Is it bad luck to buy your own deck?

[MikeTheAltarboy]

I too have wondered where this story started.
Although Tarot cards in the English speaking world were most certainly less *common* in times past, were they actually concidered witchcraft? I mean, in Italy, France, and the Germanic countries you could find them almost anywhere, and in fact Mathers is said to have imported them from Italy to bind with his book on Tarot.
Presumably they were legal enough in England, since Rider was publishing them, and I'd *guess* that if you couldn't find someplace selling them, you could always write to Rider and order a pack directly.
Of course, I don't *remember* those Dark Times; I'm only a Very Little Boy. But I am *skeptical* that it was that dangerous... Would customs really have stopped and said "We don't allow *that* sort of playing cards here..."?

 

[Crowqueen]

Don't forget tarot was used as a playing card game, so decks were published originally under that cover and only used incidentally for fortune-telling until the late 1800s, with the emergence of the Order of the Golden Dawn. So it would have been quite easy for covert occultists to acquire tarocchi decks.

While Waite and Smith (and don't forget Crowley and Frieda Harris!) were around, it may have been that the laws on fortune-telling were as lax as, say, the laws on cannabis in the UK today - technically illegal but to prosecute everyone who wanted to have their fortune told or used folk customs to do so would have been too expensive and have diverted time and energy away from, say, Jack the Ripper. Besides tarot there were any number of superstitions or practices - even hanging a horseshoe on your barn door is representative of Herne the Horned God - that could have been classed as witchcraft but beyond the "burning times" it was not usual to prosecute cases unless, say, there was fraud or a blatant scam going on.