Question 2: What was your first deck and why/how did you get it?
Way back in the last century, 1998, to be precise, I’d gotten back into things esoteric, New Age energies and such, and I remember thinking about getting back to my old interest in astrology and stuff. Then I went to the Texas Renaissance Festival where a friend of mine knew one of the card readers at the event. His reading was very well done, and I was inspired to look into getting a deck.
My first deck was the Robin Wood Tarot, a re-do in many respects, of the Rider-Waite-Smith, but with stained-glass style illustrations by Robin, and some alterations to the more negative and Christianized cards to make them more neutral, which at the time, I liked, since I found the traditional Judgement card, for one, a bit off-putting. Beautiful colors. I didn’t know that Robin had created her own companion book at the time (in the years before Amazon.com).
I was in an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore, and although Robin’s companion book wasn’t there, the cards were also featured in Anthony Louis’s Tarot Plain and Simple,which ended up being my first guide to card meanings. He did a great job of giving the overview and details of both New Agey and traditional meanings, as well as a summary of astrology’s relationship to Tarot. I still recommend his book to Tarot beginners to this day.
Although I now own about 30 decks, I still use the Robin Wood regularly for readings. It’s just so friendly and colorful!
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I found the questions for this series at a Tumblr account that no longer exists. A lovely person named Rhee started the thing. These are great prompts for telling stories about one’s journey through the world of Tarot, so I’ve started the series again on a weekly basis so you all can get to know me better, and also share your own answers to the questions in comments or links to your own posts. I’d love to hear from you!
My first deck was the Balbi! I was 17 and just walking down the road completely oblivious to the world of tarot. Suddenly I saw a box in a shop window that somehow “called out” to me.
So I went in and bought it. I just felt compelled to have it. It was the first tarot deck I had ever seen and I didn’t even know there *were* others. I even thought it was THE tarot deck!
The instructions were an appalling translation from Spanish.
And the Minors were only pips. So not really the most helpful deck for an absolute beginner. And yet…despite knowing almost nothing and only being provided with a basic 5 card spread in the LWB (it didn’t occur to me at that time that you could even deviate from “set spreads”)….it was so accurate I was amazed and that’s the deck that started my tarot journey….
Wow, Donna. That’s a super cool synchronistic Tarot beginning!