NAKED MEN , PUBLIC DOMAIN, AND HOW TO PICK YOUR FIRST TAROT DECK

If you are looking to start learning tarot, you are going to immediately hit a wall when you try to buy your first deck. The market is absolutely flooded. You can buy decks themed around cats, cyberpunk cities, or your favorite 90s sitcom.

So how do you actually choose?

I am going to save you a lot of time and money. If you are just looking to pull a card for yourself every morning and you do not care about learning the broader system, pick whatever deck you think looks cool. Buy the cats. Buy the sitcom.

But if you actually want to understand tarot and further your journey, you need to hear the boring, unsexy truth. You have to learn the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith imagery.

The Pop Culture Trap 

I learned this the hard way. The first deck I actually learned to read from was my Agatha All Along deck. It made total sense to me. The story of the cards flowed perfectly. Because I know the show inside and out, I could easily see what the cards were trying to tell me.

There was a massive complication lurking under the surface. The Agatha deck follows the traditional Rider-Waite meanings, but the images do not. The art is tied directly to The Witches' Road.

I thought I knew how to read tarot until I picked up a Buffy the Vampire Slayer deck and a Legend of Zelda deck. I was completely lost. I stared blankly at half the cards, and I actively disagreed with the artistic choices on the other half. I realized I did not actually know how to read tarot. I only knew how to read Agatha Harkness.

The Naked Truth 

My actual breakthrough happened with a completely different deck: the St. Jinx Arcana.

For the uninitiated, the St. Jinx deck is heavy on artwork featuring gay nude men in a subtle fantasy setting. It is gorgeous, but it is definitely not a deck you bring out at most family social gatherings.

Here is the wild part. I finally started learning the traditional meanings of the cards because the St. Jinx deck actually follows the foundational Rider-Waite imagery closer than the Agatha deck ever did. Underneath the highly specific, naked aesthetic, the visual cues of the original system were still intact. The wands were acting like wands. The pentacles were grounded. The visual language was correct. Working with that deck brought me perfectly in tune with the wider world of tarot.

Now, I confidently alternate between my Agatha deck and St. Jinx.

The Baseline

There is a very specific reason I use the traditional Rider-Waite images for The Index on this website.

Ok, yeah, a big part of it is because those images are in the public domain and I am not paying licensing fees.

But, the main reason is that the traditional imagery is the foundational alphabet of tarot. If you learn the original visual cues, you can pick up almost any deck in the world and figure out what it is trying to say. You can start your journey with the absolute basics and then adapt those basics to your own messy life.

Learn the alphabet first. Then you can go find a deck that combines those traditional images with art you cannot show your mother.