Top Tarot Moments

Are there any moments which are particularly vivid to you when you look back on your own personal tarot history? Moments which, though you didn't realise at the time, would end up becoming very significant for you?

I can remember as if it were only yesterday one rainy Monday after school 25 years ago, going to a bookshop in town to buy the Rider & Co Blue Box RWS with my pocket money from the previous Saturday. It wasn't even my first deck. But I can still remember bending down and picking it off the bottom shelf and my raincoat dripping water everywhere.

I also remember being in a bookshop in England and seeing on a display stand the Victorian Romantic kit (after not thinking about tarot for years) and thinking "I wonder what this set of tarot cards is like?" It was only the next day that I went back and bought it when curiosity got the better of me.

More recently, I discovered an Esoteric bookshop 10 minutes from my house that I didn't even know about (can you believe that? ) and all the decks they had in stock I already owned. Except one, The Navigators Tarot of the Mystic Sea. So I bought it. I can still remember the sensation when I got to work, closed the door and took the shrink-wrap off and the immediate reaction of "wow! This deck is special". This was a sunny Friday a couple of Februaries ago. I still remember the day vividly.

All my special moments are shopping moments . I have special reading and study moments too. But these three occasions stand out as massively significant for me on my tarot journey. All decks that would change the direction of my tarot studies in one way or another. I remember them regularly with a kind of wistfulness.

What about yours?

Two. One - when I - owning as I did an 1JJ and having passing acquaintance with a Waite, came upon a Thoth deck in a store. I was gobsmacked; I didn't know such a thing existed (it was the 70s...)

The other was a PM I got from Simone after the very first reading I did here, saying I had hit paydirt for my sitter. I was amazed and very chuffed. I could actually DO this stuff !

The rest is history

My discovery of tarot back in about 1980, it is a strong one. I worked in a restaurant kitchen and they had a beautiful girl ( an actual ex beauty queen) who played guitar for them in the evenings and read cards for them in the afternoons. She taught me "classical gas" on the guitar and introduced me to tarot.

Reading with blind faith to a house full of ladies in the 90's they and I completely believing every word leaving my mouth. ( I think this is why I will always love the Aqaurian, as that was the deck I used that day)

The discovery of the history of the cards, the evolution of tarot and how it came to be what it is today. Losing my faith but gaining some insight into the cards and why they work on some of the more mundane objective levels.

Art tarots and playing cards

I loved my first deck. All poetry and art that I learned for no reason other than it was most beautiful and could show thoughts in visible form... and there were between 52 to 78 bits to adore...and use. My sister loved her Ukiyoe Tarot.

Allegory and symbol had a lovely, lively language to speak to us from the past.

My grandmothers who looked up at me and smiled from I Ching cards.

I remember these the most.

I have two most memorable moments.

I read for someone who had been to see the local mystical-gypsical con reader, who'd said she was being affected by an evil presence that could be removed if ... The poor woman had suffered a miscarriage and was newly married. After a long reading, she asked if she'd be able to conceive another child. I had her draw one card and we both held our breath, and there it was, the Ace of Pents. I was so happy. I treasure her hand-made thank-you card.

And a client who I read for fairly regularly said, almost in passing, "All your readings have been completely accurate. Everything you've said has come true."

My most memorable Tarot moment came when I got feedback from my very first reading done via email. The querent, whom I'd never met, seen or talked to or asked any information about, emailed me back afterwards to tell me I was very accurate and that she thought I did an awesome job.

That's what nailed it for me - that I was good enough to go somewhere with the Tarot. It was by far my biggest confidence-boosting experience with the Tarot.

Mine is googling tarot and coming across this purple website called Aeclectic Tarot. I'd been told on another website that I was a witch after I'd asked about tarot and realised I needed to find somewhere else to spend my time. I've come here every day since.

On that first day at AT I was looking through the Decks forum and saw this massive thread for a deck called The Bohemian Gothic. There was a link to the BG website and I can remember going through the cards thinking, "Wow -they're amazing." The only deck I think I had at that point was the Hanson so I wasted no time, on discovering it had just been released, buying this silver copy.

It's now my most loved deck. After I'd ordered I went through the 90 page thread and realised that I'd stumbled across something that people had watched develop for months. I still feel really grateful that I'd manage to buy that deck. I don't have the Hanson anymore!

I have 2 Big Ones:

1. I can still remember the Mall and the Store I say the Dragon Tarot at and that is where my sister eventually bought them.

2. Was the one very "Off" reading I gave for some one, the "pieces" looked right just in the wrong spots. Then I realized that I didn't draw enough cards... so I drew one more, and shifted the rest back one (celtic cross) and then it just "Snapped" into place and made perfect sense lol ..

I've got a good moment.

I was sitting in the campus cafeteria, doing a reading for myself in my freeform-reading style - I start with one card each for Past, Present, and Future, and then draw clarifiers upon clarifiers, reading more and more as I go along. The cards were indicating that I would soon have a spiritual awakening of sorts (I don't remember the exact cards, but I think Judgment was involved), and "said" that a young man would come into my life and guide me to it. "When?" I asked them. "Soon," the cards responded.

And not one minute later, a young man came up to me and said "Excuse me. Those are beautiful cards. Am I interrupting?" I told him no, I was done with my reading. He explained that he was a new Tarot reader (so unusual to find another guy who reads Tarot!) and that he was taking a class to learn it. Intrigued, I asked where. He proceeded to tell me about a little metaphysical shop near campus, where they had monthly free classes on Tarot reading.

Well, I was fascinated, because the cards seemed to have predicted him just moments before he arrived in my life. So I decided I would follow through with his recommendation and see if I could indeed have some sort of spiritual awakening through his reference. And indeed, the classes were wonderful, I met a lot of other Tarot readers, and I came to love the little shop. (It's a beautiful little place, nestled into a strip mall, and I'm constantly dragging my boyfriend there to look at everything, even though I can't afford most of it!)

So that was my Tarot moment. I've never had the cards' predictions come true that quickly, before or since! I did indeed grow spiritually through the various classes that shop offered, and while I never saw that guy again, I'm thankful for what he gave me.

Blessings,
Taylor

My favorite Tarot moment is also my first: growing up in a tiny Midwest town with a fundamentalist mother, the closest I had come to anything occult was a very old and weathered hardback copy of the I Ching on a back shelf of our tiny local library. My parents got divorced, my dad moved downtown in one of our state's bigger cities, and I was staying with him over spring break. Every day I spent wandering the little tourist-y shops downtown, many of them very pseudo-mystical with incense and glass sculptures and statues of Buddha, but nothing else more deep. And then I found it, tucked away in a basement shopping plaza next to a former shoe store turned figurine shop: a REAL occult store. They had crystal balls and tarot cards, books every one of which sounded interesting, candles and herbs and odd-looking odds and ends everywhere! The next day I spent all my money on a $25 Rider Waite, and haunted that store as often as I could. It closed up pretty shortly after that, unfortunately, but to this day, a good twelve years later, I still get a sort off anticipatory feeling going shopping downtown in the springtime.