Tarot by Tempest: Playing with Numbers, Meaning & Movement

by Laura Tempest Zakroff

Discover tarot the Tempest way with this creative approach to the numbers, elements, and energetic motion of the cards.

Join Laura Tempest Zakroff on a journey that can revolutionize the way you look at math, magic, and tarot. Using a unique system she developed over twenty-five plus years, Laura helps you understand the cards without needing to memorize meanings. With her guidance, you can build innovative practices centered around card numbers, embody magic in your movements, gain confidence as a reader, and much more.

Laura's methods have been proven in many workshops and classes, and the math she incorporates is not as hard to learn as you may think. Using the symbolism of numbers and simple arithmetic, you can interpret spreads and connect more deeply with the cards' energy. You can also design new spreads and improve your pattern recognition skills.

Laura teaches you to find the rhythm in tarot's numbers and symbols. Once you do, you can embody their meaning as you dance with your intuition.

240 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2026

About the author

Laura Tempest Zakroff (she/they) is a professional artist, author, performer, and Modern Traditional Witch based in New England.

She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her artwork has received awards and honors worldwide. Her work embodies myth and the esoteric through her drawings and paintings, jewelry, talismans, and other designs.

Laura is the author of several bestselling Llewellyn books including Weave the Liminal, Sigil Witchery, Visual Alchemy, and Anatomy of a Witch, as well as the artist and author of the Sigil Witchery Oracle, Anatomy of a Witch Oracle, The Liminal Spirits Oracle. Laura edited The New Aradia: A Witch’s Handbook to Magical Resistance, The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance, and Serpents of Circe: A Manual to Magical Resilience from Revelore Press.

Laura is the creative force behind several community events and teaches workshops online and worldwide.

Visit her at www.LauraTempestZakroff.com.

Reviews

[Thomas Pinneck]

Tarot by Tempest immediately appealed to me because Laura Tempest Zakroff approaches the cards through structure rather than received meanings. Her use of number, shape, proportion, pattern, and movement gives the deck a kind of internal grammar, which is far more useful than simply adding another layer of keywords to an already overcrowded symbolic system. The numerological work is especially strong because it is not treated as a decorative correspondence pasted onto the cards after the fact. Number becomes a way of seeing relationships between cards, tracking development through a spread, and understanding why certain visual forms carry particular kinds of momentum. For readers who already know tarot well, that shift in emphasis can make very familiar cards feel strangely fresh again.

The embodied component is even more unusual. Zakroff’s background as a dancer and performer clearly shapes the way she reads posture, gesture, direction, expansion, contraction, balance, and spatial relationship in the imagery, and the exercises invite the reader to experience a card physically rather than only interpret it intellectually. I found this much more compelling than I expected, because tarot is already a profoundly visual system and movement exposes qualities in an image that can disappear when one immediately translates everything into language. Her approach also makes pattern recognition more transferable between decks, since one learns to notice what an image is doing rather than depending entirely upon fidelity to Rider-Waite-Smith iconography. The sections on designing spreads and using arithmetic to explore relationships among cards extend the same philosophy into actual reading practice.

What I like most is that the book manages to be innovative without requiring the invention of an entirely new occult cosmology around tarot. Zakroff works with things that are already visibly present in the cards and simply teaches the reader to notice them more rigorously: number, geometry, direction, rhythm, gesture, and relationship. Some practitioners will undoubtedly connect more readily with the mathematical material than with the movement exercises, or vice versa, but the methods are modular enough that one can experiment without adopting the whole system wholesale. After decades of tarot literature built around increasingly elaborate sets of assigned meanings, there is something refreshing about a book that returns attention to observation itself. Tarot by Tempest ultimately teaches a way of reading rather than a list of things to remember, and that makes it useful well beyond the particular deck sitting on the table.

[Sidney Eileen]

Tarot by Tempest, by Laura Tempest Zakroff, is anything but your typical book about the tarot. Yes, it has definitions for the meanings of the cards, but also so much more than that. It invites you to engage not just with the individual cards, but with the entire complete system that the cards exist within (the entire deck), mind (math), body (movement), and soul (intuition).

Tempest uses the numbers of the cards to illuminate those meanings, and how those meanings interrelate, as a way to glean more information out of the cards involved in each drawing. In their method, no card exists in a vacuum, even when you only draw a single card, because that card is related to the other cards in the deck, including the major arcana. Yes, there is math involved, but they make it very approachable by describing the how and the why behind it. No rote memorization is required.

Movement and the body get involved through their observations of the poses in the cards and the shapes associated with the numbers, like a triangle for three and a square for four. Tempest invites you to move your body in alignment with the cards, and to listen to how those movements make you feel, to glean even more meaning from the cards. They demonstrate that the stability of the four and the square perfectly mirrors the stability of the Emperor, and feeling the forward motion of the Chariot brings one into alignment with the card.

But most of all, Tempest encourages you to listen to your own intuition, pulling on all that you can observe about the art, the numbers, the interrelations, to build more and more insight.

If you are a lover of varied spreads, Tempest provides several inspired spreads, giving insight into why they are structured the way they are, so they make sense intuitively. They also provide insight on making spreads in general, helping guide you and encouraging you to make your own spreads.

But that is not all! There is also solid advice about caring for your deck and finding the right deck for you. At the end of the book, Tempest gives substantial down-to-earth advice for anyone contemplating becoming a professional reader, drawing upon her own experiences as a professional reader and independent businessperson.

From absolute beginner to established professional, I have no doubt that this book would be a valuable and insightful addition to any collection of books on the tarot.

[Julian Mercury]

I have reached the point where I become suspicious whenever a tarot book promises to teach me the meanings of the cards. Meanings are not particularly difficult to acquire. The harder thing is learning to look at a spread and notice what is happening across it. Laura Tempest Zakroff starts much closer to that problem. Numbers repeat, figures face toward or away from one another, elemental qualities accumulate, visual patterns form, and suddenly the cards are behaving less like seventy-eight vocabulary words and more like a language with grammar.

Her use of numbers is the part I found most interesting. There is some arithmetic involved, but thankfully nobody is required to become an accountant for the High Priestess. Zakroff uses number as a way of recognizing rhythm and development across the deck. Once you begin understanding what one, two, three, four, and so forth are doing conceptually, the Minor Arcana becomes much easier to reason through. A Five of Cups and Five of Pentacles do not need to be memorized as two unrelated entries because five itself is already contributing something to both cards, while the suit changes how that pattern manifests. This is the sort of structure I wish I had been taught when I first learned tarot.

Movement adds another layer that feels particularly characteristic of Zakroff. She is an artist and dancer, and she keeps asking the reader to notice direction, posture, relationship, rhythm, and the physical arrangement of the cards. A figure walking toward another card creates a different sentence from the same figure walking away from it. A cluster of cards can feel compressed, expansive, stalled, or suddenly accelerated. None of that requires psychic revelation. It requires paying attention, and attention has always been one of the foundations of divination.

I am not sure every experienced reader needs an entirely new tarot system, and there were places where my own established habits resisted being reorganized. That may actually be why I enjoyed the book. Zakroff gave me another set of questions to ask while looking at cards I have known for years. What number is repeating? Where is the spread moving? What is visually dominating the reading? What changes if I stop naming the cards long enough to look at them? A tarot book that gives an experienced reader new ways to see is considerably more useful to me than one that gives the Two of Swords another paragraph of keywords.

[Jen]

Laura Tempest Zakroff has a genuinely fresh way of getting people into tarot. Instead of asking you to memorize seventy-eight meanings and then panic when the cards refuse to behave, she starts with numbers, elements, shapes, energy, rhythm, and movement. That makes the deck feel like a living pattern rather than a stack of flash cards. I especially liked the invitation to embody the cards and notice their motion, because tarot is often taught as if it happens entirely from the neck up. Her approach is playful in the best sense: it gives you permission to experiment, make connections, create spreads, and let intuition develop alongside structure. The number work is more accessible than the word “math” might make you think, thankfully. My only hesitation is that this is very much Tempest’s own system. Readers looking for a conventional history of tarot, a traditional Marseille method, or exhaustive RWS and Golden Dawn correspondences may feel like they have walked into a dance class when they expected a lecture hall. The book also occasionally moves quickly from a personal symbolic insight to a larger claim, and I wanted a little more room for other ways of working. Still, for readers who feel stalled by rote learning, this is imaginative, body-aware, and full of useful sparks. It made me look at the numbered cards with fresh eyes.

[Jon Daniels]

Zakroff basically takes tarot apart into numbers, elements, symbols and movement so you can actually read whats happening in the cards instead of memorizing 78 little speeches and hoping one fits. The movement stuff is especially clever because once you start watching where figures are looking, leaning or pointing the whole spread starts behaving more like a scene than a pile of definitions, and theres good material on building your own spreads too. Ive read tarot long enough to be suspicious of anybody promising a new system but this gave me a few genuinely different ways to look at cards I thought I already knew.

[Erica Lyn]

This book did not disappoint. When I first heard Tempest talk about tarot in a sigil class, I was intrigued by her approach. Tarot by Tempest explores the magic, math, and movement present in the cards in ways that no other tarot book does. There is something here for novices and experienced readers, and it’s a great read. Her voice is clear in her writing and she has a great se sense of humor. Highly recommend.

[Eddie Cichoracki]

DNF.