Background

Tarot and Me

Back probably in junior high, I bought a tarot deck at a generic bookstore. I'm can't remember clearly why exactly I bought it nor how I had gotten the idea. I started trying to do Celtic Cross readings while looking up both the spread and the card meanings from the deck booklet. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with that tack, and the deck got placed on the bookshelf to gather dust. The name of the deck was meaningless to me then, but now I know it to be the Morgan-Greer deck, which is still one of my favorites among Rider-Waite-Smith clones.

Maybe a year or two later I was in a game shop and saw a book describing a Lord of the Rings tarot. Being a Tolkien fanatic, I was immediately intrigued, but the store didn't have the deck. Being industrious, I managed to find and order the book and deck boxed set online from U.S. Games. Unfortunately, I never really read the book, and while I was appreciative of some of the images, the artwork in general didn't appeal to me. I didn't revisit the deck until I had learned a bit more about tarot in general. In sum, the card meanings are quite accurate compared to the RWS, it's the creator's interpretation of Tolkien that is a mile off. I do think the deck will remain and rot on the bookshelf.

My present interest and increasing knowledge of tarot began when Ragabash posted a short comment about Yuuto being matched to the Devil in CLAMP's X Major Arcana, along with a link to Learning the Tarot. I dutifully began reading through the lessons posted online, and faithfully tried to follow the site's card meanings. A short time later, while I was in the middle of the lessons, I posted a list of predictions matching the remaining X characters to the remaining Major Arcana. This led to some conversations with Murasaki, who offered her own insights and some suggestions on finding tarot symbolism books at the bookstore. In essence, it was CLAMP and X that truly sparked my lasting interest in tarot, as well as an auxiliary interest in qabalah.

After that, it was merely a process of falling in love with the artwork from a number of decks and subsequently ordering them. My obsessions of the time began to attach themselves to tarot, always inspiring me to match characters and scenes to cards, which is the foundation of this site.

Currently, I own 7 decks. My primary reading deck is the Vision Quest Tarot. I'm gradually learning to read reversed cards.

- Elwen Skye, 02.16.03

« Back