The other night, a dear friend sent me a late-night text. If I wanted to pick up a tarot deck, she asked, which one should I get?
I found the text a bit surprising, first because my friend is not Pagan or particularly Witchy, and also because tarot is not a huge part of my own Paganism. But nonetheless, I found I did have opinions on the subject – pretty strong ones, it seemed, when I looked up and realized I’d written a reply long enough to be a short essay.
There are plenty of valid answers to her question – perhaps the most valid one being “just go to your local Metaphysical Goods Shoppe and pick the one that looks the most neat to you.” But my friend has a bit of a fiddly academic streak about her (as do I – it’s one of the things we like about each other) and I didn’t feel like that would be a satisfying response.
Pamela Colman Smith’s Six of Swords from the Rider-Waite Deck [public domain]
So instead I gave a different answer, more in tune with my true nature, namely, the least interesting occultist you know: I said that she should pick up Rider-Waite-Smith and Rachel Pollack‘s 78 Degrees of Wisdom, learn those, and then go where her heart took her. It’s a boring, traditionalist answer, but it’s also one I would give to most people in her position. It’s important to know what everything else is riffing on, if for no other reason than to make sure we can laugh at the jokes. (I also suggested Lisa Sterle’s Modern Witch Tarot, since it can still teach the basic imagery of Rider-Waite-Smith with more diverse characters, but my friend agreed with me that a few images – like the Chariot as a woman on a motorcycle – took us out of the magic. I’m a boring traditionalist as well, she admitted.)
Looking at my bookshelf, I count eight tarot decks – a number I realize is sparse compared to many Witches’ collections, but still, it’s more than any other magickal tool I own. Of them, four I bought for myself. They range from old favorites – the aforementioned Rider-Waite-Smith, Harris and Crowley’s Thoth deck – to decks only a few years old, like Rust Belt Arcana and Great Lakes Tarot by David Wilson, which I love for their vibrant ecological specificity, for how grounded they are in a specific place on Earth. (I wish I had either the artistic talent or the environmental knowledge to put one together for the plants and animals of the Mississippi River Valley to which I am forever bound.)
The Hierophant and the Hanged Man from the Rust Belt Arcana tarot deck [Belt Publishing]
The others were gifts or inheritances. Apolonia van Leeuwen and Rufus Camphausen’s Tree of Life Tarot is the ultimate in fusty old scholarly decks, eschewing pretty imagery entirely for diagrams of how each card fits into correspondences with the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life; it was a gift from my father many years ago, and as far as I know it has been out of print longer than I have been alive. It’s more of a study aid than a tool for divination, but I love it for that: a good tool is one shaped to its function.
Corrado Roi’s Murder of Crows Tarot, on the other hand, is all imagery: stark black and white, Gothic figures surrounded, as the name suggests, by corvids portending various fates. As an Odin-worshiper who has been known to moan to his local blackbirds that he doesn’t have time to talk to the Old Man at the moment, I always find this deck delightful. It was a gift from a lover who is herself the occasional object of worship by her local crows; she has been known to walk the streets of Portland in her grey woolen cloak, followed by a small but devoted murder. I can’t imagine using this deck for most forms of divination, though; anything I might ask would have to be about her.
The last two I haven’t been willing to open yet. They belonged to a member of my coven who passed away recently, and I don’t know when I will be willing to think of them as my own. But lately I have at least turned the box over for Nigel Jackson’s Rose Tarot in my hands, considering whether I’m ready to open it up and at least meditate on a few of the cards. It’s the last gift I will receive from my covenmate, and I wonder if I am ready yet to learn this last set of lessons from him.
But still, what surprises me is that I have this many decks. As I said, tarot is not a major part of my practice; I don’t do a lot of divination in the first place, and when I do, I typically work with a set of runes given to me by another friend who has passed out of this middle-earth. But tarot has still worked its way into the fabric of my Witchcraft, and I can’t deny how much value these decks have brought to my magickal life – whether as tools, as sources of inspiration, or as objects I have infused with sentimental power.
Typically when I use my tarot decks, it’s for inspiration or meditation more than divination, as such. I like to invoke the imagery of Rider-Waite-Smith when I call in the elements for my coven’s esbats, and when I am stuck for what to do on a sabbat, sometimes I will grab one of the decks and see what comes to mind based on an appropriate trump or suit.
I did just this for my coven’s Candlemas rite last month. As I put the ceremony together, I lifted cards from Rust Belt Arcana and Great Lakes Tarot, which use a collection of animals, plants, insects, and people for their suit cards. In a process not unlike Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, I found new turns of phrase and unexpected avenues of insight in these images, things I would not have come to on my own.
Ace of Cups from Nigel Jackson’s Rose Tarot [Llewellyn]
I texted another lover, who also knows my friend who asked about tarot decks, and told her about the conversation. You’re not that guy, though? she said when I mentioned our friend had asked me for a recommendation.
Admittedly, I didn’t think I was. But maybe this is one of the advantages of growing up in the Craft: even if tarot isn’t the first thing I think of when I think of magick, it’s more a part of me than I gave it credit for. It’s part of the air that I breathe.
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