Buying Your Own Tarot Deck isn’t Unlucky
Double Rainbow in Carmel Valley, CA
Ahh yes, I remember the first time I heard this one: “I’m interested in Tarot and want a deck but I heard someone has to buy me one and that I can’t buy one myself” Luckily by the time I heard this line I already had 3 decks in heavy rotation and none of them appeared “broken”, so I quickly dismissed this as an old superstition. As patterns tend to go, I began to hear this same sentiment several times on repeat from hopeful Tarot practitioners and Tarot curious humans and so I began to wonder. Where did this idea originate from and how long has it been floating around? What is the consensus out there in the Tarot community?
Falling to the bottom of a rabbit hole one evening, I stumbled across a few trailheads that may have led us down this path. Based on my humble understanding, here is what I have pieced together and I hope that it can be of some help.
While today we have hundreds of decks to choose from, in the not so distant past (think 1960s, 1970s) there weren’t so many options and Tarot decks were a little harder to come by. If you lived outside of a major city, there was a strong possibility your local bookshop didn’t carry Tarot decks. And so, many decks were passed on from one reader to another. There also weren’t a great number of resources regarding books (ah and no internet!) like today and so much of the knowledge was passed on from teacher to student and so down the practitioner chain it went.
Over 100 years ago, magical organizations like the Golden Dawn designed Tarot decks exclusively for their members, and thus, in order to receive one, you had to be initiated into the order of the secret society, wherein falls the idea of receiving a deck rather than purchasing.
Overall, it was a lot more challenging to get your hands on a deck if you weren’t a member of a secret magical society or if your grandmother didn’t pass down her knowledge of the cards to you. The resources just didn’t exist in abundance.
The idea that it is bad luck to buy a deck was a little more difficult to sleuth out. The best way I can understand this idea is that if you were given a deck, it held a great deal of energy, as it had been used by the most spiritual of practitioners and now was being entrusted and bestowed upon you. It had proven its effectiveness and now you were the new keeper of this divine knowledge. But how does this translate into bad luck? There were a few things that popped when I asked this question and warning, some carry the shimmer of elitism.
If it wasn’t given to you, you don’t know how to use it and could use it unwisely = Bad Luck
How convenient to say that you must be gifted a deck in order for it to “work” properly, what a clever way to hold a power position, the less you distribute the more power and less competition you have ;)
Is it possible that something got lost in translation over time? Perhaps it was meant as helpful to start, to make sure a new practitioner had a strong understanding but somehow got morphed into something negative along the way?
Any ideas that you may have I’m respectfully open to. As far as I can tell, most of those within the Tarot community don’t agree with this, the feeling seems to be if you want to learn Tarot get out there and buy yourself a deck that resonates with you! Take a look around, visit your local metaphysical shops, peruse online, if you have a friend with a Tarot practice perhaps you’ve seen a deck or two at their place that has caught your eye. It is my personal belief that there are no rules to obtaining a Tarot deck (I mean, don’t steal). If I had waited until someone handed me one I wouldn’t be here writing this post for all of you lovely folks out there.
Be well and happy selecting ☺️