I've been dabbling in cartomancy to some degree or another ever since 1989 when I bought my first tarot deck. It was just a standard Rider-Waite deck. I was a freshman in college and still very new to putting my years of research into Wicca and paganism into practice. I didn't know any better about getting a different deck. Not that I had a lot of options at the bookstore where I bought my deck, of course.
And I certainly didn't know that it's something of an unspoken rule to be given your decks, rather than buying them yourself. Even to this day, I don't follow that unspoken rule most of the time. If a deck speaks to me, touches me, and I know I have the money and the energy to bring it home, it comes home with me. End of story. Now that doesn't mean that I turn down decks given to me. Good heavens, no! I cherish those decks for the gifts they are.
But back to that old Rider-Waite deck. I love that deck, and I used it for many, many years as my sole and/or primary deck. I had some amazingly accurate readings, thanks to the unique bond I had with that deck. I even learned my all-time favorite spread with that deck, honed it to personal perfection. It does reside in a silk pouch with a picture of a variety of power animals on it, many of which actually pertain to me or my family of the heart. There's even a purple cotton reading cloth that I sewed with red embroidery floss more years ago than I care to admit.
It's still kicking around in my house somewhere. I sheepishly admit that I've lost track of it. I know it's in my little travel juju suitcase with an older set of stone runes that I'd collected and painted myself, among other things. But the exact location of said travel juju case is a bit of a mystery. When the time is right for me to work with either the deck or the runes again, the case will make itself known. That's the way of my relationship with that case and its contents.
At last count, I have somewhere around a dozen and a half decks. That's just me. That doesn't include BD's decks or our housemate's decks. Though, to be fair, we've inherited most of the housemate's decks, because she really just buys them for the pretty pictures. We actually use them. And that tally of decks doesn't include my ever-increasing wish list of decks either. *sigh* The pretties, I wants them.
In 1999 or 2000, I got the first two of what I was told were Strega decks: a deck consisting only of the Major Arcana. I still own both decks [one Celtic, the other Italian], but have never used them. I really need to frame them and display them somewhere in my home. I've never had the urge to use them for any sort of cartomancy or divination, but I can't part with them either.
Nowadays, I tend more toward the non-traditional tarot decks and oracle decks. I'm finding that I tend to have better, more intuitive readings with the various non-traditional decks than I do with the traditional Rider-Waite decks. I think that's because I associate the traditional decks with a more rigid ritual structure than I work with. That doesn't mean that I completely shun the traditional decks. It just means that I've expanded my horizons.
I have been working more regularly with some of my decks over the past year and a half now, honing my skills as a reader. I hold monthly one card draws on my fannish blogs and offer paid readings anytime. And every single reading that I've done in this time frame is handwritten in a series of journals and notebooks. I go back over them now and then, checking accuracies of reactions from my clients and looking at how my style and/or connection to certain decks and cards has changed over the years.
When I was in college in 2000, I took a philosophy class called Science and the Occult. The professor required a class science project to pass, primarily to create a hypothesis and do the testing to see if it was valid or not. Pretty basic stuff, right? I chose to do my project on the validity and reliability of online tarot readings. I used my personal favorite spread and had 108 participants in my study. In the end, the statistical analysis that I had Mama Bear run via her SPSS stats program was inconclusive to my hypothesis, which was interesting in and of itself. And I remember getting an A+ on that project and a comment from the professor that he didn't understand a single word of my analysis, but took my word for it that it was correct. To this day, I'm still amused by that.
Part of me wants to recreate that experiment now, twelve years later, to see if any changes show up. And the rest of me says not to bother, simply because I remember how physically exhausting that experiment was for me to complete, and I'm not even talking about the analysis. I'm just too old now to be expending that much energy like that again, purely for the potential amusement.
But for now, I think I'll just stick to doing my monthly draws and finish out my year and a day of daily draws for myself. That project has allowed me to work with more of my decks, and even gave me the information that two of my decks are no longer mine and need to find new homes. It has also proved to me that there are some changes required in the way I do a number of my spiritual practices. While I'm not 100% happy with the information I've learned about these practices, I'm glad to have learned it and to have the opportunity to change those practices.
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