My interest started at the age of 10, when I had a little money to spare and was spinning the "fun travel kits" rack at the local bookstore. There, in my price range, was something I'd vaguely heard of. Tarot cards! In their own little package with a book! I was enthralled (and, obviously, very easily amused) and immediately brought them home. I'd barely begun to read the book and find out what the darn thing was all about when my best friend at the time saw them. She--I'm sure we all know where this is going--was a strict, fundamentalist Christian, and threatened to never speak to me again if I didn't rid myself of the blasphemous package immediately. I was a very gullible, lonely child whose tenuous grasp on any friendship she could get was worth more than a little Tarot deck, and with the fear of eternal damnation in hell ringing in my ears, I begged my mother to return the deck.
A few years passed, and my interest in the paranormal grew. I began to question my decision to follow a god who threw sinners in a vat of fire for eternity for breaking his petty rules, and finally summoned up the courage to buy a Celtic Tarot from the used book store. I got a few powerful readings out of it, but lost interest until around the end of last year, when I finally decided that hell didn't exist and I could find it in my heart to follow a Universal divinity. I walked into a metaphysical bookstore one day, found the Ancestral Path Tarot, and began reading with it. After again dropping Tarot by the wayside for overly-positive New Age decks (which I found far too sickly-sweet in short order), I re-discovered the Aeclectic forum and rekindled my old dream of designing my own Tarot deck, started doing research and buying decks...and I could say the rest is history, but that was just a few weeks ago!
I had always had a fascination for esotericism and the occult, but didn't know where to start looking or reading to further my limited knowledge- which at that time went as far as 'The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail' and 'The Hiram Key'. Mrs Woolfe, being from Eastern Europe pointed me towards a lady whose books wer avidly read in her family: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. When I began reading her work, many things began to fall into place for me and I knew I had found what I was looking for. It was at that time that she had begun reading Amber Jayanti's 'Tarot for Dummies', and she said that I might be good at reading the cards as the symbolism on them was very much in the same vein as the stuff I was reading. She showed me a picture of a card, and asked me to work out what it meant based on the imagery I saw and how it related to what I had read so far. The card was the High Priestess in Norbert Lósches' Cosmic Tarot, and from what I told her, she was convinced I would be able to read the cards well. When I looked though the book, I was also convinced- and Tarot has been an integral part of my esoteric and occult practises ever since.
