I started learning Tarot long before I had properly deconstructed my religious beliefs. More precisely, I started more in-depth Tarot studies not long after I left organised religion.
Looking back, I think that matters far more than I realised at the time.
I had begun questioning organised Christianity and eventually left the Church around my first Saturn return. But leaving a religious institution isn’t the same thing as dismantling everything it taught you about God, yourself and the nature of reality.
Some of those beliefs remained buried remarkably deep.
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So when I began studying Tarot, occultism and alternative spirituality in earnest, I wasn’t starting with a blank slate. I was trying to build a new spiritual worldview while parts of the old one were still running quietly in the background.
If I started learning Tarot today, there are many things I’d do differently.
The biggest?
I’d give myself a tradition to learn from before trying to reinvent the wheel.
I Wouldn’t Start by Trying to Invent My Own Spirituality
After leaving organised religion, the freedom of the New Age was enormously appealing.
There were no creeds to sign. No threat of hell for asking the wrong questions. No authority insisting that it possessed the only acceptable version of Truth.
After my experiences with Evangelical Christianity, that freedom was something I needed.
The problem was that I went from one extreme to the other.
Instead of having a rigid framework in which everything had already been decided for me, I suddenly had virtually no framework at all.
Tarot. Astrology. Angels. Energy healing. Eastern philosophy. Paganism. Mysticism. Channelling. Crystals. Psychology. Manifestation. Whatever resonated could be added to the spiritual soup.
Some of it was useful. Some of it wasn’t.
More importantly, there wasn’t always a reliable way of telling the difference.
I spent years trying to assemble my own spiritual cosmology from disconnected pieces. In retrospect, I was trying to reinvent a wheel that people such as A. E. Waite, Israel Regardie and generations of Western esotericists had already spent considerable time constructing.
I simply didn’t realise that the wheel was available to me.
I Wish I’d Discovered the Western Mystery Tradition Earlier
By the Western Mystery Tradition, I mean the broad stream of Western esotericism incorporating subjects such as Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, ceremonial magic and Christian mysticism.
These traditions don’t all teach precisely the same thing, nor should they be collapsed into one homogeneous system.
What they provide is context.
That is what I was missing.
If you’re learning the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, for instance, you’re not dealing with 78 pictures that appeared spontaneously in 1909 and are simply waiting for your intuition to decide what they mean.
The deck emerged from a particular esoteric environment.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith were both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Behind the deck lies a vast network of Western symbolism involving astrology, Kabbalah, elemental correspondences, Christian mysticism and ceremonial magic.
You don’t have to believe everything taught within those traditions.
You don’t even have to practise magic.
But knowing the symbolic language changes how you read the cards.
I Would Learn Tarot’s Grammar Before Trying to Write Poetry
This is probably the advice I most wish somebody had given me.
Learn the grammar before trying to write poetry.
Intuition matters enormously in Tarot. I certainly wouldn’t want to remove it from Tarot reading.
But intuition becomes much more useful when it has something substantial to work with.
If you understand why a particular symbol appears on a card, what its planetary correspondence means, how its element behaves, where it sits numerically within its suit and how earlier Tarot traditions treated that card, your intuition isn’t restricted.
It has more material available to it.
The difference is rather like learning a language.
Eventually, you stop consciously thinking about grammar every time you speak. You simply speak.
But that fluency didn’t arise because grammar was unnecessary. It arose because the underlying structure became internalised.
It’s not that I didn’t study the grammar at all. I studied it in parts rather than as a whole. For instance, I quickly memorised numerological meanings and astrological correspondences, but without understanding the larger framework they belonged to.
Tradition gives intuition something to push against, converse with and occasionally disagree with.
I Would Study Tarot History Much Earlier
I’d also go further back than the Golden Dawn.
If I were beginning again today, I’d want to understand historical Tarot and the Tarot de Marseille before assuming that the Rider-Waite-Smith system simply represented what Tarot had always been.
When you understand what came before Waite and Smith, you can begin to see what they inherited, what they altered and what those alterations reveal about the esoteric ideas behind their deck.
You also become less likely to treat modern Tarot conventions as ancient wisdom simply because they’ve been repeated often enough.
This is one area where access to scholarship has improved enormously since I started learning Tarot.
I’d make use of it.
I Was Learning an Esoteric Christian Tarot While Running Away From Christianity
This is perhaps the greatest irony of my Tarot journey.
I spent years trying to understand a deck created under the direction of an esoteric Christian mystic while assuming that Christianity and the occult were mutually exclusive.
I had good reasons for making that assumption.
The Christianity I had encountered as a teenager taught me that occult practices were dangerous and that human beings were fundamentally sinful creatures in desperate need of salvation.
Tarot belonged firmly on the forbidden side of the fence.
So when I eventually escaped that worldview, I naturally ran in the opposite direction.
What I didn’t know was that Western Christianity has its own long, complicated and frequently suppressed mystical and esoteric history.
There were other ways of understanding Christ.
There were other ways of thinking about Scripture, creation, the soul and our relationship with the Divine.
Had I known that when I first encountered Tarot, I wonder how different my spiritual journey might have been.
Ironically, decades later, studying the Western Mystery Tradition helped bring me back to Christ.
Not through fear of hell.
Through love of Truth.
But I Understand Why I Shied Away From the Golden Dawn
There’s another side to this story.
It would be easy for me to look backwards and wonder why I didn’t simply throw myself into the Western Mystery Tradition decades ago.
The truth is that some of the people publicly representing occult traditions didn’t exactly make them look appealing.
I had already experienced religious authority, spiritual ego and people claiming privileged access to Truth. I wasn’t particularly keen to sign up for another version of the same thing wearing a robe.
Then there was the Golden Dawn itself.
Here was an organisation responsible for an extraordinary synthesis of Western esoteric teachings that managed to fracture remarkably quickly amid personality clashes, competing claims to authority and some spectacular occult egos.
I looked at that and backed away.
In hindsight, however, I was confusing the tradition with some of its representatives.
That’s something I would do very differently today.
A Tradition Is Bigger Than Its Representatives
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is this:
The value of a tradition is not determined by the character of everyone who has represented it.
I’ve had to learn this lesson more than once.
People behaving badly in the name of Christianity don’t necessarily tell me anything about Christ.
Occultists behaving badly don’t necessarily invalidate the systems they studied.
Human beings have an astonishing ability to bring ego, politics, status-seeking and interpersonal drama into almost anything.
Spirituality is certainly no exception.
If I were starting again, I still wouldn’t rush to join an occult order.
What I’d change is my assumption that studying a tradition means submitting to the people who claim authority within it.
It doesn’t.
I can read Agrippa without treating Agrippa as infallible.
I can learn from Waite without agreeing with Waite about everything.
There is nothing stopping me from learning Golden Dawn correspondences without recreating the Golden Dawn.
I can learn from Israel Regardie without turning him into a guru.
The tradition gives me a body of material to engage with.
What I do with it remains my responsibility.
I Needed Freedom Before I Could Tell the Difference Between Structure and Control
This is why I don’t regret my years exploring the New Age.
I needed them.
After experiencing authoritarian religion, I needed to discover that nobody could dictate what I was allowed to think about God.
I needed to question and experiment.
I needed to encounter ideas that would previously have frightened me.
Most of all, I needed freedom.
What I didn’t yet understand was that structure and control are not the same thing.
A tradition can provide structure without demanding obedience.
Historical sources can provide context without becoming Scripture.
A teacher can point towards something without becoming an authority over my spiritual life.
The Western Mystery Tradition could have given me a map without telling me where I was required to go.
I Would Deconstruct Before Trying to Reconstruct
There’s another thing I’d change if I could.
I’d pay much more attention to the beliefs I was carrying with me into Tarot.
Leaving a religion doesn’t automatically remove its theology from your nervous system or imagination.
I discovered that rather dramatically.
Years after leaving organised Christianity, unresolved religious trauma contributed to two periods when I returned to Evangelical Christianity out of fear. During the first, in 2020, I became convinced that my occult practices had been wrong and threw my entire collection of esoteric books and decks into a recycling skip.
Yes.
I still wince.
Eventually, I realised that I had tried to reconstruct my spirituality without completely understanding what I was reconstructing it from.
If I were beginning my Tarot journey today, I’d ask myself difficult questions much earlier.
What do I actually believe?
Which beliefs have I examined?
Which ones am I merely reacting against?
What am I afraid might happen if Christianity turns out to contain some truth?
What am I afraid might happen if it doesn’t?
Am I exploring something because I genuinely believe it, or because it is the opposite of something I was taught?
Those questions would have saved me a great deal of flailing.
I Wouldn’t Ask Tarot to Give Me Ultimate Truth
This one makes me smile because Tarot is extraordinarily good at helping us explore uncertainty.
And yet we sometimes use it in an attempt to eliminate uncertainty altogether.
Which religion is true?
Which spiritual path should I follow?
Was that synchronicity a sign?
Which deity is contacting me?
What does the Universe want me to do?
Tarot is such a flexible symbolic system that it can easily become incorporated into whatever worldview we’re currently constructing.
If I started learning Tarot today, I’d be much more cautious about asking the cards to tell me what reality ultimately is. I’d use them to explore questions, notice patterns and examine possibilities, allowing space for Mystery rather than expecting the cards to provide certainty.
But I wouldn’t expect 78 pieces of cardboard to resolve two thousand years of theological debate before breakfast.
What I’d Actually Recommend to a Tarot Beginner Today
If somebody asked me now about learning Tarot, I wouldn’t tell them to suppress their intuition and memorise a mountain of occult correspondences before they’re allowed to touch the cards.
Where’s the fun in that?
I’d encourage them to read cards from the beginning.
But I’d study alongside the practice.
Learn some Tarot history.
If you’re using the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, learn something about Waite and Pamela Colman Smith.
Explore the Tarot de Marseille and see what changed when the RWS appeared.
Learn the basic elemental structure of the suits.
Learn some astrology.
Explore the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
Read about Hermeticism and the Western esoteric tradition.
Find out where these ideas came from rather than relying entirely on modern Tarot books repeating interpretations of interpretations of interpretations.
Then question all of it.
Keep what proves useful.
Challenge what doesn’t.
And allow your personal relationship with Tarot to develop from informed engagement rather than either blind obedience or complete rootlessness.
How This Is Changing Angelorum
These realisations aren’t purely retrospective. They’re also changing the direction I’m taking with Angelorum.
After nearly two decades of writing about Tarot and spirituality online, I’m increasingly interested in going back to the foundations. Rather than treating Tarot as a free-floating divination system onto which almost any spiritual idea can be grafted, I want to explore it more deeply within the Western Mystery Tradition that shaped the deck I have worked with for most of my life.
That means paying closer attention to Tarot history, Hermeticism, astrology, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Renaissance magic, angelology and the esoteric Christian currents that once seemed incompatible with Tarot to me. It also means revisiting some of my older work with better sources and a much clearer understanding of the framework behind the correspondences I learned piecemeal all those years ago.
I’m not interested in replacing one form of dogma with another. Nor am I abandoning intuition, personal experience or the freedom to question what I’ve inherited. If anything, having firmer roots gives me greater freedom to explore because I finally know what I’m agreeing with, adapting or departing from.
Roots Without Dogma
If I could go back and hand my younger self one thing, it wouldn’t be a better Tarot deck. As far as I’m concerned, Pixie Smith achieved perfection, as did whoever originated the Marseille Tarot.
No. I would hand myself a map.
For years, I thought the choice was between accepting somebody else’s spiritual truth or inventing my own from scratch.
I no longer believe those are the only options.
Tradition can give us roots without requiring unquestioning obedience.
Scholarship can give us context without killing Mystery.
Structure can support intuition without controlling it.
And Tarot can become more interesting, not less, when we understand the centuries of philosophy, religion, magic, art and human questioning that sit behind the cards.
Perhaps I needed to take the long way around to understand that.
But if I started learning Tarot today?
I’d still wander. I’d just take a map.
