We’re all familiar with tarot but that isn’t the only form of cartomancy. If you’ve got a regular old deck of playing cards laying around then you can do the same work as you would with a deck of tarot cards.

With cartomancy, we have always used playing cards for divination. In the article, “A Brief History of Cartomancy” on an MIT blog (link), tarot cards as we know them now began as playing cards used in card games as early as the 1400s and weren’t widely known to be used for divinatory purposes until the 18th century.

So how do we use a 52 card playing card deck for divination? Let’s break down the parts in this brief and easy introduction:

Suits

The four suits of a 52 card deck correlate with the four suits of tarot.

I find these easy to remember since the tip of the spade is sharp like a sword, the heart equates to emotions and personal affairs, a club is often a stick which is how the wands are portrayed, and diamonds are wealth or financial matters and pentacles used to be called coins. To be honest, the suits of the 52 card deck make more sense to me than the tarot suits!

Pips and Face Cards

There are many books and guides out there on how to read playing cards but I’ve found 54 Devils: The Art and Folklore of Fortune-Telling with Playing Cards by Cory Thomas Hutcheson perhaps the most helpful. His approach keeps it simple. Here is Hutcheson’s list of meanings for the pips and faces regardless of suit (found on page ten of his book which you should definitely pick up if you want more in-depth explanations of the cards as well as card combinations and spread layouts, it’s fantastic):

• Aces: Beginnings; Primary or Solitary things

• Twos: Pairs; Couples; Exchange

• Threes: Growth; Wishes

• Fours: Decisions; Stagnation; Choices

• Fives: Groups; Bodily things; Gains/losses

• Sixes: Paths

• Sevens: Epitome cards (most concentrated form of that suit); Inversions;Trouble

• Eights: Talking; Ideas

• Nines: Patience; Ambition; Expansion

• Tens: Completion; Endings

• Jacks: Youth; Children;Messages; Peers

• Queens: Women or a particular woman; Beauty; Mothers; Nurses; Teachers

• Kings: Men or a particular man; Wisdom; Age; Power; Judges

Jokers

Maybe you’ve noticed that Hutcheson’s book is called 54 Devils while there are 52 cards in the deck, this is because of the two Joker cards usually included in a standard playing card deck.

I currently don’t use the Joker cards but many people do. Including them introduces the chance for more mystery within a reading. Hutcheson says that a Joker (especially in the future position in a spread) indicates that we are not to know or understand that part of the question asked at the time of the card pull. This is a very intriguing difference between a playing card reading and tarot reading. In tarot there isn’t really a blank card that indicates this idea. I suppose you could use the extra card sometimes included with Thoth decks for such a purpose, but RWS decks don’t really leave room for mystery and the unknowable.

Red and Black Colors

While not a practice I use, many people look for overall positive vs negative readings or Yes/No readings. I believe that there’s positives to be found in every reading but everyone intuits the cards differently. Generally, the red cards are positive/yes and the black cards are negative/no. This isn’t always a hard truth, however. As Hutcheson writes, “the seven of spades can mean ‘tears’ but if those tears are near lots of red cards, they are likely tears of joy.” It’s important to read the cards in conjunction with the cards they’re next to, they’re telling you a story.

Spreads

There are endless cartomancy spreads in the world and there isn’t one specific one to promote here. Use the spread that feels right for you and/or the answers you’re seeking from the reading. I tend to stick to the simple three card pull, though I don’t ascribe the positions of past, present, and future; I use the three cards to give me the three parts of a story: beginning, middle, and end.

Study

To help learn this system I got an inexpensive deck of Bicycle playing cards (I think it was around $4) and an ultra fine point Sharpie. I’m marking interpretation notes directly on the cards:

Doing this helps me stay in the zone, so to speak, when doing a reading. I don’t have to pick up my iPad to find the card in the book for each one. I can just look at the whole thing with my notes right there. This also help me to relate the cards to each other since I can see them next to each other with their meanings. Give it a try, it’s helping me learn this way of reading cards a lot!

I hope this simple introduction to divination with playing cards will help you begin or to at least give it a try!

Once again, I very much recommend Cory Thomas Hutcheson’s book, 54 Devils: The Art and Folklore of Fortune-Telling with Playing Cards for a truly in-depth but understandable explanation of these concepts if you want to dive deeper into using playing cards in your practice. I find these cards much more approachable than tarot since there isn’t a ton of symbology and iconography to unpack, all you have to worry about is color, suit, and number, (plus, they’re easier to slip into a pocket to carry around too!).

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