I just ordered my first deck. What shoul

Learn the method of looking at one card, not the meanings — and the card agrees: the draw came up Page of Swords, Reversed, in the Current Guidance seat.

Page of Swords upright is the quick student — curious, sharp, learning by asking good questions. Reversed, that energy points inward and scatters: you can end up collecting manuals, meanings lists, and other people's spreads while never laying a card down yourself. The risk for a first deck isn't learning too much theory; it's learning *about* tarot instead of reading cards.

What that means in order:

1. Structure first, and only structure: 22 Major Arcana (the big arcs), four suits — Wands (action), Cups (emotion), Swords (thought), Pentacles (material) — plus the four court figures in each suit (Page, Knight, Queen, King).
2. Then one card, three lines: what's in the picture, then position + orientation, then suit or major. That order is the reading; meanings come after.
3. Positions modulate, they don't decide: the same card in "advice" versus "obstacle" behaves differently, so the seat is half the sentence.
4. Only then a spread — three cards is enough for months.

The conditional: if, when the box arrives, your first instinct is to open a meanings book or a beginner's guide, that's the reversed Page — preparation standing in for practice. If your first instinct instead is to pick one card at random and describe it out loud before checking anything, the reversed card's sharpness turns inward where it helps, and the deck starts teaching you instead of the other way round.

One step, today: when the deck lands, shuffle and draw a single card — write down three things you can see in the picture, plus its number and suit, and only then open a reference to see what it says. Keep that note; it's your first reading and the note is the real deck in your hands.

Want this drawn as a picture, or this reading saved to your journal?