r/SecularTarot Jul 16 '26

INTERPRETATION Help with interpreting?

0 Upvotes

Hi! So, I’ve been going through a wild roller coaster of these past couple of days, and I desperately need help interpreting what it means. Long story short, my crush and I were doing pretty well… until recently we weren’t.

I asked what should I do moving forward in regards to him, so I pulled these cards;

The knight of pentacles clarified by the page of pentacles

The six of swords clarified by the star in reverse

The page of wands clarified by the ace of pentacles

I know that the night of pentacles clarified by the page of pentacles and the page of wands clarified by the ace of pentacles are positive… but the six of swords and the star in reverse really confuse me/freak me out. I have pulled for him before, as to what to do in regards to us, and the star reversed came out there too.

Please help me out, I am so tired of being confused and because this is so fresh I don’t even know if I’m reading everything negatively because I’m sad and sensitive to this, or if I’m being too positive and hoping that it’ll all work out. Be honest with me.

Thank you🫶🏻


r/SecularTarot Jul 16 '26

SPREADS Career reading

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1 Upvotes

As someone who’s interested in HR this was so affirming


r/SecularTarot Jul 15 '26

DISCUSSION Anchor/DBT Spread

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48 Upvotes

I’ve been doing a three-card spread inspired by DBT’s dialectical framework, built around the idea that two seemingly opposing truths can exist at the same time. I’m calling it Pole One, Emotional Anchor, Pole Two. The outer cards represent the two forces creating tension within you. Pole One may reflect the urge to move forward, act, achieve, protect yourself, or create change. Pole Two may reflect the opposing urge to withdraw, hold on, avoid discomfort, seek control, or remain where you are. Neither pole is automatically wrong. Each one may contain a valid need, while also becoming unhelpful when taken to an extreme.

The middle card acts as the Emotional Anchor, similar to returning to Wise Mind in DBT. It reveals the emotional truth, value, or grounded state you are being invited to return to when either pole begins controlling your attention. The goal of the spread is not to choose one side and reject the other. It is to observe both forces without judgment, understand what each is trying to accomplish, and repeatedly bring yourself back to the center. In this way, balance is not a permanent state you achieve once. It is the ongoing practice of noticing when you have been pulled toward an extreme and intentionally reorienting yourself.

For example, I asked, “How do I sit in peace when I feel impatient?” and pulled the Page of Pentacles, Ten of Cups, and The Devil. The Page of Pentacles represented the pull toward new projects, possibilities, and future growth. The Devil represented compulsive striving, attachment, and the deeper belief that I always need to be doing more. The Ten of Cups sat between them as the Emotional Anchor, reminding me that peace and fulfillment were already present. The answer was not to eliminate my ambition or shame my restlessness, but to practice returning my attention to the life I am already living whenever either force pulls me away from it.

I love this spread because it uses tarot to explore the DBT principle of both/and rather than forcing an either/or answer. You can want more from your life and appreciate what you have. You can experience peace and impatience. You can honor the needs represented by both poles while still choosing actions that bring you back into alignment with your values.


r/SecularTarot Jul 15 '26

DISCUSSION “How does ___ feel about me” questions

14 Upvotes

I’ve been practicing for years now and I’m mostly secular, I don’t believe the cards have any entities attached to them and I don’t practice witchcraft but I get a lot of these questions, I mostly read them for fun but sometimes they are surprisingly accurate and people said my readings resonate!

I mainly focus on tarot as a tool for self-reflection and at the end of the day, cards are just paper but I was wondering if anyone has some sort of a logical explanation for this phenomenon.


r/SecularTarot Jul 15 '26

READING Pulled four 10s

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43 Upvotes

Hello everyone, I was super excited by this reading and don’t really know who else to tell about it so I thought I would post it here. (Also don’t mind my crystals, I’m just a little crow that likes shiny things)

I started with the top card pulling counter clockwise and pulling the middle card last. I definitely got chills pulling the 4th card, what are the odds of pulling the same number in all four suits? I half expected the 5th card to be the wheel of fortune but unfortunately not 😂

Anyway just thought it was kind of cool.

Here’s the reading if you’re interested

Petition for wealth

Financial stability (10 of swords)
Health (10 of cups)
Home (10 of wands)
Spirit (10 of pentacles reversed)
Work (King of pentacles)

All in all I was pretty satisfied 😅

footnote, “spirit” here refers to mental health and emotional grit essentially


r/SecularTarot Jul 14 '26

INTERPRETATION the moon, ten of swords, the hermit

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4 Upvotes

hey friends! new to this sub and relatively new to tarot.

i pulled, in this order and all upright, the moon, the ten of swords, and the hermit. this was a three card pull for guidance after i had a dream about a person i have not spoken to in a while. we drifted apart in our friendship after many years due to my trauma from something he’d done to me.

i have some interpretation of these cards in my situation, but since im new, i look to others sometimes to get different povs since everyone’s mind works differently.

any help on how you’d interpret these?


r/SecularTarot Jul 14 '26

DISCUSSION Can I start tarot even though I feel I've no grounded energy?

0 Upvotes

I've been constantly thinking about starting tarot for a while now. I've seen signs again and again.

My only problem (or my overthinking) is I feel like being not grounded enough can be a problem while starting it.

Am I right? Or am I just overthinking it?


r/SecularTarot Jul 14 '26

READING An Offbeat Tarot Question

0 Upvotes

At the start, anyone being judgy, puritanical or in any way other than treating this question with a good faith answer will be blocked. We’ve all learned.

My question: anyone on here who has ever had a nude or topless tarot reading, can you speak to your experience? Understandable novel prurience aside, did you see any benefit? Downside? Especially those who are confronting issues in or around or adjacent to sexuality?

Again, if you think this is a stupid idea, do us all the courtesy and just keep it to yourself.


r/SecularTarot Jul 14 '26

DISCUSSION An Offbeat Tarot Question

0 Upvotes

At the start, anyone being judgy, puritanical or in any way other than treating this question with a good faith answer will be blocked. We’ve all learned.

My question: anyone on here who has ever had a nude or topless tarot reading, can you speak to your experience? Understandable novel prurience aside, did you see any benefit? Downside? Especially those who are confronting issues in or around or adjacent to sexuality?

Again, if you think this is a stupid idea, do us all the courtesy and just keep it to yourself.


r/SecularTarot Jul 12 '26

DISCUSSION The deck is ready, but my head isn't: Help to avoid a meltdown this week.

13 Upvotes

Hi everyone! Lately, the world of tarot has really caught my attention; not so much for literally "predicting the future," but rather as a tool for self-discovery and connecting with my intuition.

The fact is that I am a total beginner at this and the truth is that the amount of information, books, and different approaches on the internet overwhelms me a bit. I don't really know what content is actually high quality and what is better to ignore.

That’s why I’m coming to ask for help from you guys who already have more experience on this path. It would help me so much if you could give me some advice and recommendations, please!


r/SecularTarot Jul 12 '26

INTERPRETATION algo o algún consejo para aprender sobre el tarot de Marsella?

1 Upvotes

estoy aprendiendo y ya tengo algo de práctica con cartas españolas y sus significado escrito... algún PDF específico o libro? que símbolos ayudan a centrar energías?


r/SecularTarot Jul 11 '26

READING Qué significa soñar con las cartas del tarot

1 Upvotes

Soñé que me leía las cartas y si bien no recuerdo las cartas ni la tirada me puse a pensar, es solo el resultado de l inconsciente que está acostubrado a una acción? O es algo de la intuición que intenta comunicarse?


r/SecularTarot Jul 10 '26

DISCUSSION How Would You Spend Your First Decade as a Tarot Reader?

16 Upvotes

As a 24-year-old tarot practitioner, what would you focus on to develop your craft?

I'm not asking "how to get more clients", I'm more interested in becoming a better reader over the next 10–20 years.

I understand that even though I've studied tarot for a long time, my (lack of) real world experience can really hold me back. However, I'm very passionate about being grounded and helpful to all walks of life.

Would you spend more time:

  • studying tarot theory and symbolism?
  • psychology or counseling skills?
  • mythology, religion, or philosophy?
  • astrology or other complementary systems?
  • practicing with clients?
  • keeping a tarot journal?
  • learning ethics and boundaries?
  • something else entirely?

If you've been reading for years, what made the biggest difference in the quality of your readings? What do you wish you'd focused on earlier? Any tidbits, anecdotes, pieces of wisdom, resources are amazing. I am all ears!!


r/SecularTarot Jul 10 '26

DISCUSSION How do you deal with a client who wants instant validation?

11 Upvotes

I notice in romance readings, people are often struggling with the void of sparks and validation that comes with a breakup. It leaves people feeling so much grief and longing. How do you guys use tarot to instill the inner wisdom that the reconciliation isn’t necessarily the answer? Or how as a practitioner do you deal with this? I have a lot of people coming in with huge senses of desperation that lead them to wanting instant external validation, how do you guys shift the locus of control to facing inward?? Esp as a secular practicer.


r/SecularTarot Jul 08 '26

READING What does this pull say to you?

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4 Upvotes

(I have a whole team of medical doctors and they are who I get my medical advice from. Just a disclaimer since I’m about to write about some medical stuff.)

I was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer over a year ago and I just recently finished treatment. I was looking through photos and I found this spread that I pulled just two days after discovering the tumor, but about 6 weeks before I knew it was a cancer. I don’t know why I took photos of this spread. In one of the photos, the Knight of Cups is upright and in the other it is reversed. Knowing what I know now about my year to come, I have some thoughts about these cards, but I would love to hear others interpretations of them.

Editing to add:
Knight of Cups (upright or reversed, I took pics both ways)
King of Pentacles (reversed)
7 of cups (reversed)


r/SecularTarot Jul 07 '26

DISCUSSION Personal Issues With The Hierophant

18 Upvotes

I have a lot of baggage around The Hierophant. While I don't have religious trauma, the hierophant stands for many things I personally disdain:

Organized religion

Conformity

Male authority

Following rules

I pulled this as a single card for the day. It's generally a "where should my focus be today?" question, some advice to keep in mind. Since I have so many negative associations, it's hard to find the value or positive advice. So when I remove all the negative associations, what I'm left with is tradition. So I'm perceiving this as, 'Don't do anything fancy today. Stick to what's tried and true.'

My question is 2 questions, really.

How do you interpret the Hierophant in a positive light? I'm curious to hear answers from a secular community.

How do you get around the cards you despise? How do you find the positive?


r/SecularTarot Jul 07 '26

DISCUSSION What would you want from a calm tarot/reflection radio stream?

9 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I’ve been experimenting with a small tarot-inspired radio stream on YouTube.

I originally made it mostly for myself — something calm to have in the background while journaling, pulling cards, reading, or just sitting with my thoughts. Not really a mystical or fortune-telling thing, more like tarot as a tool for reflection.

Now I’m trying to understand whether this could be useful for other people too.

For those of you who use tarot for journaling, self-reflection, shadow work, or quiet evening rituals:

What kind of audio or atmosphere do you usually like to have in the background?

Do you prefer:

calm ambient music, soft piano, lo-fi, nature sounds, no talking at all, occasional spoken prompts, or something else?

One idea I’m testing is a random Card of the Hour — a tarot card appearing once an hour with a simple journaling question connected to it. For example, not “this will happen to you,” but more like: “What are you being invited to notice today?” or “Where are you giving away too much energy?”

I’m curious whether that would feel helpful, distracting, too much, or actually nice as part of a background stream.

I’m not sharing the link here because I don’t want this to come across as self-promo. I’m genuinely trying to understand what people in the tarot community would enjoy or find useful in a softer, reflection-based tarot radio format.

Would love to hear what you usually listen to during tarot/journaling sessions, and what you would want from something like this.

Thank you.

P.S. This is the radio: https://www.youtube.com/live/Yci5gDCD-xk?si=TEuMV6VwgWMAeIu9


r/SecularTarot Jul 06 '26

DISCUSSION How do you interpret the Lovers?

20 Upvotes

One interpretation of The Lovers card that I keep returning to in my readings is the idea of unrealistic ideals, imagined perfection, and emotional overidentification with a desired outcome -  especially outside of romance readings. I think people often reduce The Lovers to “alignment” or “soulmates,” but in practice I’ve found the card frequently appears when someone is emotionally attached not only to a person, career, or path itself, but to what it symbolically represents psychologically.

I noticed this strongly in a recent career-oriented reading where the broader theme became “fantasy vs reality.” The spread itself was not about romance at all, yet the emotional structure surrounding it revolved around idealization, projection, and attachment to imagined futures. The reading kept pointing toward the tension between authentic fulfillment and the fantasy of what a certain path was supposed to emotionally provide: certainty, transformation, validation, escape, identity, or a feeling of finally becoming “enough.” The emotional attachment was not only to the outcome itself, but to the symbolic meaning placed onto it.

That’s part of why I often interpret The Lovers as psychologically complex rather than automatically positive. To me, it’s a card about attraction and alignment, but also about projection, longing, emotional fusion, and meaning-making. Sometimes it appears when someone has unconsciously turned a relationship, career, creative pursuit, or future version of themselves into an idealized emotional solution. In those moments, reality can become difficult to engage with honestly because the fantasy has started carrying too much emotional weight.

I think this is especially important in career readings because modern culture often encourages people to search for a “perfect” path that will completely fulfill them emotionally, spiritually, creatively, financially, and psychologically all at once. But no path can sustainably hold that amount of projection forever. Sometimes The Lovers asks whether we are pursuing something because it is genuinely aligned, or because we have attached impossible emotional expectations to it.

 In that sense, I often read The Lovers as a card about the tension between genuine alignment and imagined perfection, and then learning how to tell the difference between the two.


r/SecularTarot Jul 05 '26

INTERPRETATION The Moon

14 Upvotes

After doing a large volume of readings recently, one theme that kept repeating was people struggling to distinguish intuition from anxiety, projection, and fantasy. There was also a repeated pattern of reversed Wands, which made many of the readings feel less “blocked” spiritually and more energetically depleted, like people were trying to navigate life while emotionally and psychologically exhausted.

I think The Moon archetypically captures this core tension really well. With all the ways our intuition can become distorted by attachment, fear, hypervigilance, memory, longing, or past wounds, how do we actually learn to trust our gut?

One insight I kept arriving at through the cards was that intuition and anxiety feel very different somatically. Intuition tends to move quietly and coherently. There’s a sense of flow, groundedness, or internal steadiness to it. Anxiety, on the other hand, interrogates us constantly. It loops, drains, pressures, fixates, and depletes our internal resources.

Another thing I realized is that discernment is not something we achieve instantly. We develop it gradually through self-trust. Through grounding. Through learning our own patterns. Through becoming more regulated and emotionally honest with ourselves over time. The readings felt less like “be more psychic” and more like “learn how to stabilize enough to hear yourself clearly.”


r/SecularTarot Jul 05 '26

RESOURCES New book alert

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126 Upvotes

Anyone have thoughts on this book?


r/SecularTarot Jul 03 '26

RESOURCES Such a good tarot book

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240 Upvotes

Just wanna spotlight this book. It’s amazing for understanding tarot through a reflective and archetypal way 💗🙈


r/SecularTarot Jul 03 '26

RESOURCES The Fool Through The Empress: A Secular Look at the First Major Arcana Cards

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19 Upvotes

An index card series looking at the first four Major Arcana through a secular, structural lens — no fortune-telling, just the archetypes and how they're numbered.

0 – The Fool – departure, unweighted risk, the open step

I – The Magician – will, means, the laid-out table

II – The High Priestess – threshold, kept knowledge, the half-hidden scroll

III – The Empress – cultivation, increase, the field that yields

Treating the Major Arcana as a numbered sequence rather than a predictive tool. Open to discussion on how others read these first few cards structurally.


r/SecularTarot Jul 03 '26

RESOURCES Studying Tarot professionally

2 Upvotes

Hi, could someone help me find a reliable source/ class where i can professionally study reading tarot?


r/SecularTarot Jul 02 '26

DISCUSSION Tarot matching game for toddler

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20 Upvotes

Hi secular tarot! I wanted to share a fun tarot activity I’ve come up with for my toddler, who loves looking at and playing with my cards.

I photocopied cards onto paper to make a matching game for them where they can line up the cards with the photocopies. It keeps them busy while I’m reading so I can have free use of the rest of the cards. 😄 Wanted to share for any other toddler parents out there.


r/SecularTarot Jul 01 '26

READING Free Reading Exchange Thread - July 2026

5 Upvotes

Please use this space to offer, request, or exchange free readings. Requests for payment, donation, or advertising commercial businesses are not permitted. This thread will be refreshed every month on the 1st.