What influenced you to delve into the tarot?

A bad breakup, after a found out a person was cheating on me for the entire time. I think I felt even worst for the other girl, they were together for 1 1/2 year and even pretty much lived together. So painful for both of us.

This lead me dive into the Tarot (well not this situation but the one afterwards) and after getting some really strange and accurate premonitions through intuition ( I think I had my energy and self really opened for the Universe due to that).

I was just one of those kids who sought out anything having to do with the paranormal, right from the get-go. It's like I was born with an interest in this stuff!

In elementary school I checked out the Time Life books, and any books about witches or psychic powers (The Girl With the Silver Eyes, anyone? The Changeover? Or am I showing my age?) I had the ubiquitous, mass-produced ouija board, but only used it at slumber parties. As is common for children, I desperately wanted magic to be real. I wanted to have powers of sorcery like Princess Ariel in the Thundar the Barbarian cartoon. I also wanted to be every evil princess or sorceress, and every sultry oracle woman in the movies or tv (Flash Gordon, all of the Sinbad episodes) -- not sure what THAT says about me, haha! But you know, the good princesses were so boring.

When I was in sixth grade, new neighbors moved in next door, and the woman had a set of books, one for each sign, that taught you how to cast your complete astrology chart, ephemeris excerpts and all. I was hooked.

I expressed an interest in tarot cards (and divination methods in general) in junior high, and my mom dug out an old copy of the Hoi-Polloi Tarot (which I still have!). I also received a copy of the standard Rider-Waite-Smith for Christmas, but thought it was sort of ugly because I hated the colors. In high school I bought myself the Londa Tarot (there weren't many choices at my local store, but I was your typical goth girl and I loved the High Priestess card), and I stuck with that one for a few years. I bought the Crowley Thoth a few years later because I thought it was so much more attractive, but then was overwhelmed with the depth of material related to that deck, and thought the Book of Thoth was just sort of wacky. I realized that religion just wasn't for me, even the alternative ones, because I'm just not a believer.

Fast forward to my 20s, when I started buying other decks in search of one with understandable but appealing imagery. I used the Sacred Rose for years. Then I joined Aeclectic in 2005, and have been tarot obsessed on and off since!

So for me, it was just an innate interest in divination and the metaphysical that led me to tarot. My parents were pretty laid back about it all -- they weren't much interested in metaphysical things, but allowed me to pursue my interests. We were not a religious household (even though we went to a United Methodist church on and off when I was 6-12 years old), so that didn't interfere. I was lucky, I guess.

kalliope said:

I wanted to have powers of sorcery like Princess Ariel in the Thundar the Barbarian cartoon.

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Thundarr!! Your mention of this made my day! I loved that cartoon as a youngster, and I would have married Ariel, given the chance. I actually will go to YouTube every once in a while and surf up an episode or two of that show (the guy who did Thundarr's voice was so incredibly committed to the role, too...). Jeez, they should make a Thundarr-themed Tarot deck -- I'd buy that in a heartbeat!

My mother is clairvoyant and my father tried out lots of different things aligned with spirituality when I was a child but I didn't go with any of this until I was much older. One day in 1985 I was suddenly convinced I must learn to read cards. I found the Gong Hee Fot Choy and began working with it and playing cards. Then I had a profound sensing that I must learn Tarot. A good friend gave me a deck and that was it. No looking back. I've been away from it and back to it a few times but it seems to have settled in for the duration at the moment

When I was youngish I don't know what inspired me but I always played around with fortune telling with playing cards. I played cards a lot, and then people I knew taught me these little methods, which weren't really what I not think of tarot reading. I started coming up with my own things, and I made up meanings for all the cards and played around with it. During High School, anime got really popular and a lot of people I know bought tarot cards for the art work. One day my best friend came over my house with a deck she bought and tried it out on me. She just picked cards and read what it said in the lwb. That got me curious, so when I was in a book store later that week, and I was curious so I picked up a deck, It was the witches tarot, I think, the one from the James Bond movies, and it didn't have illustrated pips, and I thought I just had to memorize meanings which meanings was daunting so I gave up. A year or so later I bought another deck-the quest tarot, which I studied and got somewhat into, but it wasn't after I finally got my thoth deck did I really start loving tarot. Tarot was what got me started into out occult topics and things...so thats my story

When I was very young my mother and her sister would go and have their cards read once a month in New York. When I was older I went for readings, but what really had me reaching for my first deck was a reading I had from a woman who claimed she was a real gypsy from Romania. After the reading of doom and gloom and asking me to bless her with money so she could light candles for me and get rid of the bad aura around me, I decided enough was enough. I had a really good friend who owned a new age store, she had never read for me, but when I told her about this woman she laughed.

In any event, that is what started me on my path and the Robin Wood was the first deck I connected with, after which I started buying a deck a year for some time.

I was fascinated with all things magical and mystical in high school. I had a friend who dressed in gothic lolita style and read tarot cards under the stairs with me on breaks. My parents are Catholic but my mom believes in psychics and tea leaf reading and whatnot. I didn't really get into collecting decks until like, six years ago though.

Now I'm hooked....

My mother passed away, and a little over a year later I quite suddenly began reading Tarot cards.
I'd never had an interest in Tarot before; in fact, I had quite an aversion to divination of any kind, due to my religious upbringing.

Everything seemed to change in the course of a single day.
I was in Moscow visiting family at the time, and had just received an extremely upsetting overseas phone call: one of my best girlfriends back in LA suddenly lost her beloved brother to a heroin overdose.

After I received the shocking news, I found myself in a Moscow bookstore -- my husband must have wanted to buy something, but I was just mucking around, unable to concentrate on any of the books. Suddenly, I was standing before a large glass stand full of Tarot decks (that Moscow store still has one of the largest collections of Tarot decks for sale that I've ever seen in one place). I purchased a Manga Tarot to "distract" myself, and everything suddenly fell into place.

Now, I sometimes sense my mother, Alisa's, presence during spreads...and I believe that she helped to "lead" me towards that Tarot stand.
I also feel that the energy of my best friend's brother, Eli, had something to do with my discovering Tarot (it is important, I believe, for me to credit these unseen forces in my life...)
~Paulina

I can't remember very clearly anymore... I had a vague pagan/divination/witchcraft type phase in my early teens, but that didn't really go anywhere. I guess about two or three years ago I had a rekindled interest in modern pagan religions and what it was like to be pagan in the modern world, so I started doing some reading and Googling and listening to podcasts. At the time, unrelated to that, I was also becoming more aware of and interested in archetypes, so when I came across mentions of tarot it really piqued my interest and that was sort of it!

I still don't read very often, and when I do it's only ever for myself or on TV shows or movies or what-have-you as practice and entertainment, but I have a collection of 30ish decks. I'm still really drawn to the archetypal/interpretive element most of all (by which I mean the way that different people interpret tarot ideas and produce new decks - art-within-an-existing-framework, if that makes any sense), so I love to have a variety of decks. I'm fascinated by the endless combining and re-combining of characters, situations, and emotions, and the way they play off each other.

Nerys said:

I'm still really drawn to the archetypal/interpretive element most of all (by which I mean the way that different people interpret tarot ideas and produce new decks - art-within-an-existing-framework, if that makes any sense), so I love to have a variety of decks. I'm fascinated by the endless combining and re-combining of characters, situations, and emotions, and the way they play off each other.

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That makes perfect sense to me, and that's probably what attracted me to tarot - the idea of a system. By "system", I don't mean a list of rules, but a coherent whole inside which each element is defined by its relations with the others.

I was brought up in a ferociously atheistic atmosphere; for my parents, pretty much any kind of spiritual questioning is shallow. Yet I developed a decidedly spiritual-oriented personality, though I don't belong to any organized cult of belief. I guess I was attracted to Tarot because it was an interesting in-between, like a practical way of wondering...