Stories thread of how we all got into reading Tarot.

Where should I start... 8 years ago I was a teenage girl who admired all the things mystical. I was very pulled towards them but because I didn't have the knowledge or someone to ask I just considered them fairly tales and fancy ways to make a good movie or write a good book. Perhaps I have seen or read about cartomachy but I didn't believe it was real and there were actual living breathing people doing these things. I had some weird feeling about playing cards too, like they want to speak to me in some way. Sometimes I would just sit and browse trough them and admire their mystery.
One day I was browsing some forums on the Internet about magic, occult and that sort of things - something you might ask why I haven't done long time ago. Well, because we didn't have Internet at our house back then. I was very interested in love magic - not that I wanted to do it because most of the rituals were just gross and wrong but because I wanted to know what could happen to a person under such unfluence.
Then I saw the divination section and that people can tell the future. I became really interested because there was a guy I really liked and of course I wanted to know wheather he likes me too. Then I thought to myslef how good it could be to know the future. It was in perfect align with my plans for world domination. So I thought I should give it a try. Problem is the decks I was finding are a bit pricy for my teenage budget. I couldn't save the money fast because I love food and there should be money for that too.
So I decided to make a contract with my cousin who was then 8 or 9 years old kid. Don't blame me, I just needed the investment. We bought our first deck and studied the images for some time. Then she went away and took the almost new deck with her. When she returned she suffered from really bad headache which wasn't getting any better for a couple of days. Then I was stunned because I have read that many peope experience major headaches when connecting to their first Tarot deck. I haven't had told her about that and there was no way she could have known that so it wasn't placebo effect. When I took the cards from her and put them away she recovered. She is a Scorpio so it would be no wonder for you if I tell you she had been obsessed with these cards - playing all day long with them, eating with them and sleeping with them so her head couldn't take a brake. Coincidence or not this made me less sceptical about Tarot and about the spiritual stuff. The many love questions played their role as way. When I go back in time and think about the terror this first deck had endured I feel sorry for it and I think I owe it an apology.

I saw cards with pretty art in a store. So I bought them. =p

Deck was complete rubbish, too. I wouldn't even use it for kindling now.

Took me a while to find my stride, it did.

Lightning Quick Obsession

Hiya, newbie here.
My story is fairly short. I was in the mall walking into a Romancing the Stone (my favorite store) when I saw what I now know to be the Rider-Waite deck just lying on a display table. Like a lightning bolt had struck me, that was all it took. All day I was obsessively wondering about tarot and researched it for three weeks before finally ordering a deck that I'm now in love with :3

Curious eye

I started with lenormand which later lead me to tarot. Even as a child, I had always been interested. I just wanted to see what was so taboo about them for myself lol.

celticnoodle said:

I know! And, nisaba, I am surprised at you. It doesn't seem like you at all.

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<scowling and kicking at the floor> Well, thank you. <hides grin>

at least a link to your interesting story!

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I had, briefly, gone looking. I never started any threads asking about how people got started, so I did a search on such words as "started" "began" "introduced" in the Talking Tarot subforum, and quickly discovered that all except the last few months had gone to archive. Also, I wasn't choosing the right search terms.

As I said, it wasn't me burning with desire to get my story out there yet again, but other people interested in re-reading it. And I had an interstate guest about to turn up (who has just left), and I had to do things to prepare for her arrival, resulting in my telling you all that I had things to do and limited time and if you were curious why don't you do the searches, was my thinking. Also, you might have had better ideas than I did on what search terms to enter.

My house guest has left. The mountain of dishes are scrubbed. Two loads of laundry are done, and a third is on. The visitors' bed is once more folded up into a lounge. And again, I'm not going to do the search. But I *do* have the time, now, to give you an abbreviated precis of the story that I know I've told here six or seven times. If you want to search for the longer versions, perhaps your guesses as to the original titles of the threads that people have opened asking essentially the same questions may be more accurate than my guesses.

So here goes.

I was raised by a mother who never, during my childhood, thought I was capable of choosing my own friends. I wasn't allowed to visit kids from my schools, nor was I willing to have them over (they'd see how we lived, and I'd be mortified). Just very occasionally, my mother might socialise with adults, and some of them had children. She automatically assumed I'd be best friends with them, and thrust me into their bedrooms with them when visiting, to be not-seen-and-not-heard as we were at home.

One of those was a little girl called Kirsty Morrison. She was about two years younger than I was - and I was quite young enough - so she never even struck me as someone I had anything to say to. And she was, similarly, stuck for ways to entertain me once I was imprisoned with her in her room. I remember a lot of long, awkward silences in her bedroom. I don't remember them ever visiting our home. I was profoundly relieved when they moved interstate and I was only forced to write letters to her sometimes.

During one of those painful visits Kirsty pulled out a mini-Rider-Waite. She laid out a Celtic Cross per the LWB, and interpreted each card per the LWB. It was a well-meaning nonsense, and didn't impress me much. Would I have been nine? Ten? She would have been two years younger - you can imagine how awful her reading was <grin>.

I instantly forgot it.

Then at fifteen, I had a routine surgery. Let me tell you, there is only one place you want to be when you spontaneously die, and that is surrounded by highly trained professionals in a well-equipped operating room in Hornsby Hospital.

I woke up in an ICU bed, tube in my lungs (or at least very close by!), machines making noise all around me. It was an open-plan ICU, and I could hear the click-click of nurses' high-heel shoes (yes they were forced to wear heels back then!) on the tiled floor, and a Canadian accent calling constantly "Mr Baker! Mr Baker!" I never found out whether Mr Baker survived.

I knew immediately where I was - there was no confusion. And as I regained consciousness, I deemed it a good idea *not* to open my eyes. I wanted to spy on the activity, and I knew the moment my eyes fluttered and opened people would take notice of me, whilst if my eyes were closed and the breathing machine kept doing its stuff, they would just keep walking past attending to other people.

So I lay there, and listened greedily. The fact that I was fully conscious while they thought I was still in a coma suffused me with a heady sense of independence and power. Of course, every single breath hurt, but it was only pain, Pain didn't matter much when I was younger.

And as well as listening, and mapping both the shape of the room, the number of staff and how they probably looked, I had some thinking to do. Without being told (people don't tell stuff to those who are unconscious), I knew I had died and been revived. No I didn't remember it - I had been under anaesthetic and unconscious at the time. I just knew. And why did I know? Because there was a time when I knew everything there was to know, and that was one fact in the billions of other facts that was memorable because it concerned me.

When I was discharged from hospital, I spent all my pocket money acquiring all the literature then available on death, dying and near-death experiences, and already in the middle and late seventies there was plenty. I read it all hungrily, looking for something to parallel my own experiences, and decided that everyone else was lying. Because I *knew* what death was like.

You didn't *leave* your body, exactly, but you expanded to become everything around it, and everything around that, and everything around that as well, until every atom in the universe was a part of you. The sense of self disappeared. I wasn't Nisaba witnessing the universe - I *was* the universe. There was no tunnel, no corridor. There was no Jesus or angel or ancestors waiting for me. There was no consciousness of self, thus no need to think because thinking is a way of relating information to yourself. There was, instead, a sense of the sheer size of infinite distance and agelessness of an eternity of time. As a result of that experience, infinity and eternity are *real* to me now, not just catch-words to express something I really can't grasp. Oh, and time isn't a line from Past to Future, running through the present. No, it is a plane, something like a bedsheet, that can fold and touch in all sorts of weird, sideways directions. None of the cutting-edge physics currently based around time come close to really understanding it the way you do when you are made up of it instead of being human.

So literature on death and dying understandably disappointed me, because it was so obvious that the researchers and the subjects that claimed to have died really didn't *get* it at all.

But reading extensively on death and dying led me to reading on spirituality - and then the gods grabbed me.

And somewhere along the line I came across Tarot again. I really don't remember when or how (the seventies are pretty-much a blur), but I knew with a certainty that it was personally important to me, for reasons which had *nothing* to do wit so-called fortune-telling, and aren't even clear to me now, decades later.

Okay. So this isn't the precis version any more, this is almost the full account.

WOW !! All these stories on here so far have been sooo amazing to read in regards to everyones different backgrounds into getting into Tarot, thanks for sharing everyone up to now

A couple of you have been brought up around card reading which has got you into it, and i think due to this your reading knowledge must be amazing.

And a few of you like myself have just had an interest in occult sort of stuff from a young age and then its just spiralled from there...

OMG Nisaba, your story is like WOW, you experienced death and are here to tell the story, that must be so enlightening and must have changed you as a person sooo much to experience what you experienced.

I need to keep re-reading your post to let the experience you speak of sink in, so your mind must be so wide open due to this.

So all these white tunnels etc are just stories, and seeing the heaven gates etc, yes i did always think skeptically about that hmmm.

These stories are great to read, im loving them all

nisaba said:

<smile> The search function is a wonderful thing. I think I've answered this question about every six months since I've been here. It's a long (and some say) interesting story, but I don't have the time or heart for it right now.

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Achlys said:

I am pretty sure I've posted this here before but here goes.

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We're likely to repeat ad-infinitum as newbies constantly come in with the same question.
Searching and-all-that can take time - and sometimes you just don't think about it when you first start out (I know I didn't). Plus - it's sometimes nicer to have a "fresh" here-and-now answer.

I read with interest Nisaba - about your "routine surgery" at 15. Hmm. And your mother's bedroom solution. "I *was* the Universe" - Advaita. All is one, and one is all. Death was your "peak experience" as it's sometimes described.



In my case - it was all the fault of "De Wejze Kater" (The Wise Cat) esoteric bookshop in Utrecht, Holland.

Whilst growing up, I new little about the esoteric and "other" ideas (apart from my own imaginings that the trees turned into giants at night, I often went flying in my sleep Lucidly, and the Moon spoke to me) because it didn't really exist in my home culture (Kenya). And I was not exposed to any "traditional" cultural ideas either (parents from two opposite cultures both with very "scientific" approaches to life).

It was when I was 20 and had dropped out of University after one year, because I realised I wasn't clear about what I wanted to study. I took a year-out to Holland (my sister lives there) - and one day, walked into "De Weijze Kater".
Tarot decks, books on occult and grimoires, magical trinkets and candles - all these were a wonderful feast for my eye!
I took my 1st ever Tarot deck home (Art Neuveux Tarot, by Myers), and my 1st ever book on Wicca.
The cards spoke poignantly to me and I wanted to find out if I could fulfil the meaning of my birth name in this way (My name - "Tanga" - means "An Oracle") and when I read the Wicca book I though: "OH! - so THAT's what I am!"

I was 15 and in high school when a friend of mine did a tarot reading for me, which was extremely accurate. So it got me interested.

I went to Barnes and Noble with my mom and saw the metaphysical/New Age section and a deck stood out to me. It was the Psychic Tarot Oracle deck. I picked up the box and it felt right in my hands. So I decided to buy it (or my mom bought it, I cannot remember). Now, at the time I did not know it was a tarot oracle hybrid, haha. It just felt comfortable in my hands and I was like, "I want this one", haha. 8 years later and I still have this deck and use it very often, along with my Deviant Moon and Shadowscapes. Since the Psychic Tarot Oracle was my first deck, I am quite attached to it and it seems to be attached to be because every time I do a reading, it feels like the deck is telling, "Don't worry, everything will be fine". =)

I think it's going to be 3 years since I started Tarot.

Years ago, one day my grandfather (rip) told me that my grandmother was really good at reading the cards and that she was always very accurate. She used to read Spanish Cards.

It stayed on my mind but never really got interested in fortune-telling, I was completely interested about the death, spirits and the like.

Many years passed, and I was going through one of the most difficult times in my life, I was betrayed by a man who swore would love me and protect me for life, it was a really difficult time and I got lost, my friend saw the hard time I was enduring and one day she came home with a present, she bought me my very first deck, a Rider Waite, she told me it would help me to find myself again.

From that day Tarot has been a part of my life, with some breaks because I'm a sponge for energy and sometimes is tiring, but definetively is a light in my life. I'm still learning a lot and will be something that will be a part of my life forever.

I finished high school in a small farm town and moved to a big city. I made friends with a gal about my age who attended a Catholic school. Her German teacher was her favorite instructor because he was quirky and wore lederhosen to class. When he was laid up with knee surgery, my friend made him cookies and took them to his house with me trailing along. We met his then fiancé, a modest "witch". She showed us a few of her alters, the kitchen alter and a death alter in the basement. She offered to read our cards, but I didn't know what that meant. It was a simple 3 card spread and very accurate. I fell in LOVE with the concept. My roommate at the time was much older than me and (for lack of a better term) a spiritualist. She explained tarot a little better to me and also gave me some books to read. I bought my own deck (Rider-Waite-Smith) and have been studying and practicing ever since.