Reflections on my Tarot Journey: Part Two

This is the second in a series of posts about my personal journey with the tarot. I don’t know how long this series will be btw, I’m just going with whatever comes up until I feel I’ve said it all. So it may never end

When I did finally get my first tarot deck, it was this one, the Cat People Tarot by Karen Kuykendall. I’ve used these so much that the box fell to bits years ago and I keep them in a little cloth pouch wrapped in a black scarf I’ve had since my teens and never got round to wearing. Clearly it was waiting for the cards to wear it, not me

There is a superstition around acquiring decks, which is that you’re supposedly not meant to get them yourself, they have to come to you (the implication is as a gift or via some kind of unspecified spooky means).

Now, I’m going to be frank here. I’m not dissing anyone’s belief, if they hold this view, but my opinion is it’s not true. Having said that, at first I did kind of abide by it, and what I did was find the deck I wanted online, transfer the money into a friend’s account and they ‘bought’ them for me. So technically I was still buying them for myself anyway, hahah, but whatever! With every subsequent deck I have simply bought them myself because I liked them, they spoke to me or resonated in some way, and with a few it’s literally because the art work is pretty in my experience, this has had no bearing whatsoever on accuracy, and (not that I have a slight obsession or anything, oh no) I must have bought at least 35 decks. Ahem. Bit of a collector, I suppose

I chose this deck because a) I love cats, b) the art work is gorgeous, and c) they were a reasonable price. Once they arrived, I put into practice another of those things there are suggestions and superstitions about: preparing the deck for use. Being a bit of a completist, what I did was sleep with one card under my pillow every night until I’d gone through the entire deck. A full deck is 78 cards, mind you! For transparency, now with a new (to me, as I do have a few second hand ones) deck I will usually smudge with incense smoke, greet them as friends, and make sure to find them a nice comfy place, all of which takes about 10 minutes and is far more practical. I have a little set of shelves with all my decks on, plus tarot books and a few other odds and ends.

It took me a while to get to know the deck. I started with the major arcana, slowly familiarising myself with them individually, throwing one card a day and sitting with it, looking at the art, the description in the booklet that came with the cards, and I did get hold of a book too – it’s called Power Tarot and I highly recommend it, I picked up a copy cheap and still use it pretty often, definitely a good investment! In this way I grew comfortable with the big archetypes, and then started to do spreads, such as a three card past / present / future, to get the hang of the interrelationships between the cards.

Then, I expanded to include the full deck. I remember a lot of looking things up and checking at first! But slowly I needed the book less and less, and I developed an intuition with the cards that helped me when reading for different contexts, questions, areas of life.

I’m not sure how long this took! And tbh I feel it’s still ongoing. I have what could reasonably be called a lot of experience with this system now but I’m still learning every time I read