#31DaysOfTarot

I’m not sure if the wonderful Ethony is doing #31DaysOfTarot this year, but as this is the first year I’ve been aware of the tag (and actively blogging about tarot) I thought I might give the it a go using prompts from previous years.

I’m going to (aim to) chunk the challenge into weeks rather than making separate posts for each prompt (I’m not entirely sure I’d have enough to say about each thing?). I’ve also changed some questions to allow more wiggle room for me to answer!

1. Newest Tarot Deck? (Or, did the Yule fairies bring you any goodies?)

My most recent tarot acquisition is the Tarot of Light and Shadow by the brilliant Andrea Aste and John Matthews. I ordered it after attending a workshop with Andrea for TABI and becoming utterly enchanted with the layers of research, creativity and thought gone into the creation of the deck. I was also fascinated by the concept behind the double deck, bringing a whole new dimension to readings, like adding even more reversals and slants on meanings.

2. Top deck(s) for 2022?

Well that’s just an unfair question. My inclination is simply to list all the decks.

The Wandering Star lived on my bedside table for months after I bought it, the colour palette and the illustration style are so comforting to me and I really enjoyed having the little keywords tucked into the art – it’s a great deck for daily/weekly card pulls as it quickly tells you what you need to know.

The White Numen also really captured my imagination, I find the illustrations really emotionally charged without being too intense (sometimes the more intense decks in my collection get pushed to the back because I don’t want to face them), the art style is just stunning and I love the cast of characters and interplay with the animals (numen) – I’m not really one for animal decks but this one really speaks to me.

The third deck I want to mention (otherwise I’d be here all day) is the Spacious Tarot and its expansion cards, although it’s a deck I’m yet to fully connect with, the artwork speaks to my SOUL. I find the absence of people makes it a challenging deck to read but it is incredible for personal intuitive readings, the expansion cards brought a whole new dimension to my readings and it has been so much fun just to sit and play with these images.

3. Best tarot book 2022?

It might not exactly be a tarot book but I adored Beneath the Moon by Yoshi Yoshitani, a stand alone book of folktales, myths and legends from around the word, each story is accompanied by a piece of artwork and corresponds with a tarot card in their Tarot of the Divine – more on that later. The book gave me so much to work with and so many new perspectives on the cards by aligning them each with a full story, it also helped me be better prepared to communicate the meanings to others because I could fall back on telling the story.

4. Best tarot moment?

Without a doubt, the best moment in my tarot year was doing my first readings in a market setting. This year was the beginning of my professional reading journey, after reading for myself and friends for over ten years (!) – so leaping into performing over forty readings for strangers was bananas and felt like such an achievement.

5. Which card followed you this year?

The three of swords cropped up in so many readings this year, in readings I did for myself, readings I had from others and readings I did for others. It’s quite an intimidating card, I’ve written more about the different versions of it in deck I own here – but oddly it hasn’t felt like a scary presence, more like an invitation to release difficult feelings.

6. Most used deck?

The deck I used the most in 2023 has to be Yoshi Yoshitani’s Tarot of the Divine. I’ve been on a quest to find a great, inclusive deck, a deck that feels like it can show everyone themselves in the cards but without feeling contrived or like a diversity box-ticking exercise, this deck happily fulfils that brief. This is the deck I’ve taken to the past two Leith Witchcraft Markets and they have served me beautifully.

7. What did you learn?

What a huge question, it’s hard to know where to begin with an answer. I suppose the most obvious way to respond would be to talk about getting my tarot diploma. While I can’t imagine anyone would ever call on my qualifications to be a reader, the course gave me a really great rounding out of my existing tarot knowledge. I’d always approached tarot from a bit of a side angle and the course showed me the merits of more traditional approaches and the RWS system. I also completed the Alternative Tarot course with Little Red Tarot, this fleshed out my feelings around reading intuitively and how to read from decks that aren’t straight up clones of the RWS.

But it would be missing an opportunity to not also mention the biggest thing I learned this year, which is that tarot is something I’m actually pretty good at, and that is a feeling I haven’t felt for a really long time. It has been a really magical experience to finally feel proficient at something again after a good few years of floundering and feeling not much good at anything. I’m so grateful to have rediscovered some self confidence I hadn’t even realised I had lost.

read part two here!