An Author’s Tarot Journey

When I was about fourteen, a magazine article about tarot cards lit a fire in my creative soul that still burns some thirty years later. *

Tarot cards were not totally new to this teenage me. I was a fantasy obsessed nerd with my head in Arthurian legends, Anne Rice, epic fantasy, and fairytales. I grew up in the far north of New South Wales, Australia, an area with famous (or infamous) pockets of alternative communities. I’d seen tarot readers at markets and in those secret corners behind curtains in bookstores and alternative health centers. Tarot was in my backdrop but it was still an esoteric mystery that I watched from the outside with a hungry curiosity. 

This fateful magazine article explained the history of the cards, the symbolism of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the most famous deck and the standard for most modern decks today, and offered brief explanations for how to read each card in the Major Arcana. It was the first thing I’d ever encountered that told me tarot was something I could be a part of. I just had to study it. 

It was astounding. 

I couldn’t afford to buy a tarot deck (and my mother wasn’t rushing off to buy me one). So I made a deck.

I took large sheets of card and cut them into 78 even rectangles. I pored over images of the RWS deck from that magazine with a magnifying glass and copied them as best as my unremarkable artistic abilities allowed. I didn’t know what the minor cards looked like, except the Aces – this was before the internet, people! – so I made up my own designs for them. I secretly saved my money and bought a book on reading tarot, and set to work, again secretly, trying to see into the future. 

I still have this deck and the blue satin bag I sewed to store it in. Here’s a photo…

About a year later, my sister bought me my first “real” deck. It was Legend: The Arthurian Tarot, illustrated by Anna-Marie Ferguson. 

I still have this deck. It’s worn and soft, a few cards creased and dog-eared. It has seen me through leaving home, leaving school, going back to school, going back home, going to university, boys and break-ups, moving cities, getting jobs, quitting jobs, traveling the world, getting married, having kids, not having more kids, having more kids, writing books, and everything in between.

Tarot and Magic

When I first started reading tarot, I read for my friends, usually in the Celtic Cross spread. We would gather in dim rooms, having earnest conversations while listening to the likes of PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Nirvana, and tarot wisdom. It felt significant. Magic.

My teenage self thought it was something mystical in the cards itself, but over the years my beliefs have changed. 

I see tarot cards as potent symbols of human archetypes, representations of, and metaphors for experiences most people go through on every plane of existence. We apply our own significances to these archetypes and look to our intuitions to tell us if these are messages we need to hear in these moments. Tarot isn’t exactly magic like the magic I write about in my books. Yet we have imbued them with the power to uncover hidden parts of our souls. And that feels like magic. 

My Decks

From that one hand made deck, I have become a deck collector and dedicate a corner of my office to more than a dozen tarot and oracle decks. I buy new decks maybe once a year now and they have to be personally relevant. 

I don’t feel particularly connected to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. It’s important for tarot culture and I love its history and impact, and that’s the only reason I own it.

I still use the Legend deck for my personal journey, and use other decks for writing as themes or feeling suggests. 

My Not-So-Secret Secret Tarot Life

Tarot isn’t a part of me I wear on the open – oh wait, I have a tarot t-shirt and there’s that enormous RWS Major Arcana wall hanging in my bedroom… but to meet me, most people wouldn’t immediately think “tarot reader”.

My tarot life is not a secret – obviously, because I have this site and books about it. But it’s still something personal that I only share when I trust certain folk are on my vibe. Yes, I have shared my tarot journey with the entire world in publishing this, but you’re only here reading it if you’re on my vibe.

For me, tarot is a very personal thing. I don’t even really share it with my husband. He obviously sees my decks and the massive wall hanging (and those times I talk in tarot metaphors about what’s happening in our life). I talk to my kids about tarot casually. They love gazing at my wall hanging, playing their games with it. How many different animals can you see? What’s your favorite picture? I’m sure as they get older the depictions of nudity will become part of the conversation! My eldest sometimes picks through decks, looking for the most beautiful images that call to her.

Most people in my personal life don’t see what tarot means to me, and the empowerment I get from 78 pieces of card with pretty pictures on them. And that’s okay!

How Tarot Empowers Me

Tarot is a thinking prompt. It’s a writing prompt. It’s a perspective shift. It’s a message from something that feels bigger than me. The time I take to draw the cards, spread, and reflect gives me mental and spiritual space. Even if things show up in a spread that I just can’t factor into my question, it’s an opportunity to consider why they don’t fit, which is just a different path to clarifying thoughts. Reading tarot is a moment of power to step out of a word that shouts at us at every turn that magic isn’t real and logic and productivity is everything, and tune into something beautiful and slow that claims the opposite.

Obviously, tarot has its connections to the occult, to witchcraft, to paganism, to all manner of alternative spiritual paths. I love musing on the archetype of the witch and what that means in this world and those that have gone before us, and I play with these archetypes in my identity, but I don’t claim to be a witch in any completely defining sense. I am not a pagan, or an occultist, and I do not follow any particular spiritual path. 

Still, I can’t help but feel something of this magical culture whenever I pick up a deck. Now, as I’ve said, I don’t believe in literal magic like the kind I write in my fantasy novels, but I do believe in driving emotions and personal power and intuition and manifesting intention, and that’s magic. Tarot connects to all of that too.

But then there are those times when coincidences scream so loudly that I just shrug and let it happen. Who am I to say that magic isn’t real? 

Tarot Writers

Tarot Writers is another Fool’s step on my tarot journey and my writing journey.

This work is not only me becoming a tarot teacher, but it’s an opportunity to deepen my learning of tarot. Learning is an endless journey, like the major arcana itself. We start as the Fool, eager and naïve and willing to step into the unknown with blissful naivety of where the path leads. We climb through wisdoms, we crash in turmoil, and rise again with wisdom and knowledge. Always a Fool’s knowledge, and we begin again.

I look forward to sharing that journey with you.

* That magazine was the first edition of Witchcraft, a now defunct Australian periodical by Lucy Cavendish. Lucy still is productive in the spirituality circles, and I love exploring the ideas in her DragonFae deck, my first (but very much not last) Oracle deck.