Can you teach yourself tarot?
There is no gatekeeper in tarot. No license, no required school, no credential you must hold before you’re allowed to shuffle a deck and pull a card. Every reader who has ever lived started as someone teaching themselves something, and some of the best readers I know never took a formal course at all.
So if anyone tells you that you can’t learn tarot on your own, they’re wrong.
But “can you” and “what will it take” are different questions. And the second one deserves an honest answer, because the self-taught road has a shape, and almost everyone who walks it hits the same walls in the same places.
What self-teaching gives you
Let me start with what's genuinely good about it, because there’s a lot.
Self-teaching is free or close to it. A deck, a library card, and the enormous amount of quality content available online will take you a real distance without spending much of anything.
It moves at your pace. Nobody's schedule but yours. You can sit with the High Priestess for a month if she’s speaking to you, or move quickly through territory that clicks.
And it builds something that no course can hand you: a private, personal intimacy with your deck. The hours you spend alone with the cards, with nobody watching and nobody grading, are where the relationship forms. That relationship is the foundation of everything. Self-taught readers often have it in abundance.
What eight years taught me
I studied tarot on my own for eight years before I ever read for someone outside my own practice.
I knew the cards. I had the books. I pulled daily draws, journaled, studied symbolism. By any reasonable measure of knowledge, I was well past ready years before I actually began.
So what took eight years? Not the learning. The circling.
Without a structure, I had no way to know where I was. No sense of what came next. No one to tell me that the thing I was afraid of, reading for a real person and getting it wrong, was the exact doorway I needed to walk through. So I kept studying instead, because studying felt like progress and reading for someone felt like risk.
That’s the honest cost of self-teaching. It’s rarely the money. It’s the years.
Where self-teaching breaks down
The pattern I lived is the pattern I now watch play out in almost every self-taught reader I meet. Three walls, in order.
The first wall is sequence. Self-teaching gives you access to information: books, videos, card meanings, spreads. What it doesn’t give you is an order. Which skill builds on which. What to learn now and what to leave for later. Information without sequence is how you end up knowing a great deal about tarot without being able to do much with it.
The second wall is the gap between knowing and reading. Knowing the cards and reading them are two different skills, and nothing in the self-taught road forces you across that gap. You can study for years and still freeze the first time you lay three cards down in front of another person. Most self-taught readers stall here, some indefinitely, because crossing it requires practices that almost no book teaches.
The third wall is feedback. When you teach yourself, nobody ever tells you what you’re doing well, where your blind spots are, or that you’re ready. Every question about your own progress gets answered by the least reliable judge available: your own self-doubt. That’s how eight years happen.
How to self-teach well
If the self-taught road is yours, walk it deliberately. This is what I’d tell my younger self.
Learn on the Rider Waite Smith. Every resource you’ll ever use is built around its imagery, and its illustrated scenes will teach you before any book does.
Learn through your life, not through keywords. When you pull a card, ask what human experience it reflects and when you've felt it. You’ve known the grief of the Five of Cups. You’ve felt the restlessness of the Eight of Swords. Meanings you connect to lived experience don't leave you. Memorized keywords do.
Pull one card every day and write one sentence about it. The habit matters more than the depth. Over months, that noticing becomes a genuine relationship with the deck.
And this is the one I wish someone had told me: read for another person years before you feel ready. A trusted friend, framed as practice. The feeling of unreadiness is not a signal to keep studying. It never resolves through more study. It resolves through reading.
When a course makes sense
Not everyone needs one. If tarot is a private practice, a conversation between you and your deck, self-teaching plus time can genuinely be enough. I mean that.
A structured education makes sense when you notice the walls. When you’ve been studying for years but can't seem to actually read. When you want to read for others and something keeps deferring the moment. When you're circling and you know it.
What a good course sells isn’t information. You already have access to more information than any reader in history. It's sequence, feedback, and a built path across the gap that self-teaching leaves you to jump alone.
I built Tarot Academy as the structure I searched for during those eight years and never found: all 78 cards in genuine depth, then the intuitive development that turns knowledge into reading, then the professional path for those going that far. Not because self-teaching is wrong. Because nobody should need eight years to walk a road that structure can walk in one or two.
The next step
Tarot Academy is a complete online tarot course covering all 78 cards across 20 structured chapters, with 142+ video lessons and 37+ hours of instruction. From the cards, to your intuition, to reading for others, to the professional path. Self-paced, lifetime access, all future updates included.
Tarot Academy
The Only Tarot Course You’ll Ever Need
Most tarot courses end at the cards: Tarot Academy takes you all the way. From learning all 78 cards in full depth, to developing your intuition, to launching a professional tarot practice.
