tarot for a new year 💫

finding your archetypal allies

As we ease into 2024, I’ve been thinking about tarot as a tool for transitioning into a new year: for beginning a new cycle, empowering and supporting us through phases of change and transformation, and helping us channel and name our dreams for the future. There are a handful of popular ways to work with the cards at the start of a new year — including exploring the collective card of the year (based on numerology) and pulling a year ahead spread, both outlined below — along with countless other ways you can choose to work with your deck.

For many folks, the start of a new year feels like a time ripe for diving into new practices, developing new routines and habits, and shaking things up. If you’ve been feeling called to start working with the tarot or to deepen your existing practice, maybe January will feel like the right time to do so!

The practices I touch on below range from getting to know one particular card intimately to examining all seventy-eight cards and choosing which ones you’d like to look to for inspiration and guidance throughout the year. Choose one, try them all, or come up with a system entirely your own. ✷

If you’re based in the Hudson Valley and want to explore these practices in community, I’m hosting Tarot for the Year Ahead, a beginner-friendly workshop at Ritualist in New Paltz on Thursday, January 18th! You can find more info and sign up here.

The Collective Card of the Year

Each year is ruled by a card from the Major Arcana (if you’re not familiar, the Major Arcana is the name given to the first twenty-two cards in the tarot, which represent big, overarching themes and archetypes.) The Major Arcana goes from card zero (The Fool) to card number twenty-one (The World), but when we’re using numerology with the tarot — which we are here — The Fool becomes number twenty-two (since we’re talking about adding up digits to get a sum, and that sum will never come out to zero.)

To find a year’s corresponding card, simply add up the individual digits in the year (so for 2024, you’d add 2+0+2+4 to get 8.) Card number eight in the Major Arcana is Strength, so that’s our collective card for the year. That means that collectively, we’ll be in Strength energy this year: we may experience Strength themes, find the lessons of the Strength card popping up over and over, or find it helpful to look to the Strength card for guidance and wisdom. Because it’s going to be such a prevalent energy for 2024, you may want to spend some time with the card: examine its imagery in the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck or the deck of your choice, pull it out of your deck and place it on your altar, or reflect on a time when you felt like you were in a Strength phase.

To briefly touch on the themes of the Strength card and what it might mean for the year ahead, I want to refer to the words of one of my favorite voices in tarot, Lindsay Mack. Lindsay has an incredible offering each year called The Threshold — where they offer a deep dive into the card of the year — and the following excerpt appears in the course’s description on Lindsay’s site:

2024 is an 8/Strength year — a year of profound change, true alchemy, and new beginnings. Strength kicks off a whole new cycle for us collectively, bringing us into the second line of the Major Arcana after being in the first line of the Major Arcana since 2020. Thanks to the Leo rulership of Strength, the symbolic light is dawning, the heat is burning off some of the density and liminality of the last year, and we are ready for it.

The Strength card on a whole invites us to face the things that we’d rather avoid, witnessing them with a soft and undefended heart (where it’s plausible and safe to do so.) Our willingness to do so is in fact the catalyst for the change we’re going to be experiencing this year. Strength invites us to regulate, to stay open, to get curious: what is our heart trying to tell us? What are we longing for? what have we outgrown?

I also love the interpretation of the Strength card in the guidebook that accompanies my favorite deck, The Intuitive Night Goddess Tarot by Linzi Silverman. Speaking to the goddess that appears on the Strength card in this deck, Linzi writes:

Strength stands defiant, astride nature. She has mastered her environment by surrendering to it. She understands that our true inner power is a natural resource, reliant upon harmony…True strength comes from knowing thyself, and knowing that we cannot change others. Our inner light is our strongest power.

There are countless tarot resources out there if you want to explore different perspectives on the Strength card — I personally like to hear different takes on the card of the year and combine them with my own wisdom and intuition to come up with an interpretation that really hits home for me. I think Strength energy in 2024 is going to be a nice follow-up (or antidote, even) to the energy of 2023, which was ruled by The Chariot. Personally, I look forward to having a fiery Leo-ruled card as our guide for next twelve months!

Your Personal Card of the Year

Using numerology once again, you can calculate your personal Major Arcana card for 2024: this time, you’ll add the individual digits in your birth month and birth date to the year 2024 (so using a January 1st birthday as an example, you’d add 1+1+2+0+2+4 to get 10.) If your sum is twenty-two or less, you can match it up with its corresponding Major Arcana card. If your sum is more than twenty-two, add the individual digits together again until you get a number that's twenty-two or less (so for example, a September 28th birthday would give you 9+2+8+2+0+2+4 = 27, then 2+7 would give you a final number of 9.)

There’s a second method for this that I like to mention, because it’s the one that I use: instead of calculating your card for the calendar year of 2024, you can alternatively calculate your card for the twelve months that fall between your birthdays (in other words, you’d have a card that kicks in on your birthday and stays with you until your next birthday rolls around.) With this method, you’d want to use the year of your most recent birthday for the calculation (aka the last birthday that you celebrated.) While this method isn’t quite as popular, I choose to use it because my birthday falls at the very end of the calendar year, on December 30th. In my mind, if I were to use 2024 for my calculation, I’d be finding the tarot card that would apply to me based on my 2024 birthday — which is almost a whole year away from now! Instead, I’ll use 2023 in my calculation to find the card that kicked in for me on December 30, 2023 and be with me until December 30, 2024. If your birthday also falls towards the end of the year and that method resonates with you, you may want to go that route (but there’s no right or wrong here, it’s all about what feels good to you.) Using myself as an example, I’ll add 1+2+3+0+2+0+2+3 to get 13, the Death card.

Here’s a quick rundown of the Major Arcana number correspondences, in case you find it helpful:

Just like our collective card of the year, your personal Major Arcana card’s energy and themes may color your year ahead. I like to keep my card of the year in mind and check in every so often to see how it’s showing up and what messages or lessons it might have for me.

This is where I pause for a moment to remind you of my core belief about the tarot, and one that I’ve heard time and time again from countless tarot readers & teachers that I trust: there are no good or bad cards! Each card is here to offer lessons, guidance, and wisdom on our journey — and while some cards may be less fun to work with than others, they’re not “bad” or indicative of anything negative happening to us. My upcoming card of the year is a perfect example: while the Death card may not sound appealing (and its imagery in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck is a bit ominous, to say the least), I know that it speaks to natural and necessary endings — things that must come to a close so that we can start anew. We dance with the Death card every time we experience the closing of a chapter in our lives, whether it’s something more straightforward (like the end of a relationship or a job) or the breaking of a cycle or shedding of an unsupportive habit. If your card of the year is one that feels intimidating, remember that it isn’t here to predict outcomes or occurrences, and it doesn’t mean that you’re going to have a bad year. A Death year might look like releasing what no longer serves you in order to experience a rebirth of sorts; a Devil year might look like breaking the chains of what holds you back; a Tower year might look like necessary upheaval in order to get you closer to the life that you desire. And these cards don’t always show up in big, explosive ways, either — sometimes their presence in our lives is more subtle, gradual, or internal.

Choosing Archetypal Allies

When we work with the tarot, we don’t have to leave everything up to the universe or our intuition (or numbers, in this case) — we’re allowed to bring in our thinking mind too! While pulling cards intuitively is such a powerful practice (and, in my experience, always gives me exactly what I need), I also love intentionally choosing cards to work with: I often flip through my deck and identify a card or two that embodies the energy I want to call in, and then place it on my altar as a trusted guide.

You might want to spent some time this month choosing an ally or two for the new year, from either the Major or Minor Arcana. The 78 cards in the tarot represent such a wide range of themes, lessons, and archetypes, reminding us of all of the beautiful energies we have access to. Maybe you want to work with The Empress to prioritize your relationship to joy, pleasure, and abundance or to support your desire to birth new offerings into the world, or perhaps the Three of Cups is the reminder you need to take time to celebrate community and collective joy. If you’re planning on working towards a big goal or chipping away at an ongoing project, maybe the Eight of Pentacles will be your accountability buddy for staying focused and getting the work done bit by bit; if you’re committed to trusting your inner wisdom and following your own path, maybe The Hermit is your role model.

Whatever cards you choose, let them become your trusted confidants and helpers throughout the year. Place them somewhere where you’ll see them often, make them the background on your phone’s home screen, or photocopy the cards and carry their images around with you. Journal about how you hope to work with them, write them poems or love letters, envision yourself as your chosen archetypes and how you might move through the world if you took on their energy. Let them inspire and empower you, and revisit them any time you feel lost or need a boost of motivation.

Year Ahead Spreads

I love doing a year ahead spread at the very beginning of the year: it feels like drawing my own intuitive roadmap for the months ahead. It offers a peek into the potential of each month and some of the themes, lessons, or energies that might be most present, and it can also offer insight into the pacing of the year, reminding us that there are ebbs and flows and that everything is always in flux.

For this practice, I recommend taking some time to get grounded and centered first — you might want to close your eyes and take some cleansing breaths, meditate, or free write about your visions for the year ahead. Once you feel present and relaxed, shuffle your deck and pull a series of twelve cards, one for each of the months of 2024. You can flip each card over as you pull it, or lay all of the cards face-down first and then turn them over one by one after you’ve drawn all twelve. I like to arrange mine in a circle, starting at the top with my card for January and working my way clockwise until I reach December.

If seeing twelve different cards laid out in front of you feels overwhelming, you’re not alone! It’s a lot to take in, but I’ve always found that focusing on one card at a time — notebook in hand to jot down any thoughts and insights— makes this practice much less intimidating. Starting with my card for January, I like to unpack each card by writing down my associations with it (keywords, themes, messages) and what a month ruled by that card might look or feel like (ie an Ace of Wands month might mean diving into a new creative project or endeavor, and a Four of Swords month might invite you prioritize rest and be mindful of your energetic capacity.) It can be tempting to attach specific events to each card, but remember that the tarot isn’t meant to predict the future! The cards can show us what potential lies ahead or what themes we might want to keep in mind, but it doesn’t tell us what’s going to happen.

Once you’ve spent some time with each individual card, try to zoom out and look at the big picture: moving through the months of the year, do you notice any patterns? Is there a rhythm or flow as you move from one season to the next? Did you pull an abundance of Major Arcana cards, or multiple cards in the same suit? Maybe your year looks evenly-paced — with months of growth followed by slowness — or one season looks particularly action-oriented while another looks like a time of inward reflection.

Write down or take a photo of your spread to refer back to the coming months. I like to change up the card on my altar each month using my year ahead spread for reference — it helps me keep each month’s card at the front of my mind as I turn the page on the calendar, so I can take note of how it shows up or what guidance it might have for me. After doing this for 2023, I can confidently say that my year ahead spread resonated so much! Each card felt so spot on, but not in the way that I expected it to (which is what keeps things interesting.) Back in January 2023, I thought my spread told a particular story about how my year would play out, but it turns out I was way off — the cards that I pulled still checked out, but within an entirely different context. That’s why I suggest trying not to attach particular outcomes or occurrences to the cards you pull, because you never know what 2024 will have in store for you!

In case that wasn’t enough tarot for you, I put together a few prompts that you might want to use for a tarot spread to welcome 2024. Pull a card for each of the following and see what comes up!

1. What is my greatest lesson this year?

2. How can I open up to more ease, joy, and abundance this year?

3. In what ways / areas am I being called to grow or evolve this year?

4. What am I ready to shed or leave behind this year?

5. Where can I turn my attention when I feel lost or unclear and need to re-center?