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Well I'm going by their belief system, and I think according to them it's like... I dunno the physical item has demonic stuff on it or something (man when you try to rationalize these beliefs from the other side it sounds so nuts...) But an app doesn't have a physical... ok yeah maybe it is just as bad lol I dunno!!! Right now though I'm so obsessed with just removing the rest of what is blocking me that I don't reeeeally care. Tarot isn't an integral part of my life in the sense that I get on fine without it, I don't rely on it for anything. When I DID read it though, I gained some profound insights, and I have decks I'm very fond of. I came back here simply because I remembered there being cool spiritual people here and I was already a member, I don't really like... care about not being able to read Tarot at this time. Not enough to go sneaking around anyway. More than anything I really just need to fully free my throat and chest of the rest of this pain I feel, (which I absolutely CAN do and am close) and then I need to find a way to make enough money to get back out on my own. My plan is sound, just only I can feel the very real thing I am healing and how close I am to having it fully completed, that's the part that sucks. Good news is, it can't be more than a couple weeks tops before I'm able to move past the healing phase and on to the doing phase. If I were still so far away I couldn't see the end, I wouldn't be showing my face online. 😅

Sadly the quality of Amazon and it's selling and customer service has really declined in the last 2 years. It's a fight to get a genuine deck (usually you are safe if the seller is Amazon itself or a high rated bookstore type third party) and then will it come with stickers on it, that damge when you take them off? or delivery damage? or even someone's previous return? It really has become a minefield of buying and a poor customer experience. Honestly it's better to pay a little more and find a little bookshop website or tarot site in your country. @jupiter you paid good money for a brand new deck, you were right to return it for a replacement ❤️ . Don't feel guilty 🙂

Yes, fair point and thank you 🙂 The replacement deck is on the way and I am still really excited for it, more so now that I've gotten a glimpse at the cards. I'll share photos once I have it.

I've got a new craze going and for once it isn't an expensive one. Gold Foil Decks! I bought one just for the heck of it and then I got impressed with it. No harm done, eh? Guess again! Now I have four of them of different styles. I've become a gold foil deck buying monster. Now that I've caught on that there are different styles, I know not where this obsession is going to end. There's even a PINK gold foil deck. When I cruised past it over and over again, my thought was-----no, not any use even looking closely at that one. I figured it was some hokey, ghastly ,childish, uber Barbie pink thing and I'm not into that. Then I looked more closely at it and and I was hooked. It was very pretty. Very flowery and scroll-y and feminine both front and back. I ordered it Monday and it came today. It's even more beautiful in person. Now it's my favorite of all four. It's kind of a Victorian themed deck. Every single gold foil deck is different in the patterns and colors that catch the light. It's quite fascinating. This will be my deck recommendation for Tarot beginners from now on. I've never liked RWS but the gold foil versions are wonderful. I hope I've moved other people to give them a try.

We used to have a "go to the top" of the page button, at the bottom of the forum pages, but sadly we lost it in a big forum software upgrade in September 2022, this was the news about that at the time here. Unfortunately we can only have features that are provided by the forum software or someone makes a plug in we can use to add it. This disappeared after this update 😞 Often browsers have ways of going to the top and bottom of a page. On Windows desktop devices, this is the Home key or End key for the bottom, sometimes Ctrl + those if you are in a text field. On Mac this is CMD and up and down keys. Many mobile device apps have this built in and a button appears at the bottom of pages. Also if you touch the top of the screen on some mobile browsers, it will take you to the top. Have a look online about the feature in your preferred browser, it usually has it's own function these days.

I'm just offering an idea, not from any book. It makes me think of little girls from poor families (or orphans) of history who sold flowers to survive. (I'm also thinking of little matchstick girl.) They were known as "flower girls". Now, where it gets interesting is that "flower girls" became a label associated with prostitution. When you think about it, if a child is poor or orphaned, and selling flowers to survive, it's unlikely she will grow up wealthy. Flowers can be picked, they don't cost anything, and they're a pleasure to see and smell (sometimes they're medicinal). People can be more generous to children. As adults, not so much. So, the innocence of childhood, the leeway given is lost upon getting to a certain age. So how does a female of a class system she cannot escape - that is built into society - fending for herself meet her needs now that society is not so generous because she is an adult (a traumatised one at that)? So nostalgia and pleasure might be better understood here. Nostalgia for when people were kinder, prior to all the diseases she may have incurred as a result of not having any other livelihood to survive on, she now has children to feed with the same coin she survived on, (and increasingly less coins earned once her disease has set in and takes away her appeal). The idea of matchgirl comes to me for this. The reverie is the only place of pleasure. I'm going on another tangent here and that is - these days (but maybe then too, if the boy is doing what I'm suggesting) - others will go and take all the flowers before anyone else can get to them. Then the flower girl has to pay a fee to someone who went out and picked the flowers for nothing - further decreasing her ability to provide for her needs. So she could also be nostalgic about the days she could take pleasure in picking flowers (because there were always some about and it would give pleasure to find them). Ultimately, with this intermediary taking the flowers and not being able to find any out in the fields, the pleasure might be gone from the fight for survival altogether. Then, what's the point?

Here , where I live all the Crows have gone for the winter. Only Ravens are left. I am using this deck with a heavy heart. A very close friend of ours ( - her home here up north is/ was called Ravenstone) - has started chemo in a desperate attempt to hold back terminal cancer. She is in the city. Ravenstone is sold. She now only has the urban Crows of Toronto as her feathered companions. My card of the day is 5 - Battle.....

@Darrell, if you like reading intuitively, then you would probably enjoy participating in this month's ISG (Intuitive Study Group) Reading Circle. Check it out here:

Hi geoxena, Thanks for the response. I believe I understand what you mean by intuitively. I mostly read in the past for myself, friends and family. My conversations with them were always much more relaxed and what we talked about was free form and simply flowed from the imagery on the cards. I would quite literally say things like "Oh, this ones cool. I like it in this positions" and then we'd go into why. Or how it made me feel in relation to the position in the spread or their question. I don't think the Fools Journey is a divination tool in an of itself. I never meant to imply to anyone that it was. I like it as the story of the fools journey this his various stages of development. It's a form of self analysis that I can use when I'm wondering why.. Ya know? I like that Carl Sagan quote!! Sincerely,

LOL, I crossed the streams in two projects I've been involved in -- Berti's tarot is the CLAUDIO Perrin.

I understand the dilemma you're in and I don't want to undermine your efforts to act sustainably, though compared to what's going on in the world your case doesn't make much of a difference. If you were hopping on your private jet to pick up the deck in Italy, I would want to have a discussion with you. I'm glad you'll get a nice replacement!

Hiya, Oftentimes when reading a thread, I have wished there was a link or icon at the bottom of the page that I could click to be quickly brought all the way back up to the top. It would be so much easier, especially with super long threads, than having to keep scrolling to get back there to the top of the page. Most other forums I frequent have this feature - would it be possible here? It could be to the right of the "Mark site read" button.

I'm aware of the idea of the Fool's journey, of course, but it is not generally something I use or look for. There have been some rare instances that I was reminded of it in a reading by seeing a particular card in a specific position, but only because there was something about the querent's question or issue, as well as the spread's purpose, that made me think of it. I read more intuitively, mostly using the imagery to guide me rather than memorized meanings, so an "established" story like the Fool's journey would only come up if it fit with what my intuition was telling me.

Better read: I'm sorry for spelling a foreign language incorrectly, and it's important to know, that no one used the expression Tarot de Marseilles before 1856. Even after 1856, when Romain Merlin (1793-1871) minted the expression, it took a little while before the term became widespread. Papus and Paul Marteau certainly caused the expression "tarot de Marseilles" to have a greater impact, but that happened after Christian's/Pitois' demise. I was considering writing substantially about French republican refugees in Belgium 1852-1870 but changed my mind.

Christian/Pitois is also the reason why Oswald Wirth put a crocodile in the corner of The Fool and why Wirth (subtly) and Waite-Smith (overtly) put sun symbolism on Temperance. While de Mellet and Etteilla had associated The Traitor with prudence, Christian/Pitois associated The Hermit with prudence, an influence we still may find among some tarot readers today.

The Gold Foil decks are so beautiful. I have Golden Art Nouveau Tarot and Golden Black Cat Tarot. There is som more I would like to have, but hard to get when I don´t want to have accounts at sellers outside my country.

Yes, it is. As a historian, in our sense of the word, Christian/Pitois is sorely lacking. So is Eliphas Levi. On the other hand, Christian/Pitois and Levi were surprisingly good at forming coherent systems of symbolism. All those people who read The Star as "hope" these days are resting on the foundation of Christian/Pitois, and the sequence of moral strophes, he associated the trumps + wild card with, forms a useful tool for meditation.

I started with Banzhaf because that's what was available back then (in German), and it's not bad, but for a better understanding, nothing beats DuQuette. I find Arrien irritating and unhelpful, Gerd Ziegler even worse, but Snuffin is good as well. For people just setting out with the Thoth, buy the DuQuette book and start working with the cards themselves. Lay them out according to their astrological associations (all Saturn cards together, all Venus cards together etc), and get used to the Tree of Life. There is a lot of wisdom in the cards themselves. Two other excellent books are M.M. Meleen's books for her Thoth-based decks: Book M for the Tabula Mundi and the Book of Seshet for the Rosetta. I'm re-reading the Book of Seshet right now, and it's great. Even if you don't have her decks, the books are a great resource for the Thoth system. The decks are wonderful as well. I would also recommend that beginners draw their own Tree of Life - it's not difficult if you start with a Flower of Life as described here. All you need is a simple divider (is that how it's called in English?). It's a great feeling when things start falling into place. Don't rush it, enjoy the process, and you can read with the Thoth deck even if you don't understand the whole theory behind it. By working with it, you'll understand it better. That's at least my experience.

@Misterei Thank you for this response! I really liked the video interview with Robert M. Place. That is the kinda' stuff I was looking for. Although, I'm not familiar with the deck they were showing I really liked his thoughts and interpretations. I'm going to get mine out and "play along" the next time I watch it. I may have to watch it a few times, because I want to take some notes. 😊

I have an "ugh" today. 😞 The Fairytale Tarot by Giulia F. Massaglia (Lo Scarabeo) arrived. After finding it in my local shop for 58€ and on Amazon (sold by Amazon) for 28€, I had ordered it from Amazon (.de). It was shipped to my address here in Finland. The box was thrown into the package alongside a bunch of other things I had ordered, and either during shipping or maybe already before it got a bit scuffed up on the edges. It was sealed with two transparent stickers. I opened it and looked straight at the Fool card... which has what I'd have to describe as scuff marks on it. Behind it - the Chariot. Behind that, the 2 of Wands. The deck has been mixed up, and looking at the scuff marks on some cards I'd say it was shuffled. I then opened the LWB, and guess what... someone underlined keywords for each card with pencil. 😐 The cards are so beautiful, but idk what to do. Returning is a hassle and I already hate myself for even ordering from Amazon, I guess I got what I asked for. Going to count if there are any cards missing... edit, no cards missing but quite a few of them have marks from (frequent?) use. I contacted Amazon and they're sending a replacement, but I need to return this one. I feel bad for what I've done to the environment and that I continue support this absolute garbage company. I only order from there when I can't find stuff locally - or when the price is 2x or higher.

Thanks, Daniel. I'm exploring some of the sugestions on that section.

Just starting out with Thoth, this really appeals to me. Using colour like this. Thanks for the suggestion.

There are some learning and book suggestions in the Thoth section here

How did you learn the Thoth system? Can you recommend a book that would help me get to grips with it? I, too, am interested in using the deck for deeper personal readings ...although I am not religious at all (any religion.) Will my lack of religious belief handicap me, do you think? By the way, I am a huge fan of the Anna K Tarot (in fact I reviewed it in our deck library here on Tarot, Tea and Me.) And the Centennial deck is the RWS deck I use most often these days. 🙂

In their book Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot, Katz and Goodwin often underline the fact that Pamela drew much of her inspiration from her experience in the theatre. It seems she used examples that helped her weave in a certain complexity. A couple of years back, there was a neon light installation on the outer walls of the Altes Museum in Berlin by Maurizio Nannucci that read: All Art Has Been Contemporary. The book makes a strong case for recognising this very contemporary aspect of the CSW Tarot. Here is a short passage from the chapter on the 6 of Cups: