What led you to tarot cards?

I am not sure if this subject has ever come up, so apologies if I am bringing back a worn out topic. We have such a wonderfully diverse group, here at AT, that I was curious what first led people to tarot cards?

When I was still in Elementary School my best friend was a genius-seriously. Her whole family was smart as whips, but they had decided to not let her skip grades, but stay within her own age groups, always taking advanced classes and getting honours. And they constantly fed her hobbies. I really lucked out on that. When young we played with Breyer horses, trolls, plastic animals, then onto reading Bradbury, Tolkien, memorizing the runes, fantasy, sci-fi, mythology, etc. One day she showed me the IJJ Swiss Tarot which she had received for her birthday. We started to learn the major arcana and did readings for each other. We played rummy with the minors! I ended up getting the same deck that Christmas (I was 12). Later that year she had bought the RW deck and we started learning the minor arcana. And that was my first introduction to tarot. I fell out of taroting when I was in High School, but fell back into it, right after, when a gorgeous New Age store opened up down the street from my college. I walked in a glorious daze around this place with incense burning, mellow music, and decks in card catalogue drawers so you could see each one available. I purchased the Sacred Rose, Gypsy Witch and a RW deck, and was hooked for life. Not only for the artwork, but for reading and opening up possibilities that I would not have explored on my own. I can't even remember how I found AT, but I am so thankful I did! I am not sure if my friend, who I have long since lost touch with, still has any interest in tarot. She is a famous doctor/scientist/astronomer and the main character in the movie "Contact" was partially based on her! But I am forever thankful for her enthusiastic parents in allowing me to be part of her varied and creative childhood.

So....how did you fall into tarot?

Just a story lover.....

I have only became intensely interested in tarot in the past year. I'm not sure where it all started really. My first deck was actually a Mayan Oracle, only four years ago. It was the the history of this pack and the stories that each still picture told that led me to find more decks and understand their stories also. I've always been interested in different cultures mythology, and I'm a lover of stories in general. I see my own life as a story, each day has it's own tale to tell and tarot readings just help me with my direction in creating my own life story.

ohhh what a fascinating question!

Well, going through a very prolonged difficult period in my life, I keenly felt the lack of spirituality in my life. So I turned to meditation. And so doing, I tried to "tune in" to my spirit guide, prayed and so on. This helped me immensely and is a practice that has become very dear to me. I had always been fascinated by tarot, but never felt the compulsion to get a deck. I had never even had a reading done. Lo and behold, I was browsing E-Bay one day and next thing I knew, I had gotten myself a deck! I don't recall it being a conscious decision, as in "gee, I should get a deck". I don't even know how I came to be looking them up. It was just time I guess.

I take it as a gentle nudge from my spirit guide.

Nat

Well i always pulled cards occasionally online, and i loaned a deck from a great friend of mine, yet i didn't really have had the connection with those cards. Then last month i suddenly started to crave for tarot cards of my own so a friend of mine gave me a link and somehow i ended up here! I got the goddess oracle first and then the lenormand cards. Now i have eh 4 more extra decks and one coming up! I just really love them all and am not yet done with collecting decks that my heart goes out too!

Curiousity about knowing the future with the help of cards led me to tarot..

An aunt of mine told me about tarot cards and how you could predict the future with them. I was so curious about this which led me to learn how to read the cards. It was so sudden and perfect as if i was meant to learn how to read the cards. And life has been great after that.

Yes, I also feel that Tarot was very much a non conscious decision on my part when I bought my first deck. It's almost as if it called to me to pick it up and reveal it's secrets. The pictures can be a great transportation device in meditative practices, I've found, though some decks work better than others for me...and my overall taste in the deck style has changed sinced that first oracle I bought four years ago. My reasons for loving tarot has also become more complicated, I've built up a rather complex and intimate relationship now, like a very good friendship

I honestly can't remember. It was the 70's and I was 15 or 16 years old and they appeared in a store in town and there they were and there I was and they came home with me .

I did a "developing intuition" course. We did name reading, scrying, remote viewing, telepathy . . . all sorts of things. And we read cards - not tarot but some cards invented by our tutor, with different shaped blocks of colours. And I found of all the things we had done that I did best with the cards. So I decided to buy a tarot deck. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The 3 of Swords

The Three of Swords led me to tarot. Pixie Colman Smith's card with those three swords piercing that red heart in a rainy sky - right in the middle of the first reading I had ever received, right in the middle of a great heartbreak...

...and the reader's voice, taking me back to my childhood, and seeing where the heartbreak started - and how this man who had hurt me had called up a pain I had thought long forgotten. She told me another man would come along who would help me heal the pain caused by this latest heartache, but that the older wound I would have to look into, clean up and stitch up myself. Open-heart surgery...

It led first to a huge overhaul in my emotional life.

A few months later, in Israel, I met the man who helped me heal the sexual and romantic hurt that had precipitated the crisis. He also had a pack of tarot cards and would read for me. The RWS... I spent time with the Three of Swords. When I returned to London, I went back to the shop where I had received the reading, and bought my own pack, and Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees of Wisdom.

By then I was happy and bouncy again, and tarot became a joyous exploration

gosh

How I started with tarot? *thinking*

The first time I was introduced in the cards was many years ago, in a little shop. I belive that's the first time as saw them. The thaought was layd to rest in my mind. This makes me 16 years at the time.
The years went by and now and then the thought of tarot came upp to remember me.

At the age of 20 I baught my first one. I do not remember it anymore. It hade sort of nice pictuers and I think it was one of the major names. It was pretty but it never came to feel.. I started to feel very negative about the deck. So I gave it to someone that feelt right.
After that I lay the thought of tarot at the side and I went and bought some stones to use instead.

And then at my wedding day I got The Anchestral Path deck as a wedding gift. It feelt right instantly.. This hole ancestral path idea is really my thing. Due to a pregnancy at the time I have never really been able to pick upp the deck and really communicated with it.
Now, about two years later I am eager to learn and use. And I am just in the process of learing about the cards and how to look at them in readings. At the side I have my stones, wich I study in the same fasion. (The stones are a lot simpler dho..)
The major thing I try to learn is how to join the divination with the cards. Mostley the divinations has kicked in and finisched even before I am finisched shuffeling the deck. That a bit enoying. So thats my major thing right now with the cards..

I like this thread..