Adept."

Each chapter is peppered with activities designed to help readers explore the techniques and try them on for size.

Anyone with experience reading the cards has used some (and perhaps many) of these techniques before: describing a card, working with suit and elemental correspondences, exploring the numerological meanings, chatting with card characters, telling stories.

In almost every case, though, Mary offers a new twist on the familiar material. For example: I've been telling stories with the cards for years, dealing from three to five cards to represent beginnings, complications, and conclusions. One exercise in Mary's book encouraged me to see what might happen if I thought of these cards as one wide card, ignorning their borders and, in my mind, fusing the images into one.

Suddenly, instead of facing the 10 of Cups, Death, and the Emperor, I was facing a single story: a happy family, celebrating the fact Death had passed them by, even as Death himself approached the Emperor to ask payment for having spared them.

So: there's something for everyone here -- creative, common sense tools you can employ again and again when reading the cards for yourself and others. Think of the book as a practical toolkit, packed with tricks, techniques, and applications designed to make you a more clever, capable reader.

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