The 30 Day Tarot Challenge - day 2

Day Two of the Tarot Challenge.  Today's question is:

What was your first deck and why/how did you get it?

My first deck was the Sharman-Caselli deck (created by Juliet Sharman-Burke, illustrated by Giovanni Caselli, published by Connections).  Why this one?  I first looked at the Rider-Waite-Smith deck but couldn’t connect to it.  My first tarot friend, who I met on-line but turned out to live in the same city as me, had the Sharman-Caselli so I borrowed that for a bit.  I found the images more accessible – I’m a visual person, so being able to connect to the artwork is important for me.  So off I trotted to a local bookshop....and the rest, as they say, is history.

And the history continues, with question Three - soon to be answered! 

Both images from the Sharman-Caselli Tarot, published by Connections 2002.

The 30 Day Tarot Challenge - day 1

Tarot bloggers have started to respond to this 30 Day Tarot Challenge, started by Ree at 78 Keys.  I probably won't be posting on this on a daily basis, but I will take 30 days to complete the challenge over a couple of months.

The first question that Ree posed is:

1. What introduced you to, or got you involved in tarot?

My design for the TABI Tarot Deck

That’s a very good question, but one that’s difficult to answer! The honest answer is that I don’t remember. As a child, my favourite Hallowe’en costume was a ‘gypsy’, and I was intrigued by the idea of crystal balls and divination. I don’t know when I first came across tarot cards, but I’d guess it was probably as a teenager, and probably from one of the many books I devoured during that time!  It wasn’t until much later that I actually saw a tarot deck, but already in my mind I’d imagined what the cards might look like. Once I started looking at decks, I found that although many of the images appealed to me, I couldn’t find a deck that really spoke to me, so I started thinking about creating my own.  Eventually I started to read the cards, but I found it hard to trust my intuition.  Joining the Tarot Association of the British Isles (TABI) was what really got me going!