Tarot Verbatim · Certification
In Tarot Verbatim, we don’t guess. We read the literal, physical grammar of the cards.
If you are ready to drop the standard tarot fluff, stop relying on "intuition," and prove your absolute mastery of this system, this is your official path to certification.
Start Your Free WeekYour first week is completely free. No card needed to start.
You cannot master a language without speaking it. The entire 3-month training course and exclusive Practice Room run directly on Discord. You will drill the vocabulary, construct literal two-card sentences, and lock in the physical grammar of the deck with daily, hands-on practice.
Put your skills to the ultimate test. Once you have completed your training, you will take the official certification exam to prove you can translate real-world spreads with strict, Verbatim accuracy.
Pass the exam and officially earn your title as a Certified Tarot Verbatim Master, proving you have mastered the exact historical and grammatical rules of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
Certification opens the door to leadership. Top graduates unlock the exclusive opportunity to become an official moderator for the r/TarotVerbatim Reddit community. Build your authority as a Master, guide new students, and help shape the future of the system.
If you already practice tarot, Tarot Verbatim is a complementary technique. It gives you a strict, literal foundation. You don’t have to throw away your current skills, but you will learn how to ground them by making the cards speak in exact, grammatical sentences.
The system was founded by Emily Sandstrom. In 1980, while working as a court reporter, Emily attended a statistics lecture on "Consistent Violators of the Laws of Random Distribution"—the same laws actuaries use for risk management, insurance, and gambling. Tarot was one of the five known violators. She bought a deck to reproduce the professor’s experiment at home, and turned it into her hobby, then her life’s work.
When Emily tried to learn to read the cards, standard books were useless. Professional readers claimed they were "listening to spirits" rather than reading the cards. Emily rejected that. Using the algebraic principle that you cannot solve an unknown with an unknown, she asked the cards questions she already knew the answers to. She then tested the deck’s accuracy in real-time against the live jury trials she was court-reporting.
Because of Emily’s background as a court reporter, the meanings had to be strictly literal. Making the pictures directly into words eliminates the fluff: it’s just you, the pictures, and language. Tarot talks word for word when you base it on grammar. Emily logged these exact meanings on index cards, eventually filling over eighty 1.5-foot Rubbermaid files to create the ultimate Tarot data dictionary.
Yes. Emily established herself as a Tarot authority, beginning with 12-hour daily shifts reading Tarot on the phone in 1991. She now provides access to this exact data dictionary, and it is proven to work for everyone who learns it. It is not just one person’s intuition—it is a tested, reproducible linguistic system.
Your first week is completely free. No card needed to start.
