Where the belief that you shouldn’t read for yourself comes from

This is a superstition from fortune-telling folklore, not a rule of tarot. People explain it in different ways: “the cards lie to you about yourself”, “you mustn’t look into your own fate”, “a fortune-teller shouldn’t read for herself”. None of these explanations has any basis in the primary sources on tarot. On the contrary, in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot Waite directly describes the case where the reader asks about themselves1.

That said, the superstition does contain a grain of truth: it really is hard to be objective about yourself.

The main traps of reading for yourself

  • Seeing what you want to see. An anxious person will find a threat in any card, a person in love will find a promise.
  • The Forer effect. People tend to accept general descriptions as accurate descriptions of themselves. In psychologist Bertram Forer’s experiment, 39 students rated a “personal” profile that was identical for everyone at an average of 4.30 out of 5, and it had been put together from an astrology book bought at a newsstand2. The same thing happens with tarot cards.
  • Redoing the spread. You don’t like the answer, so you draw again and again until the card you wanted turns up.
  • Reading out of anxiety. The tenth spread of the evening on the same topic doesn’t calm you down; it only winds up the worry.

How to read for yourself the right way

  1. Write down your question before the spread, so it is harder to bend it to fit the answer. How to phrase it is covered in the article “How to ask tarot questions”.
  2. Decide in advance how many cards and which spread. No “clarifying” cards once you have seen the answer.
  3. Write down your interpretation right away, then reread it in a week or a month: that shows you where you were bending the meaning.
  4. One question, one spread per day.
  5. Read the card as advice, not as a verdict. “What should I do?” instead of “What will happen to me?”.

Which spreads work for yourself

When it’s better not to read for yourself

  • If you are under heavy stress or grieving, the cards won’t replace a conversation with people close to you or with a professional.
  • If it concerns health, money or legal decisions, a spread can be a prompt to think things over, but not a basis for the decision.
  • If you lay out the cards on the same topic every day, that is a sign the question needs to be solved by something other than cards.

Read for yourself or see a tarot reader?

An outside view helps when the question hits close to home. But even then you can do the spread yourself and show it to someone who knows the card meanings: another person often sees in a spread what you missed. The meanings of all 78 cards are in the Card meanings section.

Frequently asked questions

Can I read tarot cards for myself?

Yes. The taboo is a superstition; classic tarot manuals don’t contain it. The real difficulty is something else: it is hard to read the cards impartially when the reading is about you.

Why do people say you shouldn’t read tarot for yourself?

It is a belief from fortune-telling folklore. The grain of truth in it is that it’s hard to be objective about yourself.

How often can you read tarot for yourself?

One card of the day, every day. A spread on the same question no more than once a day, and ideally once every few days or when the situation has changed.

How this article was prepared

This text was written with the help of AI, based on the sources listed below and on the questions people actually search for. Every factual statement — about the history of decks, what a deck contains, what authors wrote — has a footnote. The text was then checked by a separate AI instance that took no part in writing it: it compared the facts with the footnotes, and errors were corrected. The English version is a translation of the original Russian article.

We describe reading practices — how to shuffle, charge or “cleanse” a deck — as traditions and habits of tarot readers, not as proven methods: there is no scientific evidence for divination. Read more on our editorial policy page. Found a mistake? Let us know via the contact form.

Sources

  1. A. E. Waite. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part III, § 7: An Ancient Celtic Method of Divination. Choosing the significator, shuffling, the Celtic Cross spread sacred-texts.com
  2. Barnum effect — Wikipedia. The Forer effect: the 1948 experiment, 39 students, average rating of 4.30 out of 5 en.wikipedia.org