The short answer is YES! It is totally OK to read Tarot for yourself. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that reading Tarot for yourself is even more valuable and more impactful than having your Tarot cards read for you by a professional.

The standard modern tarot deck is based on the Venetian or the Piedmontese tarot. It consists of 78 cards divided into two groups: the major arcana, which has 22 cards, also known as trumps, and the minor arcana, which has 56 cards. Moon, the 18th card of the major arcana.

The Tarot Deck Decks are based on various themes such as nature, animals, fantasy, dragons, etc. The most common deck in the United States is the Rider-Waite deck, which was created in 1909 by A.E.

Reversed, the card signifies something with a weak influence. Consider upright cards as fully developed aspects of a situation, topic, or personality. Reversed cards indicate a facet of life or the personality that needs development.

Reversal cards can tell you when the card is an internal influence rather than and external one. If you’re using both upright and reverse cards, then upright will indicate that something is an external influence and reversed will be an internal influence.

UPDATE November 5, 2011: I’ve been getting a lot of hits on “Tarot card order” so I’ll lay it out, so to speak. The short answer to whether or not you need or put the cards back in the original order is ‘no. ‘ You do not need to do anything.

Is there a right way to shuffle tarot cards? Short answer: “There is literally no right or wrong way,” explains astrologer and tarot reader Bess Matassa. That being said, if you’re someone who craves a more regimented shuffling approach, here are a few to try out.

Reversals can be tricky because they’re often quite negative, which can distract from the true value of the reading. They can also create confusion in inexperienced readers, so if your Tarot reader is not very experienced, he or she may not realize reversals are even a thing, or how to properly interpret them.

If you use the reversed direction, you should refer to a few ways of shuffling so that both the upright and reversed cards can appear in one Tarot spread. The easiest way is to cut the deck into a number of different piles and put each pile in an upright/reversed order alternately, then shuffle them up.

Let’s get back to how to shuffle tarot cards, which is actually really simple:

1. Open your tarot card deck, and cleanse it if it’s brand new.
2. Hold the cards and ruminate on a question you’d love guidance in answering.
3. Then focus on that question and shuffle the cards in whatever way you see fit.