The Tarot Deck I Bought on the Way Home from the Library

I was eleven years old, walking home from the library, when I saw it in a bookstore window.

A tarot deck. I had never seen one before — not in person, not up close. I knew the word vaguely, the way children know words they've encountered in books without fully understanding them. Something to do with fortune telling. Something slightly forbidden-feeling, in the way that things adults don't talk about directly feel forbidden to children.

I went in. I looked at it. I bought it.

I was eleven. I had no idea what I was doing. I went home and started reading for my classmates.

The Deck

It was a standard Rider-Waite-Smith deck — the most widely used tarot deck in the world, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite and published in 1909. I didn't know any of this at the time. I just knew that the images were vivid and strange and that each one seemed to contain more than it was showing.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck was, in retrospect, exactly the right deck to start with. Unlike earlier tarot decks, in which the minor arcana cards were illustrated with simple arrangements of suit symbols — five cups arranged on a card, seven swords in a row — the Rider-Waite-Smith deck illustrates every card with a scene. A figure stands in a landscape. Something is happening. The image tells a story, or the beginning of one, and the reader's job is to complete it.

This narrative quality is what makes the Rider-Waite-Smith deck so accessible to beginners. You don't need to memorize abstract meanings. You can look at the image and respond to what you see. The five of cups shows a figure in a black cloak standing before three spilled cups, while two full cups stand behind them, unnoticed. You don't need a book to tell you what that means. You can feel it.

Reading for My Classmates

I learned the cards the way children learn most things: by doing, by making mistakes, by paying attention to what worked and what didn't.

I read for my classmates. I shuffled the cards, laid them out in simple spreads, said what I saw. Sometimes what I said landed with an accuracy that surprised both of us. Sometimes it missed entirely. I noted both without fully understanding either.

What I noticed, even then, was that the readings that worked best were not the ones where I recited memorized meanings. They were the ones where I looked at the image and said what I actually saw — where I let the card speak rather than translating it through a layer of learned interpretation.

This observation would take me years to fully understand. But it planted something: the suspicion that tarot was not primarily a system of fixed meanings to be memorized, but a language of images to be read — and that reading a language fluently is different from knowing its dictionary.

What Tarot Actually Is

A standard tarot deck contains 78 cards, divided into two sections: the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana.

The Major Arcana consists of 22 cards, numbered 0 through 21, each depicting a symbolic figure or scene: The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World. These cards represent the major themes and forces of human experience — the archetypal patterns that recur across individual lives and across history.

The Minor Arcana consists of 56 cards, divided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles (sometimes called Coins or Disks). Each suit contains fourteen cards: Ace through Ten, plus four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King). The suits correspond to the four classical elements — Wands to fire, Cups to water, Swords to air, Pentacles to earth — and to different domains of human experience: creativity and will, emotion and relationship, thought and conflict, material reality and practical matters.

The origins of tarot are contested. The cards appear in northern Italy in the fifteenth century as playing cards — used for a trick-taking game called tarocchi — and their use for divination develops later, in the eighteenth century, primarily in France. The elaborate esoteric systems that now surround tarot — the connections to Kabbalah, astrology, numerology, Hermeticism — are largely the work of nineteenth and twentieth century occultists who found in the cards a convenient framework for organizing their broader symbolic systems.

This history matters, because it means that tarot is not an ancient oracle with a single correct interpretation. It is a living system that has been continuously developed, argued over, and reimagined by practitioners across three centuries. The meanings are not fixed. They are a conversation.

Why the Images Work

The question that I couldn't articulate at eleven but was already implicitly asking was: why does this work at all?

The cards are shuffled randomly. The images that appear are determined by chance. And yet, with a regularity that exceeds what chance alone would predict, the images that appear seem to speak to the situation at hand. How?

There are several frameworks for understanding this, and I would encounter all of them over the following years. The Jungian framework — which I would reach for first, and find partially but not completely satisfying — understands the cards as activating the archetypes of the collective unconscious: universal patterns of human experience that the images embody and that the reading process brings into conscious awareness.

The synchronicity framework — also Jung's, and more interesting — understands the meaningful coincidence between the cards drawn and the situation at hand not as causation but as meaningful pattern: the same underlying reality expressing itself simultaneously in the external event (the cards) and the internal experience (the querent's situation).

Other frameworks exist — some more mystical, some more psychological, some that resist the distinction between the two. I would spend years investigating them. I would find that none of them fully accounts for what actually happens in a good reading.

But at eleven, I wasn't asking the question yet. I was just reading the cards.

And sometimes, inexplicably, they were right.

Next in this series: Why I stopped reading tarot — and what brought me back, years later, to the practice of pulling one card every single day.