Grace Cavanaugh ~ Staff Writer
I have been a little off brand recently and figured I should probably go back to the “Mystic Magic” I came here writing. To get back on topic, I thought I would write about some of the superstitions surrounding tarot cards.
One such superstition is something I always forget: you are not supposed to buy the cards for yourself. The tradition is to have the cards given to you. For a lot of people, like me, we are too impatient to wait for a deck to be given to us, or the people around us are not picking up our hints. I know I have, for one, shown many people my Etsy wishlist, full of different decks I would love to receive as a gift. Through Christmas and my birthday, though, I ended up buying a few of these decks for myself.
One way to get around this superstition, my pagan friend and I have found, is getting another person to buy it for you. I get my pagan friend to buy me a deck, and then coincidentally gift her the same amount of money she spent on the deck. It is a clever and convenient way to get around this particular superstition.
According to a few tarot websites, though, this superstition is dependent on the person buying the deck. If you are someone who is prone to believing black cats and broken mirrors bring bad luck, maybe wait for a tarot deck gift. For others, using a Tarot deck you bought yourself or one gifted to you by a friend or family, they all work the same.
Another superstition I want to address is that there are leftover “essences” of people who have previously touched the cards. Some tarot reading books will advise you to knock the past impressions of people out by physically knocking on the cards, something that I do for every reading.
Another way to get rid of these phantom impressions is to cleanse the cards with white sage or crystals. Since I cannot burn sage in my house on campus, I opt for the safer choice of crystals. There is a shop in Richmond, Virginia, called Rest in Pieces, that I like to visit every time I go home. The last time I went, I bought a large chunk of white quartz to cleanse my cards and two little hematite stones to draw out negative energy.
Of course, there are plenty other crystals and stones that you could use to cleanse your cards, and I hope to eventually have a wide assortment of crystals to use. To cleanse the cards, you put the crystals on top of the deck and set the deck by a window. They stay like this overnight and are good to go for the next reading.