The Tarot and Me

 I was a teenager in the late 90s and I'm not sure it was possible to be a teenager in that time period without having at least a passing fascination with the occult.  I blame The Craft, but I definitely remember being interested in the tarot cards before them.  

I remember being around 12 years old and sitting at my friend's house, in her family's computer room (remember when computer rooms were a thing?), and talking about how we each really wanted a deck.  We were both Catholic, so actually attaining one without our parents knowing, would be key.

I stumbled across a Rider-Waite deck a few years later.  It was in my step-mother's storage and since she was, in fact, an evil step-mother, I felt justified taking the deck as my own.

It had this horrible little booklet in it that informed me, briefly, of the tarot's history, and then told me what each and every card meant and how to do a reading.  It felt like an awful lot to memorise, so I always referred back to that book.

Because there was so much to memorise, I never took tarot reading on as a regular activity, but I did keep the deck through my university years and used it as a self reflection tool periodically.

The thing that always shocked me was the amount of Christian, and at times specifically Catholic, symbolism there was in the Rider-Waite deck.  The Catholic Church, for all its flaws, ingrains symbolism in ones soul.  Catholic worship is done with all the senses and looking at certain cards invoke sense specific memories in me.

Flash forward to now.  I'm in my mid-thirties.  I still consider myself Catholic, but I don't attend Mass.  I do feel guilt over that fact, but my relationships with the Church and God are complicated.  Thankfully, my relationship with God is growing and evolving still.  I hope that there will be a day when attending Mass is a part of who I am again.

A couple of months ago, I read some article on the tarot, possibly on Buzzfeed, in which case, I should call it an "article".

I remembered how I liked using the deck as a new way of examining my inner thoughts and decided to order a new deck, the purloined Rider-Waite desk having long gone missing.

I opted for a new Rider-Waite deck because the pictures really do speak to me.  It came with that same little booklet full of too many things to memorise, but I also started reading about intuitive understandings of the cards, looking at patterns and how each card speaks to an individual.

I'll be sharing how I do my readings and some of the readings themselves here in hopes that other people can use this tool to their benefit.  I don't think the tarot reads the future, but I think one can use the tarot to read themself.