How did you find Tarot?

Or should that be how did Tarot find you?

I always love hearing stories of how people stumbled across their first deck or started throwing down the cards.

For me, Tarot came into my life when I was 12 years old. I was recovering from a pretty drastic surgery at the time which meant I was out of school for months. My poor mother was having a hard time entertaining me - by this stage I was fed up watching TV, I couldn't go outside and play because of my illness and I had read everything in the house. One day she went into town, came home and shoved a deck of cards into my hands. I remember her telling me that a person in the bookstore told her it would take years for me to master reading them, so I was likely to be entertained for quite a while.

I still remember that deck (it was cheap, printed on really awful cardboard and with the most hideous pictures) but I was obsessed with it (and so surprised that my super religious mother would even bring me home anything like it!)

After reading the cards for a few years, I found out one evening (after some drinks had been poured) that my grandmother (my father's mother) had been a reader although it wasn't spoken about much. I never got a chance to meet her before she died, but I like to think she urged my own mother to pick up that deck that day.

What's your story? I'd love to hear it

While I was in Germany, sometime between 1968 and 1971, someone had a copy of the Aquarian that had just been published and it fascinated me. But I detoured into astrology and didn't get back into tarot until late 1971 when I retruned to the US and bought a Thoth deck.

for me it was a progression from my innate curiosity, love for reading and books. The local Library lead onto book stores, always rummaging through self help and new age stuff. I picked up my marseilles deck, which I still have, some 20 years ago. But thanks to the internet the reading skills have certainly improved. I think tarot is another tool for self development and a way to connect with the people I read for.

I don't remember the exact year, but I was probably around 15. I also can't do the math at the moment, but at the very least it was around the airing of the 2nd season of Yu-Gi-Oh GX. One of the antagonists in it uses tarot cards and I got interested in them because of that character. I didn't pursue reading the cards myself until I was 18 or 19, which would be when I got my first tarot deck.

It was just this past summer for me! I've always been into astrology, even since I was really little, and when I first read about tarot on this website I always read, I was totally hooked. I found a shop that sold decks and texted my best friend asking if she was up for an adventure, and the rest is history!

Started around 1982 when I dabbled unsuccessfully in Christianity and then the occult as a teenager. My dad inexplicably honored an Xmas request for the Rider Waite boxed set which included two Eden Gray books and the hilarious Sexual Key to the Tarot. Followed by some very successful readings for friends in high school and college.

Abandoned for a long spate,, though I would pick up a deck here or there at a tag sale. Dropped in college because friends weren't interested, and I wasn't as successful at reading for myself.

Picked it up again seriously last year while studying the idea of archetypes while procrastinating from writing a novel. I've since read a slew of books, and have started studying the TdM style and lenormand. And acquired more of a collection of decks.

I've always been interestested in divination in general. I grew up with a Nana who read tea leaves and interpreted dreams. I came across my first tarot deck at age 16 at a bookstore. It was a revelation for me, that an average person like myself could purchase such a thing at the local bookstore! I remember feeling quite daring about purchasing it, since my parents had given me a relatively strict Catholic upbringing.

The deck was The Mythic Tarot, the edition from the 80's that came with a black companion book and a black spread cloth. The book and spread cloth are long gone, but I still have the cards in much-loved, well-used raggedy condition. I don't use them much for reading anymore, but I could never part with this deck. So many memories attached to it.

I grew up in a society where separate cultures all lived together, practising their own spiritualities - but with little talk or information available on alternative esoteric practices.

I dropped out of my 1st University at 20-ish and took a year out to live with my sister in Holland, and contemplate what I really wanted to do next (which was go back to University to read a different subject. Lol.)

Whilst there, I stumbled upon "De Wijze Kater"(The Wise Cat), in Utrecht. The 1st esoteric bookshop I'd ever set foot in. I was over-the-moon at all that I discovered within.
Here I feasted my eyes on Tarot decks, and bought my 1st one (Art Nouveau Tarot)
http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/art-nouveau-tarot/
It was also where I bought my first Wicca book - and realised that I was a neo-pagan in my outlook.

My mother had a "mini fit" when she saw the pagan book I had bought - and attempted to talk me out of ownership of it. I gave it to her with little preamble - and then secretly re-bought it again. I hid the Tarot deck and anything else esoteric from her and the rest of the world, for a loooong time after that (closet Pagan).

Later - I discovered, my mother herself is psychic (in the form of prophetic dreams) and had many years previously, discarded her gift after she foresaw the death of her boss in the basement the following day.

I fiddled about for quite a few years - but my "reading hand" as it were, became clearly defined only after I decided to take a "formal" Tarot course, at The College of Psychic Studies in London. This was RWS based.
After this, I tried reading for a while - but I discovered that it just didn't quite work, in my then work setting (I'm a body therapist by main trade) and I put it on the back burner.

It is Wing Tsun Kung Fu, that has brought me back to reading again!
The club moved and prices went up - and I had to find some way to scrape a bit of extra cash together to fuel my Kung Fu addiction. My only real skill, other than taking on more therapy work (which I don't wish to do and cannot squeeze into my diary anyway) - which is both fairly easy, always enjoyable and can be done from home, is reading the cards.

So here I am.
It also means I'm able to use my intuition and delve into my esoteric interests in relationship to others, on a more regular and "built into my life" basis, which is more "holistic" for me.

I feel as though tarot found me. Although always interested, even as a kid, in the metaphysical, I never gave tarot much thought. As an adult I would come across images from the RWS in random places and was mildly intrigued, but never, even then, felt the need to pick up a deck and have a good look. Then I came across the RWS 10 of wands and some seed got planted. It remained on the back burner for a while, but somehow after seeing it I knew eventually I needed to check out tarot. I did years later. So for me, I can thank the RWS 10 of wands. Still one the most fascinating images I can think of. So dream like and mysterious.

It was about 1995 and I was 17. I had become close with my high school English teacher. She gave me a job; I'd go to her house on a Saturday and help clean up and organise her library. She paid me a little money, gave me lunch, and we hung out and talked a lot.

One day we went up to her bedroom and she gave me a tarot reading. Her husband came home, but she had locked the front door, and from the upstairs bedroom balcony, she playfully shooed him and told him to go away because we were doing "witchy things".

Some time later, just before I graduated, she gave me that tarot deck - an old Yellow Box RWS and I still have it.