Tarot Journaling

Tarot journaling is the practice of keeping a written record of your engagement with tarot cards: the cards you draw, the readings you conduct, the meanings you are studying, and the reflections that arise from sustained attention to the deck. It is one of the most effective methods for developing genuine fluency with tarot because it creates a body of personal data, your own history with each card, that no guidebook can replicate.

Where a guidebook gives you a keyword or interpretation created by another reader, your journal gives you evidence of how that card has actually shown up in your life, what it pointed toward when you drew it before a difficult conversation, what it named when it appeared during a period of financial stress, what it felt like when you pulled it and immediately recognized the truth it was telling. This personal evidence becomes, over time, more useful than any external reference.

History and origins

The tradition of maintaining working notebooks in esoteric practice is ancient, and dedicated records of divinatory sessions appear throughout the history of Western occultism. Grimoires themselves were, in their original sense, workbooks: personal records of a practitioner’s magical practice rather than instruction manuals for others. Tarot journaling in the modern sense developed alongside the popularization of tarot in the late twentieth century, when the practice moved from professional cartomancers (who did keep records of sessions) to individual self-practitioners who were exploring the deck for personal development.

Contemporary tarot teachers, particularly those who approach the cards as psychological and spiritual tools rather than fortune-telling devices, have made journaling a central recommendation in their curricula. Books like Rachel Pollack’s work and the teaching of Mary K. Greer have formalized journaling as an integral part of tarot study, including specific prompts and structures that guide the beginning student.

A method you can use

A tarot journal practice can be built in layers, starting simply and adding depth as the habit becomes established.

Begin with a daily card draw section. Each morning (or another consistent time), shuffle your deck with a brief intention to notice the energy or theme of the coming day, draw one card, and write it down. Record the card’s name, your immediate visual reaction to the image, and a sentence or two about what the card might be pointing to in your day. In the evening, return to the entry and add a brief note about how the day actually unfolded. Did the card’s quality appear? If you drew the Eight of Swords in the morning and spent the day feeling trapped by overthinking, note that connection.

Add a section for full readings. When you lay a spread for a real question, record the entire reading: the question as precisely as you can state it, the spread layout you used, the card in each position, and your interpretation of each card and the spread as a whole. Include your emotional response to the reading: was it clarifying, confusing, uncomfortable? Did any card surprise you? Did any card’s appearance in a particular position seem perfectly obvious?

Add a card study section. As you work through learning the deck, devote one page or one entry per card. Write the card’s name, its number, its suit or major arcana position. Then write in your own words, without consulting a guidebook, what the card’s image suggests to you. What colors dominate? What is the figure doing, or what symbol is shown? What feeling does it evoke? After freewriting your own response, add notes from any guidebooks or teachers whose interpretation adds something to your understanding.

Include a retrospective review practice. Set a reminder to re-read journal entries from one month ago, three months ago, and six months ago. Past readings that seemed opaque often become transparent in hindsight. Note these retroactive understandings in the margin or in a separate entry. This retrospective material is some of the most valuable content a tarot journal produces.

What to record in each entry

For a daily card pull, record: date, card name, brief image observation, initial sense of its relevance, and an evening note on how the day went in relation to the card.

For a full reading, record: date, question, spread layout, each card and its position, your interpretation of each card, an overall reading synthesis, your emotional and intuitive response, and any cards that surprised or puzzled you.

For card study, record: card name and number, your own visual observations, personal associations, guidebook notes worth keeping, and any experiences where you have previously seen this card appear meaningfully.

Over time

A tarot journal kept consistently over months and years becomes one of the most valuable tools in a practitioner’s life. It reveals patterns: which cards appear repeatedly during particular life phases, which cards consistently challenge you to understand, which positions in your preferred spread tend to carry the most accurate information. It builds an archive of your own interpretation that reflects genuine growth. Looking back at entries from two years earlier, many practitioners are struck by how much their understanding of the cards has deepened and how much more confident their readings have become.

The journal also serves as a private record of the relationship between inner and outer life that tarot reveals over time. Cards do not change; what changes is the life that looks at them.

In myth and popular culture

The tradition of keeping a magical or spiritual working journal is ancient. The grimoire, in its original sense, was a personal workbook: a practitioner’s record of operations, formulas, and results rather than a published instruction manual. John Dee kept detailed diaries of his angelic communication sessions with Edward Kelley from 1583 onward, and these records, now housed in the British Library and the Bodleian, are among the most extensively studied documents in the history of Western esotericism precisely because they preserve a practitioner’s actual working notes. Aleister Crowley similarly emphasized the magical diary as a central discipline, devoting a chapter to it in Magick in Theory and Practice and keeping his own extensive records throughout his career.

In contemporary literary culture, the tarot journal has become a recognized genre with its own publishing market. Numerous pre-formatted tarot journals are sold with prompts, card images, and space for reflection, and the format has been adapted for specific decks, specific practices, and specific life situations (grief journals built around the Cups suit, for instance, or creative journals structured around the Wands). This commercial development reflects genuinely widespread practice while also standardizing something that works best when kept personally.

Rachel Pollack, whose Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980) was formative for psychological tarot, consistently recommended journaling as a central practice, and her influence spread this recommendation through generations of tarot teachers and their students. Mary K. Greer’s Tarot for Your Self (1984) built journaling exercises into the core of its methodology, treating the journal as the primary site where tarot becomes personally meaningful rather than abstractly studied.

Myths and facts

A few practical misconceptions arise around tarot journaling as a practice.

• A tarot journal does not need to be beautiful or elaborate to be effective. Ornate notebooks and expensive pens can create pressure to produce worthy entries, which sometimes results in the journal remaining empty. Any notebook that gets used consistently is better than a beautiful one that stays blank.
• Recording a reading you do not understand is not wasted effort. Confusing readings often become among the most valuable journal entries because they can be returned to with hindsight and found to have named a situation that was not yet visible when the cards were drawn. The value of a tarot journal is often retrospective.
• Tarot journaling is not a substitute for learning the cards through study and practice. The journal records experience, but experience needs some structural framework to generate insight. Beginning practitioners benefit from combining journaling with deliberate card study rather than relying on journal entries alone to teach them the deck.
• Daily card pulls do not need to be read as predictions of what will happen that day. They are more useful as invitations to notice a quality, theme, or energy that is present, not as forecasts. The evening review comparing card to day is most productive when the comparison is open rather than checking whether the prediction came true.
• Sharing tarot journal entries publicly, while common in online communities and social platforms, changes the practice. Private journaling allows for full honesty, including reactions and interpretations that feel tentative, embarrassing, or unresolved. Public sharing tends to produce more polished entries that sacrifice some of the raw material that makes private journaling most useful.