El arte psíquico del tarot

by Mat Auryn

Awaken your inner eye and strengthen your psychic senses with the tarot. Drawing on decades of experience as a professional reader, bestselling author Mat Auryn presents a comprehensive guide to unlocking your psychic potential. He shows you how to unite traditional tarot techniques and your own intuition, which will enhance your readings with astounding levels of accuracy and insight.

With 78 exercises, meditations, and rituals accessible for practitioners of every experience level, The Psychic Art of Tarot provides step-by-step instructions for understanding your unique psychic style and mastering an array of skills. You'll explore the arts of mediumship, soul alignment, seeing and strengthening auras, clearing negative energy, scrying, forming powerful relationships with your higher self, and many more.

Genres: Witchcraft, Tarot, Spirituality, Magick, Nonfiction, Occult, Divination

360 pages, Paperback

Published January 19, 2026

About the author

Mat Auryn is an influential author and teacher in the fields of occultism and witchcraft, with an audience that extends beyond the United States to an international level. His deep knowledge and experience come from years of dedicated study, practice, and training in a variety of occult traditions and esoteric orders, often under the guidance of prominent knowledgeable mentors. His award-winning books Psychic Witch and Mastering Magick offer practical insight and practices for those interested in psychic and magickal practices. He is also the author of The Psychic Art of Tarot and co-authored Pisces Witch with Ivo Dominguez, Jr. The books draw from a range of traditions such as astrology, Hermeticism, Wicca, Traditional Witchcraft, New Thought, Thelema, parapsychology, Jungian analytical psychology, Neoplatonism, and alchemy, making them versatile yet accessible guides for the spiritual seeker. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into more than thirteen languages, widening their impact.

To find out more about him and his work visit www.MatAuryn.com or follow him on instagram @matauryn

Reviews

[Erika]

This is an excellent book on HOW to read a tarot or oracle deck. I love that it is independent of any deck, even though its examples/references are all rider-waite-specific. I also love that it gives examples of what the exercises can look like since it allows for further clarification and context. If you've read Mat's other two books that proceed this one, some of the exercises will seem familiar but not identical. While you don't need to have read those books to read this one, they will provide additional context and understanding. It will also mention pages for those other books when referencing topics covered in more depth in those other books.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in enhancing their readings, whether for themselves or others. I will reference this book many times in the future and plan to use several exercises moving forward.

[Thomas Pinneck]

Mat Auryn's The Psychic Art of Tarot stands as the most important contribution to tarot literature in decades, addressing a gap that has long existed within the field. It seamlessly integrates psychic abilities into tarot practice. For years, tarot guides have focused solely on card meanings, spreads, and surface-level interpretations, but Auryn’s book takes the reader much deeper, connecting the cards to their own innate psychic potential. This is not merely a tarot book; it is an invitation to transform one’s practice into something more profound, intuitive, and powerful.

What makes The Psychic Art of Tarot so crucial is its accessibility without sacrificing depth. Auryn masterfully guides readers, whether they are beginners or experienced practitioners, through a system of exercises, meditations, and rituals designed to enhance psychic abilities alongside tarot readings. The inclusion of 78 different practices, each corresponding to a card in the deck, provides readers with actionable steps to align their readings with their psychic senses.

Auryn’s approach not only fills the long-overlooked gap in psychic development within tarot literature but also pushes the boundaries of what a tarot reader can achieve. By emphasizing practices such as mediumship, scrying, and energy work, Auryn encourages readers to tap into layers of divination that most tarot books never touch upon. His style is practical yet transformative, equipping readers with the tools they need to achieve unprecedented accuracy and depth in their readings.

What truly sets The Psychic Art of Tarot apart from other tarot books is its holistic approach. Rather than treating tarot as a set of mechanical interpretations, Auryn presents it as a living, dynamic art form that responds to the reader’s psychic attunement. This is where the book excels. It teaches you how to connect with the cards beyond traditional methods, turning the process of divination into a deeply personal, psychic experience. The result is readings that feel not only accurate but also profoundly aligned with the querent’s soul and the reader’s energetic awareness.

In a field saturated with guides that fail to transcend basic techniques, The Psychic Art of Tarot is the book we have been waiting for. Auryn brings forth an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to evolve their tarot practice into something more intuitive, insightful, and magical. This is, without question, the best tarot book of its kind, setting a new standard for tarot literature and psychic development alike.

[Wendy Werthmann-Harding]

A other amazing exploration

Don't start this book expecting a tarot guidebook. Most decks come with one, and this is definitely not that. This book is well written in easy to follow language. It is assembled thoughtfully with a clear path to follow and guided experiences that explore the wealth of knowledge to be gained. The narrative and exercises in this book provide a portal to a relationship with your deck that will enhance your experience exponentially, whether you read at your kitchen table or outing the world for others.

[Amie]

Do you want another way to look at tarot? Do you want ideas to delve deeper? Then read this book. This is not a Tarot 101. You should already have at minimum a basic knowledge of the card meanings. *not for beginners*

[Amy Vaccaro]

Mat did it again. May never fails to not only write an amazingly well written book, but again gives so many ways to improve your craft! From all the exercises, to the technique building skills, this author has managed to write a fabulous book for both the novice as well as the seasoned tarot reader. Well done. Well done.

[Sylvia Moore]

Mat Auryn’s The Psychic Art of Tarot is hands down the most transformative Tarot book I’ve read in years. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is the book I wish I’d had on my shelf from day one. Mat has this way of making you feel like he’s sitting across from you, explaining things in a way that just clicks. It’s not just that his knowledge is vast—it’s how he brings it to life with such genuine passion that makes every chapter feel like a conversation instead of a lecture.

What really stands out is his ability to weave psychic development directly into your Tarot practice. I’ve gone through my fair share of books that promise to teach you how to be more intuitive, but Mat’s approach feels so much more hands-on and practical. He goes beyond the basic exercises and dives deep into the subtle details of working with your “inner eye.” I found myself trying out his methods for tuning into psychic impressions, and I swear, they changed the way I see the cards. I started noticing things in readings that I’d missed before—things that went beyond symbols and keywords.

One exercise in particular—his approach to scrying with the Tarot—was a total game changer for me. I’d always thought of scrying as something separate from Tarot, but the way Mat integrates it into the card imagery blew me away. The first time I tried it, I felt like I was stepping inside the card itself, and it brought a whole new layer of depth to my readings. That’s what this book does over and over: it takes what you thought you knew and pushes you to go deeper, see more, and trust what you find.

But what I love most about The Psychic Art of Tarot is the tone Mat sets throughout. It’s empowering without being fluffy. He’s not just giving you information—he’s guiding you to find your own way, to develop your own psychic style. Reading his chapter on soul alignment felt like a wake-up call, reminding me that Tarot is more than just a tool; it’s a mirror for your own spiritual growth. It’s not about getting “correct” readings—it’s about building a practice that feels true to you. That’s a rare gift in a Tarot book.

This is the kind of book that keeps surprising you. Even now, I find myself flipping back to sections and catching insights I missed the first time around. If you’re serious about Tarot and want to go beyond memorizing card meanings, The Psychic Art of Tarot will change how you see the cards—and yourself. I can’t recommend it enough.

[Beverley]

-loved the explanation of how there are different ways to read tarot. Psychic or card interpretation and traditional symbolism. Helped me as I struggle with memory and have to look up the meaning every time.

Intro compares art and psychic abilities, you need to practice and develop it over time which was so inspiring and refreshing to hear.

Love the exercises though once again the meditations should be available online by now not just written in text this would make them more accessible

Text is small but the book is soft and opens easily so not a problem for those of us with hand pain etc

Loved that there was no mention of chakras or any other cultural appropriation. I prefer to call them energy centers also and I loved this

Most of the exercises only require you and your tarot deck making them very accessible

The section about fear and imposter syndrome is an important one. It's something we all deal with and should be talked about more often

Talks a lot of the intersection between science and spirituality which is so fascinating.

Love how everything is explained in such an accessible way with tv shows books and movies often referenced helped you to picture and understand concepts

Not everything is based on being able to visualise which is so important as not everyone can do this. Many options are given based on all our senses

[Kayleigh]

Psychic Witch by Mat Auryn is an absolute gem for anyone looking to deepen their psychic and magical practice. As a professional tarot reader, I’ve found this book to be an invaluable resource that has significantly enriched both my readings and psychic work.

Auryn’s approach is practical, accessible, and deeply empowering. I highly recommend reading the entire book before diving into the exercises—this allows you to absorb the foundational concepts and approach the practices with the depth and understanding they deserve. Take your time with it; there’s no need to rush. Each exercise builds on the last, creating a beautifully layered path toward psychic development.

Whether you’re new to psychic work or have years of experience, Psychic Witch offers insights and techniques that will resonate and inspire. It has become a staple in my magical library, and I’m sure it will in yours, too!

[TamaraO]

Mat Auryn did it again! Fantastic work 👏 I will keep this one close as I will go back to it often.

[Hayden Farrar]

I've been reading tarot professionally for ten years, and The Psychic Art of Tarot is the tarot book I wish I'd had much earlier in my practice because it addresses the question that eventually arises after you've learned what all 78 cards mean: now what? There are already countless excellent books explaining the symbolism, history, correspondences, spreads, and traditional interpretations of tarot. After a decade of reading professionally, I don't need another few hundred pages telling me that the Three of Swords means heartbreak. Mat Auryn assumes we've learned the language of the cards and focuses instead on developing the person who is actually doing the reading. For me, that is exactly why this book stands out.

I've seen people complain that there isn't enough tarot in it, which honestly surprised me because the entire book is about becoming a better tarot reader. Tarot is being treated as a psychic instrument rather than simply a symbolic language. The cards provide the structure, but Auryn is interested in everything that can happen around and through them: the image that suddenly appears in your mind, the physical sensation that makes no obvious sense until the client responds, the detail you somehow know but can't locate anywhere in the card, or the moment when a familiar card seems to be communicating something completely different because of the person sitting across from you. After thousands of readings, I've experienced moments like these more times than I could possibly count. This is one of the few tarot books I've encountered that actually asks us to investigate what is happening in those moments and develop it deliberately.

That's the distinction I think some readers miss. This isn't a book about learning tarot meanings. It's about psychic reading with tarot. Those are related skills, but they aren't identical. You can become extraordinarily knowledgeable about tarot symbolism without developing psychic perception, just as someone can have strong intuitive or psychic impressions without knowing anything about tarot. Auryn is interested in what happens when those two skill sets are deliberately trained together, and as someone who has spent ten years reading for actual clients, I think that distinction is incredibly important.

The 78 exercises are a huge part of why I loved it. I don't see their number as excessive at all. I see it as the book actually delivering on its promise to train something rather than merely discussing it. Psychic development is a skill-based practice. You cannot learn clairvoyance by reading a beautiful description of clairvoyance any more than you can learn piano by reading about scales. At some point you have to sit down and practice, get things wrong, notice what a genuine impression feels like, distinguish it from your expectations, and gradually develop greater consistency. Professional reading makes that especially obvious because clients give you a tremendous amount of feedback over the years. You begin recognizing which kinds of impressions tend to be reliable for you and which ones require more caution.

I also don't think anyone needs to perform all 78 exercises immediately or treat them as homework assignments that must be completed before they're allowed to continue reading. I approached them as a toolkit. Some exercises immediately clicked with me, some challenged me despite my years of experience, and others became things I wanted to return to later. Having that much material means the book can continue serving you as your abilities develop instead of being exhausted after one read. That's something I particularly value at this point in my practice because so many tarot books are written for beginners and give an experienced reader very little reason to return to them.

Some of the exercises may look simple on paper, and I've seen that simplicity mistaken for a lack of originality. But effective training exercises are often simple. The point isn't to invent increasingly bizarre occult techniques simply so nobody has seen them before. The point is to isolate a particular ability and train it. After ten years of professional reading, I'm much more interested in an exercise that improves a specific aspect of my reading than one that merely sounds impressive. What I found original was the curriculum itself: taking psychic-development techniques and systematically integrating them with tarot so that the cards become both a divinatory system and a training device.

I particularly appreciated the emphasis on reading other people because that is where psychic tarot reading becomes genuinely challenging, and it's where this book speaks directly to my experience as a professional. When you read for yourself, you already know an enormous amount about the person you're reading. Your hopes, fears, memories, expectations, and preferred outcome are all sitting at the table with you. When someone you've never met sits down across from you and gives you little or no information, you suddenly have very different conditions. You have opportunities to discover whether an impression actually corresponds to something outside your conscious knowledge. For anyone interested in reading professionally, that kind of training is invaluable.

That doesn't mean solitary readers have nothing to gain from the book. Quite the opposite. Many of the underlying skills can be practiced alone, and learning to distinguish observation, interpretation, intuition, imagination, and psychic impression dramatically improves self-reading as well. But I appreciated that Auryn doesn't pretend reading yourself and reading a stranger present exactly the same challenges. They don't, and a decade of professional reading has made that distinction extremely clear to me.

I was especially interested in the way the book encourages you to move beyond the visible content of the card. A tarot card might give you the symbolic doorway, but the reading doesn't necessarily have to stop at what is printed on the cardboard. That's something professional readers eventually discover whether anyone teaches it to them or not. You pull a card you've seen hundreds of times, but something entirely different happens during this particular reading. Your attention locks onto a tiny detail you've barely noticed before. An unrelated memory surfaces. You hear a phrase internally. You suddenly know that the card is referring to a specific situation that isn't contained in any standard interpretation. Once you become comfortable allowing those impressions to arise alongside the traditional symbolism, the cards become less like flash cards containing predetermined definitions and more like interfaces through which information can unfold.

The skepticism about whether psychic ability exists at all doesn't particularly bother me in evaluating this book because The Psychic Art of Tarot isn't trying to be a philosophical defense of psychic phenomena. It's a practical occult book written for people who want to explore psychic perception. After ten years of doing this professionally, I'm far more interested in whether a technique produces useful results in practice than in endlessly debating whether I should be permitted to describe those experiences as psychic. I wouldn't expect a book on ceremonial magic to spend half its pages proving magic exists before teaching ritual, and I don't need a psychic-development book to litigate the existence of psychic ability before every exercise. What matters to me is whether the practices give readers opportunities to experiment and evaluate their own results.

In fact, I think doing the exercises is considerably more useful than simply believing everything you're told. Psychic development shouldn't mean interpreting every random thought as supernatural revelation. If anything, professional reading teaches you the opposite. You have to become comfortable being wrong. Practice gives you opportunities to notice patterns, compare impressions with outcomes, receive feedback, and gradually learn the difference between a strong hit, a vague association, wishful thinking, and something that simply didn't land. Over ten years I've learned that discernment isn't something you acquire by declaring yourself intuitive enough. You develop it through repeated experience and feedback. A training system that gives you repeated opportunities to test yourself is much more valuable to me than one that simply tells you to trust every feeling.

I also appreciate that Auryn doesn't treat intuition and psychic ability as mysterious gifts that either descend upon you at birth or remain forever unavailable. The underlying message is that perception can be trained. Maybe different people begin with different aptitudes, just as they do with music, art, athletics, or meditation, but improvement comes through deliberate practice. I've watched my own abilities change tremendously over ten years of professional reading, so that aspect of the book rings particularly true for me. Things that once felt uncertain became recognizable through repetition, and impressions that were initially faint became much easier to distinguish once I understood how they tended to present themselves.

What really changed for me through Auryn's approach was the relationship between card knowledge and perception. Even after ten years, I found myself reconsidering habits that had become automatic. Instead of immediately reaching for the memorized meaning when a card appeared, I began giving myself a moment to notice what happened first. Where did my attention go? What detail suddenly seemed unusually important? Did an image arise? Did I feel something physically? Did a word appear in my mind? Did the card remind me of something that seemed completely unrelated but later proved relevant? Only after noticing those things did I bring traditional interpretation into the reading. That small change made even familiar cards feel more alive again.

That's why I think The Psychic Art of Tarot works especially well for intermediate and experienced readers. Eventually you reach a point where memorizing another fifty keywords isn't going to transform your readings. You know the cards. I've known them for years. The next frontier is learning more about yourself as the reader: how you perceive information, how you recognize intuition, how imagination interacts with divination, how you develop discernment, and how you allow the cards to initiate a process rather than dictate its limits. I wasn't expecting a tarot book to make me reconsider parts of my process after ten years of professional work, but this one did.

I finished the book feeling less dependent on tarot rather than more dependent on it, and I mean that as the highest compliment. The cards became collaborators rather than crutches. They could initiate an impression, focus attention, confirm something I was already sensing, or provide symbolic language for information that was difficult to articulate. After ten years of asking what a card means for the person sitting across from me, Auryn pushed me toward a subtly different question: what am I perceiving through this card? That distinction may sound small, but in practice it opened up an entirely different level of reading for me.

[Ashlyn]

One of the best books on tarot for both advance and beginner readers. Mat Auryn’s well written book on psychic tarot goes in deep on strengthening your intuitive skills and ability whilst using tarot from spreads to mediations how to connect with spirits and the tarot itself. As a tarot reader for about four years I thought I knew everything all about tarot and Mat’s book really eye opening and gave me inspiration to do a lot more with my cards in many ways. My favorite excerise is guessing the feelings of the cards without looking at them and the tarot spirit guide. I can’t tell you how many tabs I booked the book because it was so good and easy to read. Mat is amazing storyteller as well, when he was telling about his friend Susan it made me emotional and very touching. Here is a quote that to end of the review, “The true beauty of tarot, much like that of a masterpiece, lies in its ability to forge connections and convey authenticity.”

If you’re a beginner or advanced tarot reader, highly recommend reading this book!

[Paola Dunbar]

I really enjoyed this book. There are some lovely meditations, tarot spreads, and some great techniques that I will definitely use. The parts that caught my attention the most is near the end of the book when he talks about having a tarot spirit guide, meeting your HRU, and using mediumship in tarot, I have been working with spirit guides and mediumship so it was great to see these things incorporated with tarot. I'm very excited to try some of these techniques. Great work again Mat!!

[Scott Gray]

The Psychic Art of Tarot is one of the rare tarot books that actually gave me something fundamentally different to do with the cards. Instead of another system for memorizing meanings or interpreting spreads, Mat Auryn approaches tarot as a training ground for consciousness itself, bringing together psychic development, altered states, psychology, energy work, mediumship, Jungian theory, and practical experimentation in a way I haven't encountered elsewhere.

With 78 exercises, meditations, and rituals, this is essentially an entire psychic development course built around tarot. The cards become targets, gateways, mirrors, symbolic interfaces, and tools for learning how information moves through consciousness. By the end, I was thinking about tarot very differently than I had when I began.

Most tarot education starts by filling the mind with information. You learn traditional meanings, symbolism, elemental and astrological correspondences, numerology, reversals, dignities, and methods of synthesis. All of that is valuable, but eventually something happens during an actual reading that cannot easily be traced back to anything you consciously know about the card.

You look at the Three of Cups and suddenly think of someone's sister. You see the Tower and become aware of a particular building. A card produces an unexpected physical sensation, word, memory, image, or certainty that seems unrelated to its conventional meaning, and somehow it turns out to be relevant.

That territory is the real subject of this book.

Auryn makes an important distinction between intuition and psychic perception, and I found that distinction incredibly useful. We tend to collapse everything that arrives quickly or mysteriously into “intuition,” but psychology tells us that intuitive knowing can arise through unconscious pattern recognition, implicit memory, emotional processing, subliminal cues, and information being integrated outside conscious awareness.

Psychic perception raises the question one step further: can consciousness sometimes acquire information that wasn't available through any of those ordinary processes?

Tarot provides an extraordinary laboratory for exploring that possibility because the cards give psychic perception structure. Instead of sitting in a room attempting to become vaguely receptive, you have an image in front of you that stimulates associations and spontaneous impressions while providing enough symbolic structure to keep consciousness engaged.

The challenge becomes learning which information belongs to the traditional symbolism, which arises from personal associations, which reflects unconscious pattern recognition, which comes from projection or bias, and which may represent something genuinely anomalous.

I loved how much attention Auryn gives to developing that discernment. His discussion of distinguishing intuition from trauma responses and psychological biases is particularly important because psychic development becomes infinitely more useful when paired with self-awareness. Trusting intuition and questioning ourselves are complementary skills, and becoming a better psychic reader requires developing both.

The Jungian material was one of my favorite aspects of the book.

Tarot and Jungian psychology have been paired countless times, but Auryn goes considerably deeper than simply labeling the Major Arcana “archetypal.” Concepts such as archetypes, the collective unconscious, synchronicity, dreams, unconscious symbolism, and active imagination become part of his exploration of how tarot interacts with the psyche and how psychological processes can coexist with genuinely psychic ones.

I especially enjoyed his direct engagement with active imagination. Rather than merely borrowing Jungian terminology, Auryn actually discusses the practice and places it into conversation with tarot and psychic development. This gives the reader another way of understanding what happens when an image stops functioning as something passively observed and becomes something consciousness can actively enter into relationship with.

That becomes particularly fascinating when paired with scrying.

Tarot imagery is almost ideally designed for this kind of work. Instead of treating the picture as a static collection of symbols to decode, the practitioner can work with the image experientially. The landscape can continue beyond the frame. Figures can move or communicate. Details become unusually salient. New imagery emerges. Symbolic material develops dynamically rather than remaining fixed on the printed card.

Auryn's discussion of active imagination provides a psychological framework for understanding one dimension of that experience, while his psychic exercises allow the reader to investigate whether information can also emerge that exceeds what we would expect from personal imagination and unconscious material alone.

That distinction is incredibly important.

The mind is extraordinarily generative, and any serious psychic practitioner should understand that. Imagination can produce astonishingly vivid imagery, autonomous-seeming figures, unexpected associations, symbolic narratives, and emotionally charged experiences. Jungian psychology gives us sophisticated ways of working with that material rather than dismissing it as meaningless fantasy.

But psychic development introduces an additional test: does the experience ever contain verifiable information that the practitioner had no ordinary way of knowing?

That is where psychology meets parapsychology.

The book's treatment of synchronicity makes this intersection even richer. Jung's concept gives us a way of thinking about meaningful correspondences that cannot be adequately understood through simple linear causation. Tarot presents this mystery constantly: why does this particular randomly selected card so frequently seem meaningful in relation to this particular person, question, or moment?

For someone interested in both Jung and parapsychology, that question is irresistible.

The book's exploration of altered states of consciousness is equally important. Auryn doesn't treat psychic reading as something that happens solely through intellectual interpretation. He teaches practices involving meditation, concentration, visualization, scrying, dream incubation, mediumship, aspecting, and Alpha brainwave training that deliberately change the practitioner's mode of awareness.

This immediately connected tarot for me with the much larger history of consciousness-altering techniques found throughout mysticism and occultism.

Magicians, mystics, mediums, and diviners have always developed methods for shifting ordinary awareness. Chanting, repetitive prayer, drumming, breathwork, sensory restriction, gazing, meditation, visualization, ritual, and dream practices all alter attention and perception in different ways. Modern psychology and neuroscience give us another vocabulary for investigating what happens during those states.

The discussion of brainwaves was especially interesting because it adds a physiological dimension to something occultists have historically approached through trance and receptive states. Learning to deliberately shift toward Alpha gives the reader a concrete method for exploring how changes in consciousness affect psychic receptivity and tarot reading.

I appreciate that Auryn doesn't simply mention altered states theoretically. He gives you practices for actually learning how to shift your state.

That is where the book becomes much more than tarot instruction.

Learning to recognize and deliberately enter different states of consciousness is itself an important occult skill. Once you become aware that ordinary waking consciousness is only one configuration of awareness, practices like scrying, mediumship, psychic perception, active imagination, and dream work begin fitting together differently. Each provides a different method of changing the relationship between conscious attention and information arising from beyond its ordinary boundaries.

The exercises involving dream incubation, sensory imagination, sensory memory, psychic learning styles, telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing expand that inquiry considerably. They encourage the reader to observe how their own consciousness actually presents information rather than trying to force every psychic experience into clairvoyant imagery.

That recognition of cognitive diversity is extremely valuable. Some people experience vivid internal imagery while others receive information primarily through bodily sensation, emotion, words, sound, spatial awareness, or direct knowing. Understanding your own cognitive and psychic style allows you to develop what is naturally strongest instead of constantly measuring yourself against someone else's internal experience.

The parapsychological implications become especially explicit in exercises involving precognition, telepathy, and remote viewing.

These practices move tarot beyond symbolic interpretation because they create opportunities for feedback. If I attempt to perceive a concealed target or future event, I can eventually compare my impressions with something external. Over repeated trials, I can begin asking which impressions correlate with accuracy and which arise from imagination, expectation, or analytical interference.

That feedback is invaluable.

Psychic development without feedback can easily become a closed loop in which every impression confirms itself. Feedback forces consciousness into relationship with reality. Over time, you begin recognizing the texture of your own cognition: how fantasy develops, how anxiety distorts information, how desire influences interpretation, and how accurate impressions tend to announce themselves.

The goal becomes discovering your own psychic language.

I also loved the progression into mediumship and spirit work because it raises the psychological and metaphysical questions even further. Experiences of apparently autonomous personalities have fascinating relationships with Jungian ideas about complexes, archetypes, active imagination, and autonomous unconscious contents. Psychology therefore gives us enormously useful tools for examining spirit communication while psychic practice allows us to investigate whether those models account for everything that occurs.

If a spirit communicates verifiable information the practitioner could not reasonably have known, parapsychology becomes relevant. The interesting question becomes less about choosing between psychological and spiritual explanations and more about determining what each model can actually account for.

That layered approach runs through everything I loved about this book.

Psychology can illuminate intuition, projection, symbolism, unconscious processing, trauma responses, bias, imagination, and archetypal experience. Neuroscience can investigate attention, sensory processing, memory, visualization, altered states, and brainwave activity. Jungian psychology provides a language and methodology involving archetypes, synchronicity, dreams, the collective unconscious, and active imagination. Parapsychology can investigate telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, and mediumistic information under controlled conditions. Occultism contributes practical technologies developed specifically for changing consciousness and accessing unusual forms of experience.

Tarot somehow sits beautifully in the middle of all of them.

By the end, I stopped thinking of a tarot deck primarily as a collection of 78 symbolic meanings. It began to resemble an instrument for navigating consciousness.

You can use it to explore the unconscious and encounter archetypal material. You can practice active imagination with it and observe synchronicity through it. You can use its imagery for meditation and altered-state work. You can scry through it, dream with it, practice telepathy and precognition with it, communicate with spirits through it, and use it as a structured interface for developing psychic perception.

That is an enormous expansion of what a tarot deck can be.

The Psychic Art of Tarot ultimately bridges two approaches to tarot that are too often separated: tarot as a psychological technology and tarot as genuine divination. Auryn demonstrates how profoundly useful psychological models can be without requiring psychic experience to be reduced to psychology. The unconscious matters. Archetypes matter. Active imagination matters. Synchronicity matters. Projection and bias matter. Altered states matter. Brainwaves matter. Imagination matters.

And alongside all of them, psi matters.

That is exactly where I want a modern book about psychic tarot to stand.

For anyone who already knows how to interpret cards and feels that something more is happening during a reading, this book provides an extraordinary framework for exploring what that “something more” might actually be. It doesn't just teach you to become more intuitive with tarot. It teaches you to investigate consciousness through tarot.

That makes The Psychic Art of Tarot one of the most intellectually interesting and practically useful approaches to divination I've encountered.

[Jessica Nightshade]

As someone with a large collection of tarot books and years of professional reading experience, I rarely come across a book that completely changes the way I approach tarot. The Psychic Art of Tarot by Mat Auryn does just that. If you want to unlock your psychic potential and bring more depth to your readings, you need to read this right now. Mat blends psychic development with traditional tarot techniques, showing you how to use your own psychic abilities to uncover deeper, more meaningful insights. It’s unlike anything you’ve read before.

One of the things I appreciated most about this book is how practical and immediately useful the exercises are. With 78 different exercises, meditations, and rituals, Mat lays out exactly how to tap into your psychic abilities and improve the accuracy of your readings. I’ve already added several of these techniques to my sessions, and the results have been transformative. My connection to the cards feels stronger, and the clarity of my insights has skyrocketed. You will see the difference in your practice as soon as you dive in.

If you’re serious about taking your tarot practice to the next level, this is the book to get. Whether you’re new to tarot or a seasoned reader, The Psychic Art of Tarot will open up new dimensions of understanding and psychic power. Mat Auryn has created something extraordinary, and if you haven't picked it up yet, you’re missing out. You need to read this right now and watch your readings transform.

[Katie Stockton]

This is everything I have ever wanted from a tarot book. I have read enough books on tarot that another tour through seventy-eight card meanings rarely gives me much anymore, and I have read plenty of books promising to make tarot more “intuitive” that never really explain what that means beyond trusting your first impression. The Psychic Art of Tarot is doing something much more ambitious. Mat Auryn assumes you can learn card meanings elsewhere and asks what happens next. How do you move beyond interpreting the cards in front of you and use them as a doorway into intuition, psychic perception, energy work, altered states, mediumship, and deeper levels of consciousness? This was the book that finally took tarot to the next level for me.

One of the most important distinctions Auryn makes is between traditional interpretation, intuition, and psychic perception. I loved this because those terms are constantly treated as interchangeable in tarot circles when they describe different processes. Knowing that the Three of Swords traditionally relates to heartbreak is learned knowledge. Looking at its imagery and having a personal association arise is intuitive interpretation. Receiving specific information about a situation that isn't reasonably contained within the card or anything the querent has told you moves into psychic territory. Once I understood those layers as separate sources of information that could then be combined, I started thinking about readings completely differently.

The book is structured around seventy-eight exercises, meditations, rituals, and techniques, and there is an extraordinary amount here: energy work, the clair senses, scrying, empathic perception, telepathy, timeline work, dream incubation, spirit guides, mediumship, aura work, pendulums, aspecting, and much more. But it never felt like Auryn was simply attaching random psychic practices to tarot. The cards remain the laboratory where these abilities are trained and applied. I could immediately understand how developing a particular skill might make an actual reading more specific, layered, and accurate.

I was particularly impressed by the material on altered states of consciousness and brainwaves. Learning how to deliberately shift the mind into a more receptive state before attempting psychic work seems so obvious once it is explained, yet it is missing from an astonishing amount of tarot literature. Auryn treats consciousness itself as part of the reading technique. Meditation isn't simply something nice to do before shuffling the cards. The state of consciousness from which we perceive can affect what information becomes available to us. That connection between tarot, psychic receptivity, and altered consciousness alone gave me months of material to experiment with.

The psychological and philosophical material also gave the book considerably more depth than I expected. Auryn brings Jungian ideas into conversation with tarot alongside metaphysical models of consciousness and the self, giving several possible ways of understanding why engaging deeply with symbolic imagery can produce information and insight. I appreciated that the psychology doesn't flatten tarot into nothing more than projection. Instead, psychology, symbolism, intuition, and psychic perception become different layers through which the cards can operate. That reflects my own experience of tarot much better than arguments insisting it must be entirely psychological or entirely supernatural.

What really separates this from other tarot books I've read, though, is how much of it can actually be practiced. Auryn frequently follows explanations with an exercise and then provides examples showing what the technique can look like in an actual reading. I found myself stopping constantly because I wanted to put the book down and try something. Some exercises changed how I approached familiar cards almost immediately, while others clearly require weeks or months of practice. This isn't the kind of tarot book I can imagine reading once and shelving. It is a curriculum I expect to work through repeatedly.

By the end, tarot felt bigger to me. The cards were still a symbolic language and divinatory system, but they had also become tools for training perception, entering altered states, exploring consciousness, communicating psychically, interacting with spirits, and accessing information beyond what is printed on their faces. That is what I had been looking for without quite knowing how to articulate it. I didn't need another book telling me what the High Priestess means. I wanted someone to show me how to walk through the veil behind her. The Psychic Art of Tarot did that, and it has permanently changed the way I approach the cards.

[Patricia]

After reading this, I have realized I've only been scratching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my tarot practice.

This is packed with so many (70++) helpful exercises to help any beginner reader get in tune with their psychic abilities and apply it to their own practice. Unlike the other tarot books I have read, I think this one is very beginner friendly as I wasn't bombarded by too many technical words 😅.

Each chapter also contains one anecdote of how the author applied the exercise in the chapter, which I found makes the exercises more accessible and makes me less intimidated by trying them out.

The only part I had trouble with as a beginner was.during the last chapters where it delved more on the historical aspects and how it connects with different schools of thought (Plato, Jung), but thats on me as I havent read the original text to fully grasp those chapters.

Overall, I really great and informative read. One I'd recommend to beginner tarot readers like me looking to sharpen their own practice and unearth the many layers of tarot!

[Helen Blake]

I attended Mat Auryn’s workshop on The Psychic Art of Tarot at Templefest, and let me tell you, his charm is as magical as his tarot skills! Mat has this amazing ability to make complex concepts feel simple and relatable, all while keeping the atmosphere light and fun. His unique ideas and fresh perspectives on tarot really stood out, making me eager to dive deeper into the book. After the workshop, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on The Psychic Art of Tarot. The book is packed with 78 exercises, meditations, and rituals that are perfect for both beginners and seasoned readers. Mat’s step-by-step instructions helped me unlock my inner eye and strengthen my psychic senses in ways I never imagined. From mediumship to soul alignment, each chapter offers something new and exciting. What I love most is how personal and engaging Mat’s writing is. It feels like he’s guiding you through each exercise with a warm smile and a twinkle in his eye. His tips on forming powerful relationships with your higher self and clearing negative energy have already made a noticeable difference in my readings. Plus, the slight typos add a charming, down-to-earth touch that makes the whole experience feel genuine and heartfelt. If you’re looking to enhance your tarot practice and connect more deeply with your intuition, The Psychic Art of Tarot is a must-read. Mat Auryn’s expertise and delightful personality shine through every page, making this book not only insightful but also a joy to explore

[Kevin Worcester]

loved this book! the psychic art of tarot is hands down one of the best guides if you want to really connect with your psychic abilities thru tarot. mat auryn’s approach makes everything feel so acessible, no matter where u are in your practice. as someone who's very spiritual, i found his insights really resonated with me. the exercises and meditations are practical and super effective, helping u go beyond just “reading” the cards to really tune into your intuition and psychic senses. plus, the way he blends traditional tarot with psychic development is genius

[Sandra Fargo]

I have been reading tarot long enough to remember when "trust your intuition" was considered a perfectly adequate instruction. Nobody ever seemed particularly interested in explaining what intuition was, where the information might be coming from, or why one reader saw an image while another felt something in her stomach and a third simply knew. We shuffled, practiced, and eventually developed our own ways of recognizing it. So I had one of those wonderful moments of recognition when I realized that The Psychic Art of Tarot was going to spend an entire book digging into the part everyone else had been waving a hand at for years. After Psychic Witch and Mastering Magick, I should have known Mat Auryn would find some neglected corner of my practice and make me examine it. What I loved was discovering names and exercises for things I've been doing at the tarot table without consciously separating them. Auryn takes clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and the other psychic senses and teaches you to work with them deliberately while reading cards. That sounds obvious once somebody says it, but I couldn't remember another tarot book on my shelves that had actually trained me to do it. I began trying the exercises with decks I've known for years and occasionally had the peculiar experience of receiving something that had very little to do with the traditional meaning of the card in front of me, only to have it make perfect sense in the reading. I've had moments like that throughout my life. What was new was slowing the process down enough to notice how the information had arrived. Auryn also does something I've appreciated since Psychic Witch: he tells you where he got things. I recognized pieces of older psychic-development teachings, witchcraft and occult practice that I've encountered in various forms over the years, alongside ideas and combinations that were new to me, and the references sent me wandering happily back through my shelves again. There is something deeply satisfying about watching a younger author pick up threads from older traditions, weave them into something genuinely useful, and leave the ends visible so readers can trace them backward if they wish. I own more tarot books than any sensible person needs, and these days very few of them actually change the way I read. This one did.

[A.J. Franks]

I have frequently searched for an advanced tarot book that doesn't recap all the meanings and doesn't regurgitate information from 100 other books. This has been that book for me. loved the blending of psychism, mediumship, and tarot. It's very exercise-heavy, but it tells you that on the back of the book. There is no way I will do all of them, but I earmarked about 25-30 I will go back to. It also helped me with my visualization challenges. I recommend this for advanced practitioners and anyone wanting to further develop tarot and psychic practices.

[Mallory White]

He's a great author!

[Julian Mercury]

I learned tarot the way many people of my generation did, by memorizing meanings until the cards finally stopped looking like seventy-eight small examinations I had forgotten to study for. Eventually something changed. You begin seeing relationships between cards that aren't in the books, noticing that one figure seems to be staring directly at another, getting an impression before you have consciously interpreted anything, or knowing that the perfectly respectable textbook meaning sitting in your head is simply not what the card is saying today. The Psychic Art of Tarot is about that second education.

What Auryn does particularly well is refuse the false choice between knowing tarot and reading psychically. Intuition is not an excuse for never learning the cards, and memorizing correspondences does not require shutting down everything that cannot be found in the little white book. He teaches the reader to work with both. Across 78 exercises, meditations, and rituals, tarot becomes a vehicle for developing psychic perception itself, with work involving scrying, mediumship, auras, energy, the higher self, and different ways information might actually arrive during a reading.

I particularly appreciate the attention given to discovering one's own psychic style. One of the worst things we do to beginning readers is describe clairvoyance so vividly that anyone who does not receive internal cinematic visions assumes they are not psychic. Someone else may receive words, bodily sensations, emotional shifts, sudden knowing, or an apparently irrelevant thought that becomes meaningful only when spoken aloud. Learning the difference between these signals, ordinary mental noise, and the associations deliberately produced by looking at a card is much more useful than simply being told to trust your intuition. Auryn treats discernment as something that develops through repetition and observation rather than mystical self-confidence.

There is also something satisfying about this as the third movement in Auryn's work. Psychic Witch develops the perceptive machinery, Mastering Magick turns that machinery toward sorcery, and here tarot becomes a laboratory in which perception and symbolic language continually test one another. I have read tarot for long enough that another explanation of why the Three of Swords means heartbreak is unlikely to alter my life. A book that makes me reconsider what is happening in the few seconds before I decide what the Three of Swords means in this reading, for this person, beside these particular cards is much rarer. That is where this book becomes interesting. It is less concerned with teaching you what tarot says than with making you a better instrument for hearing it.

[Jon Daniels]

Most tarot books teach you what the cards mean, Auryn is much more interested in what the hell is happening in your head and nervous system when you start knowing things the picture didnt exactly tell you. Theres 78 exercises in here involving scrying, auras, mediumship, energy work and different ways of actually developing the psychic side of reading, and quite a few of them are basically little experiments which obviously appeals to me. I started modifying one of the exercises before I even finished it which usually means a book has done its job.

[Davezilla]

The Psychic Art of Tarot: Opening Your Inner Eye for More Insightful Readings is the latest from famed witch author, Mat Auryn. Mat is also the author of some of the top-selling books of the decade: Psychic Witch and Mastering Magick.

I was expecting a primer on the cards and if that is what you are looking for, this is not it. I would recommend 78 Degrees of Wisdom for that. This is not a primer. It assumes you have a decent working knowledge of the cards. Nevertheless, this book covers a lot of ground!

While based primarily on the Rider-Waite-Smith and Marseilles decks, the techniques apply to any deck (eve to Oracle decks). I tried most of the exercises with the following decks and had a unique experience with each one: Tarot of the Unexplained, the Light Seekers Tarot, the sadly, out of print Witch’s Tarot, Thoth Tarot, and The Chinese Five Elements Oracle.

What sets this book apart is as mentioned earlier, it is not a guide to the cards, nor is it a guide to spreads. This book is about strengthening your psychic abilities using the cards, and strengthening your relationship with your cards using psychic abilities. This is a big difference.

Highly recommended and possibly my favorite book of 2024.

[Amanda Graham]

This book isn’t just another tarot guide—it’s in a league of its own. The Psychic Art of Tarot delivers what no other book on the market does: an unparalleled roadmap for blending traditional tarot techniques with true psychic development. Mat Auryn has created something entirely unique here, seamlessly connecting each of the 78 cards with exercises that awaken your inner senses and expand your abilities beyond what most books even attempt to cover.

Mat’s approach is practical yet deeply transformative, giving you methods for everything from aura reading and mediumship to soul alignment—all accessible and organized for readers of any level. You won’t find another book that guides you through this kind of psychic awakening with the tarot. If you want to unlock insights that go beyond symbolism alone, this is the one to add to your shelf. Mat’s decades of experience shine through in each page, making this a true standout in tarot literature.

[Lance]

This was a really great intermediate-level tarot book. Since I've read a few beginner's books, this is exactly what I was looking for, and Mat Auryn does a solid job laying out good next steps to deepening a tarot practice. Especially helpful are the large number of exercises Auryn provides, some of which even have examples afterwards of his own work doing that exercise. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who has already read a book or two on understanding what the individual cards mean and feels ready for something more than just another, slightly different, take on each card's meaning.

[Natasha 4E]

I enjoyed doing the many exercises. Some of them were very enlightening and really improved my bond with the Tarot. Others were just fun to do. I love how much knowledge and experience Mat Auryn has, and his writing is beautiful.
He is one of the authors I will buy the books of without any research or doubt, the only other being Christopher Penczak.

[Bri Ayala]

From the very first page I knew this book was going to change my practice. I’ve been reading tarot for 15 years for myself and family but have never read a book on it beyond what the decks provide. I’m so thankful for Mat writing this book!

[Nicole Bergen]

Excellent exploration with exercises/meditations.

[Mitchell]

Some decent meditations here but nothing too groundbreaking.