Grace Cavanaugh, Staff Writer~
I’ve always been interested in Tarot. At first, it started with a little interest while I was doing research for a story I was writing. I talked to a Pagan friend of mine who read Tarot about which cards would mean this and that, and she gave me a few websites to look at, as well as a few suggestions for the cards I should look up. I went on to tell my aunt about this same story, and the research I’d done, and then my aunt surprised me with a pack of Tarot cards. At the time, I had no interest in doing readings. I just thought they were cool. The cards my aunt gave me were zombie themed, but I never got to even open them. My parents aren’t very religious, or weren’t at the time, but they were superstitious. My mom made me give the cards back, because by having them I was inviting “the Devil” into our house.
I ended up buying my own decks after an interesting time I had with a group of my friends in Hopwood Hall. It was my freshman year in college and I wanted to expand my horizons, follow my own interests, and so on and so forth. I ended up purchasing the Universal Waite Tarot Deck and Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven’s Prophecy Tarot on my own Amazon account so my parents did not find out. I also bought a book, The Modern Witchcraft Book of Tarot by Skye Alexander, to teach me how to read the cards.
What is interesting about Tarot, my Pagan friend explained to me, was that it’s a neutral force. The cards themselves do not swing one way or another, as Ouija boards and seances can get very scary, and go downhill quickly. You also don’t have to be a psychic to read Tarot, prior to some beliefs.
I ended up taking my Waite Tarot deck to camp with me for the summer and got a lot of practice doing readings for my friends. I helped them work through their problems, because ultimately there’s two ways to look at Tarot: either you believe in the power of the cards future-telling, or you believe they’re a way to direct your thoughts so you can better think through a situation. Because of situations I’ve been in the past, and the frankly spooky way the cards can be accurate, I believe that the cards do have some power. They are not evil, but they are not good either. They are a neutral party that have the ability to help the user think through their problems, and hopefully allow them to prepare for the future.
