Syllabus

Course Information

  • Course format: Online, Zoom

  • Course days and times: Sundays @3pm central time

  • Time Sacrificed: For this course, you should plan to spend at least 1.5-2 hours in class per week, and a minimum of 1-2 hours of out-of-class work per week.

Course Description

This course is an initiation into tarot as a living grammar. Over five months, we’ll move from the roots of the deck into the rhythms of practice, learning not just what the cards mean but how they speak.

Each month layers a different dimension of study:

  • History & Ethics: Through Robert Place and our own reflections, we’ll ground tarot in its origins and ask what it means to read responsibly today.

  • The Majors: With Duquette and Hammer, we’ll explore the archetypal spine of the deck, moving them from abstraction into lived experience through Qabbalistic meditations on the Hebrew letters as we read through the Sefer Yetzirah.

  • The Pips: The Pips ground tarot in everyday actions and temperaments. They register the tones of energy as it moves through life—whether grief, desire, struggle, or growth. Through the Four Worlds and the decans, we’ll explore how these simple cards weave elemental, astrological, and numerical patterns into a language of lived experience.

  • Aces & Courts: With Eliade, Bachelard, and journaling practice, we’ll uncover tarot’s relational grammar—the Aces as elemental seeds of connection, the Courts as roles and masks we meet in ourselves and others.

  • Praxis: Finally, we’ll practice. Spreads, trades, feedback, and dialogue with others in the offering circle will turn study into confidence, helping you hear your own voice in the cards.

Homework 

There will be weekly assignments consisting of either reading or writing. When it comes to the required texts, please note:

  • All assigned readings will be provided in the class Drive.

  • You will never be asked to read an entire book. Specific chapters or selections will be assigned each week.

  • Homework can only be seen in the full class syllabus, available in the class drive which the student will gain access to upon purchase of this course.

Attendance Requirements

Attendance is not required though it will be hard to follow a new class if you missed the last one as all the classes build on each other. 

In order to provide students with some leeway, all classes will be recorded and available for review at any time by the current cohort only via our class drive.

Course Outline

Month 1: History and Ethics

Every language has a history, and tarot is no different. Before we can speak with the cards, we return to their origins—their invention, their migration into divination, their place in culture. Alongside history, we ask: what does it mean to read ethically? How do we honor the people, practices, and contexts that shape the cards? This month gives students a foundation: an understanding of where tarot comes from, and a framework for how to step into its use with care, clarity, and respect.

W1 - Course Goals and Expectations

W2 - History of Tarot - Origin of the Cards

W3 - History of Tarot - Tools of Divination

W4 - Ethics and Cultural Context

Month 2: Laying the Foundation - Major Arcana 

The Majors are not distant symbols but images we meet in our own bodies and lives—the Fool’s leap into the unknown, the Tower’s shock. These are felt experiences that reverberate across channels in both the material and energetic body. Through meditations drawn from the Sefer Yetzirah, we will practice recognizing these cards as embodied knowledge, learning how the Major Arcana returns again and again in the rhythms of life and in the body’s own postures of speech.

W5 - The Structural Grammar of the Majors

W6 - The Mother Trumps

W7 - The Double Trumps

W8 - The Simple Trumps

Month 3: Laying the Foundation - Pips

The Pips ground tarot in the movements of everyday life. Each card carries an actionable tone, a temperament that colors how energy is lived—through work, love, struggle, and growth. Numbers, elements, and decans weave these cards into patterns that reflect the different expressions of our sensory lives, showing us how simple images mirror the rhythms we inhabit day by day.

W9 - The Actionable Space of the Pips

W10 - Wands and Cups

W11 - Swords and Disks

W12 - Embodied Pip Play

Month 4: Laying the Foundation - Aces and Courts 

The Aces and Courts teach tarot’s relational grammar. The Aces are seeds of connection—elemental sparks that become the tools of each suit. The Courts embody these forces as roles, masks, and personalities, showing us how elemental energies take shape in our relationships with self, other, land, or event. To learn the courts, one must navigate the dialogue between seed and expression, spark and mask, inner impulse and outer relation.

W13 - The Relational Grammar of the Aces and Courts

W14 - Aces and Princess

W15 - Kings, Queens, Princes

W16 - Testing the Aesthetic Grounds

Month 5: Putting it into Praxis 

Here we put the pieces together by testing spreads, trading readings, and reflecting on what emerges. Practice with others turns tarot into a living language: every question, every pull of the cards, every exchange teaches you to listen differently. In dialogue with partners, you begin to hear how the cards speak not just to you but with you—how meaning takes shape in real time. By practicing and offering feedback, students learn to trust the deck, gain confidence in their own voice, and hold faith in the shared conversation that makes tarot come alive for each student.

W17 - Questions and Answers

W18 - Spreads; Getting Creative

W19 - Practice Makes Perfect

W20 - Final Feedback