Why I chose playing cards over Tarot.
Tarot cards are beautiful. The artwork is stunning and the ancient method tried and true. Oracle cards have also been known to connect deeply with many contemporary readers. Once you’ve found your medium, the messages come through loud and clear. Divination methods are as personal as food preferences or individual style, and are definitely subjective. For me, it has always been about the standard playing deck.
It was during the early 1970s, when the onset of puberty changed everything inside and out. I had just turned 13 and the worst was yet to come. The house back then was thick with spirits. They’d come and go in short bursts of chaotic energy. It was a busy place and there always seemed to be people from this plane and others ushering through with unsettling speed. With two adolescents, my brother and me, in the house, the churning energy brought turmoil.
The hub of the house was a large kitchen. Its sea-mist green walls and round oak table bespoke the era. It was my mother’s domain, her sanctuary, and she always kept plenty of playing cards on hand. She secretly liked solitaire, which betrayed her secretive demeanor. Aloneness, whether real or imagined, was her refuge. I had few friends, but enough moody siblings to keep me entertained, though never included. It became an identifying condition for me, the youngest and least noticed of the brood. Spending chasms of time alone served me in ways I never expected.
One autumn day, I riffled through the kitchen junk drawer and found a random deck of cards. They were designed with an illustration of a church, an ironic choice. I counted them, 52, to make sure the deck was intact. With so many people flurrying about things often got scattered. Skulking up the stairs, I held the deck close to me so my mother wouldn’t notice. There was something pushing me to take the cards, voices, if I remember correctly, whispers. With all the decks she had lying around, I’m sure she would’ve said that was her favorite, although she never noticed them gone.
Big and angular, the house was hardly private. It had an odd, quixotic layout with sharp walls jutting out around corners and deep, narrow closets. No inside doors, except my mother’s bedroom, were ever closed or locked. Upstairs, I waited for uncharacteristic silence to calm the air. When the time felt right, I held the cards in my left hand, my dominant hand. They felt unusually light, weightless; I’d made the right choice.
Before this time, on that particular fall day, I’d never thought much of divination, especially turning to cards for answers. I’d dabbled in other areas, some inadvertently stirring the darkness and leaving me uncomfortable for days at a time. It was all part of the lessons of youth. On this particular afternoon, everything seemed to settle into place, as if planned. I’d heard spirits before as they’d shimmer their way through to speak a few words or utter sounds. Always coming in from the right, for reasons I’ve never been sure of, they’d tell me little secrets – something had happened, or was going to happen, or something had changed, or just a simple, “hello.” They were welcome ripples in an otherwise lonely life.
I sat on my bed. Those days, it was never made, so I straightened the blankets as best as I could and made a level space for the cards. Shuffling was a struggle, not having had much practice, but after a few minutes I felt comfortable with the cards’ alignment. I looked at the smooth blanket and wondered how to place the cards; face up, down, in rows, a circle, triangle, square, simple, like reading a book. It was trial and error. The more I handled the cards the more clarity swept over me. The voices grew from whispers to words and I felt something I rarely felt those days… confidence. I was a ragged, plump, overly developed, painfully shy, pre-teen who talked to spirits. School wasn’t easy. Yet, for this precious moment in time, I knew without a shadow of doubt what I was hearing and seeing.
The cards fell together in perfect order and I read them like some primordial text that suddenly filled my mind with long-slumbering understanding. This was decades before the Internet, so there was no information readily available to guide or misguide me. In those days it was all about feeling, intuition, sensitivity, and learning to shed uncertainty.
Over many years, I’ve tried multiple decks of Tarot and Oracle cards, sometimes honing my craft in both, but I always returned to my original playing deck. These days it’s horribly dog-eared and much of the church has been worn away. As I sat quietly one night holding the deck in my left hand the same way I did so many years ago, I thought about how many people had shuffled it and how much energy had passed through it to me. I thought of the hundreds of stories that spilled from their minds onto the table in front of me and how willing, if not desperate they were to share their tales of sometimes unimaginable sorrow and irrepressible joy. That simple deck of cards, not designed for anything more than a hand of Old Maid, Whist, Gin Rummy, or even Solitaire, told stories of the ages.
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