Breaking In a New Tarot Deck

Your ultimate guide to cleansing, connecting with, and getting to know your tarot cards

🎈Hear ye, Hear ye! You are officially reading the words of a newly minted 40-year-old! 🎈

I want to thank you for your patience over this last birthday week or two as I vacillated wildly between beyond excited and empowered to be a 40-year-old badass on the one hand and being tormented and paralyzed by middle age on the other. I am happy to report that I am slowly but surely landing somewhere in between liberation and reevaluating absolutely everything, which is definitely not the worst place to be!

And to celebrate, you will be getting lots of stuff this week! In addition to this post, you will get a new Whimsical Wednesday post this week. And, we will be wrapping up our Tarot Book Club this weekend with our final live Zoom chat on Sat. 3/15 at 11:00 am PST, exclusively for paid supporters. More details at the end of today’s newsletter. Thanks so much for reading and supporting Office Hours with The Tarot Professor!

I recently became the shocked, delighted, and oh-so-proud owner of an authentic 1970s Aquarian Tarot by David Palladini - complete with all 78 cards, original box, and guide book - found at the magical Bart’s Books in Ojai, CA.

What do you do when you get a new tarot deck? Do you bring it home and wonder if you should do anything special? Or if there’s anything you’re “supposed” to do with a new tarot deck? (Emphasis on the quotation marks.)

Or perhaps you recently got your very first tarot deck. If so, welcome to the club! Now what!?

You may have heard of the need to cleanse or break in a new tarot deck so that it is ready to be your personal intuitive tool. If you’re trying to figure out how exactly to do that, this post is for you!

STEP 1: CLEANSE YOUR NEW TAROT DECK.

Before we get into the how of cleansing a new tarot deck, let’s consider why we would even do this. Because if you don’t buy into the reasoning or it doesn’t seem to make sense for you, why go through empty motions, am I right?

The purpose behind energetically cleansing your tarot deck is to allow it to attune to you and your unique intuition so that it can be as accurate and revealing a tool for you as possible. I like to think of my tarot deck as an extension of myself. It isn’t an external source telling me what to do; it’s a medium through which I guide myself to my highest good. So I need to make sure the signal between me and my cards is static-free.

If tarot decks are carrying all sorts of lingering, residual energies - from the manufacturer, bookstore, Amazon seller, or previous owner - the readings you do with your deck might come out murky or distorted and not as helpful as they could be.

You know how you might want to take the amazing vintage blazer you just scored at the thrift store to the dry cleaner just to get all that musty dusty ick off of it before actually wearing it? Same idea!

So if you’re still into the idea, read on for the step-by-step process I use to cleanse, break in, and familiarize myself with a brand new tarot deck.

There are various tools you can use to cleanse the energy of your tarot cards. Below are four different ways you may want to try. Select one or mix and match as you please.

Smoke-cleanse your tarot deck with incense.

While I’m a frankincense and myrrh girlie myself, smoke cleansing is perhaps most often done with a bundle, or wand, of dried sage. Among its other benefits, burning dried sage is believed to dispel stale, negative, or toxic energies lingering in the air. Cleansing a tarot deck, or any object really, with sage can similarly clear its energies.

Any incense or herb bundle will do the trick to rid your tarot deck of old, stale energy. Use whichever one feels right for you.

All you do is burn your sage bundle or other form of incense and move the tarot deck through its smoke. The fragrant smoke rising from the incense will purify your cards. Please don’t burn your tarot cards or rub the ashes on your cards or anything like that!

Place a smoky quartz over your tarot deck.

If you’re not a smoke or incense person (umm, hello migraines!), have no fear. You can also use crystals for cleansing tarot cards.

I like to use smoky quartz to cleanse my decks. Smoky quartz is a powerful healing crystal used for its cleansing, detoxification, and protective powers. It is believed to absorb negative and toxic energies in a room or from an object. You can remember this because of the smoky, dark color of smoky quartz. Think of it as a spiritual vacuum, sucking in all the dark energy around you so that it doesn’t mess with your vibes. That’s why it’s such a great tool to cleanse a tarot deck of negativity.

To cleanse your tarot deck with a smoky quartz, just place a smoky quartz crystal on top of your deck for as long as you feel is necessary. The smoky quartz will absorb any negative energies out of your deck, freeing it up for your use.

Ring a bell over your tarot deck.

Air signs, this one might be especially potent for you. Ringing a bell literally makes the surrounding air vibrate with new energy. As such, it can be used as a cleansing tool to clear stagnant or negative energies from your tarot deck or any space in general.

To cleanse your tarot deck with a bell, hold your tarot deck in your non-dominant hand. Hold a small, handheld bell over the tarot deck with your dominant hand. Gently ring the bell a few times. The idea is that the sound waves will disperse any lingering or clogged energies away from your tarot deck, making it free and clear for your use.

If you don’t have a bell, I bet wind chimes would also do the trick!

Give your tarot deck a moon bath.

A moon bath doesn’t involve water, so please don’t get your precious tarot cards wet! Cleansing your tarot cards with a moon bath refers to laying underneath the light of a moon, preferably a full moon.

If you can safely leave your tarot cards outside over night during a full moon, that would be ideal. That’s because the moon is most illuminated in the full phase and being outside allows the most direct contact with the moonlight. But you don’t need to wait to cleanse tarot cards under a full moon. If a full moon tarot cleanse is inconvenient, try it any time moonlight is visible.

If you are an apartment-dwelling city mouse without a private outdoor area, a nice alternative is to leave your tarot cards on the clean sill of a window that looks out onto the moon.

The tarot cards will be cleansed of any lingering negative energies and ready to be used the next day.

STEP 2: BOND WITH YOUR NEW TAROT DECK.

Now that you’ve taken care of the energy surrounding your tarot deck, we can get down to business with the cards themselves. You and your tarot deck need to bond and familiarize yourselves with one another. (If you, like me, are actually not a big fan of anthropomorphizing your deck, here’s a rewrite: You need to familiarize yourself with the cards in your deck.)

Switching to a new tarot deck is not something I like to do very often. Once I’ve been working with a specific deck for awhile, I finally master the imagery and become really fluent in reading the cards. It’s like we develop our own additional layer of tarot code, with certain cards taking on a specific meaning special to me (the King of Cups represented my husband for awhile, the Queen of Wands totally represented a certain coworker I couldn’t get away from, and the King of Pentacles started to represent a particular career path I was considering, etc.).

When you work with a new deck, naturally, you have to start all over. So be patient and put in the time to get to know the cards. Here’s what I do to jump-start this process.

First, shuffle the cards. A lot.

You can actually cleanse tarot cards by shuffling as well. In fact, you need to cleanse tarot cards between readings, and shuffling is the ideal way to do that.

But shuffling a new deck of tarot cards also helps you familiarize yourself with the cards in two ways.

First, it helps you get used to the feel, weight, and size of the cards in your hands. Shuffling can be tricky and awkward if the cards are too slick or not slick enough. Some cards are larger than others, and if you have small hands, you’ll need to practice. Other cards are designed to be more portable, which means they might be too small for comfort at first. Practice makes perfect.

The second reason I shuffle my new deck of tarot cards extensively is because I then make myself put the cards back in the right order.

Then, put the cards back in order.

Nothing forces you to look at each and every card like having to put them back in order after shuffling them a bunch. And you especially need face time with each and every card in a new deck because the imagery in some tarot decks can be quite different from what you’re used to. You don’t want an unfamiliar card to catch you off guard or stump you in the middle of a juicy reading because it’s one you’ve never really noticed before.

What’s the “right” order for tarot cards anyway? I learned the following order for the Rider-Waite and derivative decks somewhere now forgotten. Here it is for what it’s worth:

• Major Arcana (from The Fool to The World)

• Suit of Wands (from Ace to Ten, followed by the Page, Knight, Queen, and King)

• Suit of Cups (in the same order as the Wands)

• Suit of Swords (in the same order)

• Suit of Pentacles (in the same order)

If you have a different way of ordering the four suits (which together make up the Minor Arcana), have at it. But start with the Major Arcana first.

Putting the cards back in order gets you looking, examining, touching, and counting your cards. You’ll notice cards you like, cards that frighten you, cards that remind you of things or people. You’ll get a feel for the overall theme and flare of the deck’s artistry, use of color, and symbolism this way too. And, going through the cards in order shows you the overarching life narrative depicted in the cards, from birth to death and beyond.

Don’t forget to shuffle the deck again when you’re ready to do your first reading. And when it comes to a brand new tarot deck, for me, the first reading is almost always a deck interview.

STEP 3: INTERVIEW YOUR NEW TAROT DECK.

Many tarot practitioners enjoy “interviewing” a new deck to see what kind of inner work or types of tarot readings would be best suited for this particular deck and its energy.

You can also do a tarot deck interview any time you feel like you’ve disconnected from a particular tarot deck or if you haven’t used a deck in awhile and would like to start doing readings with it again.

So how does one go about interviewing a tarot deck? I’m referring to a type of tarot spread. Go ahead and search the phrase “interview tarot deck” on Pinterest. You’ll find various tarot spreads to try. Or, use the simple three-card tarot spread I created for interviewing a new tarot deck. Here it is below: