What influenced you to go and buy your first Tarot deck?

JMI_Tarot said:

If any of you are "Mad Men" fans, you've no doubt noticed The Sun card from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck appears in the end credits of the show.

I was always curious about this and then I heard an interview with the creator of the show, Matthew Weiner where he explains it.

As a writer, he said he often used Tarot to sort of see the future of his characters, to help plot their next moves.

I thought that was amazing.

And that was when I took up Tarot myself and began with The Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Initially I saw reading Tarot as a way of making life more interesting, more magical, to use it to open the doors of my imagination, to spark creative thinking.

Anyway, that was my original start, my original inspiration with tarot. Can anyone else share their "origin story" of how they got into Tarot?

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Actually, I guess you could say what influenced me to buy my first Tarot deck was AT. It's also where I was able to look through all the decks and decide which one would be my first. Love AT for the role it's played in my life all these years.

The longer story is it was in a time in my life where I was very very upset. Just lost the man who I felt was the true love of my life for the second time. He is still by far the person I have loved the most in my life.

But yeah, at the time I was very very upset. I was trying to find a way to deal with it and found fascade.com where they had computer generated readings. I did not at all believe in Tarot at the time and was pretty sure there was no way it could work. But was in enough pain to pretty much try anything that might relieve it.

So I started playing around on that site with the computer generated readings and surprisingly to me the cards were being wise and telling me the truth and giving me useful answers. Each and every time. That gave me enough to lift my skepticism enough.

One day there, I saw an ad for AT, and the minute I came over here and read a bit I KNEW I HAD to learn to read. I just knew I was meant to, and it has always been a huge part of who I am ever since I started too. And obviously I have full trust in it now. No more skepticism here.

Never heard of Mad Men though. No real idea what it is though. Never owned a Rider Waite either though. My first was the Haindl Tarot, which I found out later was Thoth based, not even RWS based. Made it a bit harder to learn. But I would not change a thing in my learning or Tarot experience.

Babs

I vaguely remember reading about tarot in a Judy Bolton mystery when I was a kid. I hadn't seen one in person until...

the late sixties. My ex and I were driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco and stopped in a few shops along the way.

I saw my first tarot deck -- it was a 1JJ Swiss, and I bought it right away. I used their spreadsheet to do my readings, along with the book. The readings predicted things that I thought would never happen, so I put it away.

A few years later, I had a daughter and my husband had become very abusive. Lisa and I moved into a small apartment. and I took out my tarot cards and notebook and looked at the readings again. They had all come true.

I dabbled with the cards, doing readings for people once in a while. Years later, I got into rubber stamping, and read about the Artists Inner Vision Tarot in a stamping magazine. It sounded interesting, but I had no idea how to get one. I was shopping in a favorite rubber stamping store, and there it was, so I bought it. It was wonderful -- I knew most of the artists from the rubber stamping world.

The next deck I bought was the Osho Zen tarot at Borders. After that, I found Aeclectic, and I'm still here, with a collection of decks.


Apparently Tarot needed to become a part of my life.

Cocobird55 said:

Apparently Tarot needed to become a part of my life.

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BINGO!

I think this is true for most of us: if it hadn't happened one way, it would have happened another way.

Another library card person here. I've always been interested in spiritual matters, and went through a phase of borrowing some great books from the excellent occult section of my then local library in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. I was in my mid twenties, and a young mother. I remember reading one book which dealt with a type of divination I've never encountered since - I think it was a type of geomancy, but could be wrong. Anyway, I tried it, and it provided useful answers. Also, reading about Jung opened my mind to the possibility of the irrational practice of divination actually working. Then I happened upon a discounted glossy book on how to read the tarot (I was poorer than a church mouse back then, so it must have been VERY cheap!). In it were pictures of various decks, and eventually I gathered the money together to buy myself the one I liked - the Sacred Rose - at the local new age shop. A long hiatus later, I can fairly confidently say I'm back for life.

Great topic! Its lovely to hear everyone's different stories.

My first couple of decks were gifts,I've always been interested in unusual things,like spells,fortune telling etc since being little,and first encountered Tarot when my mum dabbled with the Astro tarot by Russell Grant but although they were beautiful and mysterious they didn't get used much by her.I didn't start investigating tarot myself until being a teenager,about 12 or 13,and I got a fortune telling kit from a bookstore ,it had dice,playing cards and just the major arcana of the prediction tarot deck and a guidebook on using all three.I got my mum to buy it me.I was hooked,they fascinated me and I used them loads.For a few years they were all I had until my mum brought me the Johnathan dee kit for christmas,they were in a basket in a supermarket, so I finally had a full deck.
There wasn't any new age shops or big bookstores locally so no chance of getting any other decks-no not even the Waite-smith! It was really that bad- no internet yet either lol.
Then we went on holiday to north wales and I purchased my first decks from a cluttered new age shop that smelled of beautiful incense.I was thrilled to find such a shop and promptly spent most of my holiday money!
You couldn't open them or see display cards so had to choose by the box pictures,and to be honest I think I chose quite well with my limited knowledge at the time.
The three I brought were,Tarot of a moon garden ( just so beautiful),The old english tarot (by Maggie kneen,it was just so quaint and old fashioned ) and the witches tarot (fergus hall) since I was studying witchcraft.
I still have all three,it takes me back when I get them out,and they still smell faintly of incense.

I've always been into various forms of divination in nature. I had interest and was intrigued by tarot, but never sought it out for myself.

Then one day I was Barnes & Noble on Union Square with a couple blessed hours on my hands to haunt the stacks. I came upon a bright green box that stopped me in my tracks. It was the Greenwood. An unconventional introduction to be sure but I was hooked.

That was so long ago. I really got drawn into spirituality and all sorts of other things that I won't speak of because when I was in middle school I started having prophetic dreams. I did a bunch of research and tarot was just part of the process of exploration. I went pretty far beyond tarot as I met the wrong influences. I am just now returning to reading tarot cards as I find it to be probably the safest of the practices in that 'world', though it isn't 100%.


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Love reading everyone's stories.

When I was in high school in the early 70's (!) I found a copy of the Causeway edition of Waite's book on the remainders table at the only local bookstore for $1.

Though I had never had tarot cards I was always interested in the occult and divination, and had an ouija board and an 8 ball. My family's attitude was that there was more to life than what we see and there was no censoring of reading material or anything else. (I too loved my library card) At some point I found a deck of the Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Cards. I had a lot of fun with them in college.

I finally bought a deck of Rider Waite cards to go with the book I had picked up a few years before but I hated the tartan backs. I never could get over the ugliness of them so I eventually gave them to a second hand shop, I think. Then I bought the Original Rider Waite with the roses and lilies backs. I did not find any tension using these that I felt when using the first ones with the tartan backs. I could relax and enjoy them.

All was well till I discovered Baba Studio's Baroque Cats in 2009. ' Twas then a collection was born.

I'm so thrilled with the responses here, all the beautiful interesting stories everyone has.