November 24, 2009

This is the story of the last month or so concerning my fascination and progress with learning tarot.

I have been doing tarot readings for less than a month, and the first deck I had ever used was a borrowed Herbal Tarot deck from my mother. I promptly ordered as many decks I could afford at the time (three) and waited and waited. All three, along with two all encompassing tarot how to books arrived early last week. I was disappointed in two of the decks (not because of the decks, I'm sure I will learn to love them all, but because of my expectations of them). The third was Rider-Waite :-] I guess I didn't understand that such esoteric knowledge was required to read with such decks a Celestial (all based on astrology and astronomical myths) and Hermectic (to which I have no idea where to even begin!). Rider-Waite was more perfect than I imagined it to be to learn and be able to fathom meaning without looking up each card in an index. The herbal was based upon this deck, but wasn't as easy to pull meaning intuitively as each illustration had to include which herb was associated with each card as well…but a great starting point for me.

I was hesitant to even order the Rider-Waite if you can believe that, because I wanted to be a 'professional' right away, a complete natural card reader. I thought all decks were virtually the same for some reason, and thought I could start wherever I wanted. Boy was I wrong. Each new deck is a separate journey toward understanding and tarot fluency. You have to become acquainted with a deck before you can even think about using it. Now I understand that. So though I have looked over each of the decks I now own, I have only really used the RW deck. I feel more acquainted with this deck now, I have channeled a lot of my energy through the cards, spent a lot of time with them, a little (or a lot) each day. I've shuffled them for readings and shuffled them just to shuffle. They are feeling more at home in my hands now, easier to shuffle, and I can read them more with ease (but still look up meanings most times just to clarify/double check. I am brand new at this after all!).

I'm not sure what it is exactly that drew me into tarot reading. Of course I'd heard of it before, but never really took note of it. I'd never even considered if it could have been a real practice/ritual before. When driving down the road I've seen signs of home shops for palm reading and fortune telling, those sorts of things, and I've always wanted to go into one of those just to see. I think my mother said that her mother had her cards read once (or maybe her mother…someone down the line anyway) and they predicted the outcomes of all her children: which would take care of her, which would have money issues, and which would die young. This information has been passed down to me, so obviously it had some profound effect on this woman. So here I am, just going along in my life, making progress, working a lot and contributing to society, moving in with my boyfriend, got a new dog (black lab, Mollie), and one day I'm visiting my mother and she pulls out these tarot cards she just got in the mail that she'd ordered. We play around with them, doing readings and not understanding really anything about them-like a party game or something-and forget about them. Then I see an episode on TV that includes tarot card readings. Then I read a book where one of the characters is a bruja (a sort of catholic witch from the description in the book) in which she read tarot cards. This all within about two weeks. As soon as I finish reading the paragraph of the tarot reading I put down my book, grab my phone, and start googling. The next day I went to the library and checked out every single book they had on tarot and doing readings, called my mom asking if I could borrow her deck until I bought some, did some research online about different decks and ordered the ones I mentioned above. Also I found an amazing website and forum on aeclectic tarot which has been really insightful and just a wonderful resource on my journey to become a tarot savant. Now here I am, sitting at my computer starting up a blog dedicated to my personal tarot studies. I even have a separate e-mail account set up for tarot correspondences. (tarotreading.emmaleigh@gmail.com)

The most stand out experience I have had with tarot so far was a daily reading I did for my best friend (who lives about an hour away). I did a three card spread: Challenge/Advice/Outcome and got Two of Wands/The World/Ace of Cups. I came to the conclusion that she was currently waiting on results for something to come in, something she was examining/assessing (the world in his hands), that she had all the knowledge she needed at this point to attain her goals and that her current experiences were making her stronger, and she will obtain the results soon and that she will have done better than she expected-or than she has done previously. When I sent this reading to her (via text message) she texted back immediately and said "You mean my physics test?" Turns out she was getting the results later on that day, she was expecting to get between a 60 and 65 but ended up with a 72.