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This post is in response to a reply to my numerological post, asking about Tarot Card reccomendations. Clearly I’m having a writing block keeping me from posting as regularly as I’d like, and that’s why I’m adressing this.

Yes, I am going to write a piece specifically on tarot, it’s a beautiful and familiar system of divination. But I want to do it right, and that means doing the research and sorting out my ideas and so forth – I can’t write the thing casually.

But I can reccomend a tarot deck casually. I can promise you that almost any book on tarot is sufficient to get you started, and that if you take tarot divination seriously it will prove a valuable resource for you.

Here’s my blog post on divination in general and how I believe it works and is useful.

Now when it comes to choosing a tarot deck,  there are 4 basic varieties of Tarot Deck:

Rider-Waite is the most popular Tarot deck, it updates earlier designs with excellent artwork while maintaining traditional symbolism completely. This is often the deck recommended to begin with. I still prefer reading with it. Almost 90% of other tarot deck designs use this tarot deck as a template while substituting different styles of artwork.

Ceremonial Magic Tarot: The Golden Dawn and Thoth tarot decks add a great deal of traditional European magical symbolism to their deck. Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck is mildly non-standard. These are excellent decks to use if you like them and/or are fond of the broader European magical tradition.

Tarot of Antiquity: There are older tarot decks than the Rider-Waite, I invariably find them aesthetically disapointing – but if antiquity makes a tarot design seem more powerful to you, it’s a good choice.

“Other” tarot, these are tarot decks that do not use the visual symbolism of Rider -Waite, while maintaining the suits and trumps of a tarot deck. I once used a ‘Ukio” tarot deck that used Japanese flowers for tarot symbols – I found it effective for a time.

Not Tarot: These are decks that diverge from Tarot tradition in suits, trumps, number of cards and interpretation of cards. These decks can be used for divination as well, see my post on divination.

When choosing a tarot deck, what is most important is how it ‘feels’ to you. You want a deck to suit your subconscious, that ‘feels’ powerful to you. Very often people will have different decks for reading for themselves and reading for others.

I like the Pamela Smith drawings in the Rider-Waite deck, they are simple and well drawn without artistic imposition of style, without shoehorning unnecessary additional symbolism – clearly the classic traditional symbolism of the cards guided the design instead of desire to impress with flash and style – as is rampant with most other deck designs. That’s why I’m fond of the Rider-Waite deck and use it despite it’s ubiquity.

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