Divination: Is it Bad Luck to Buy Your Own Tools?

 Dear Reader,

If you've even mentioned a passing interest in divination, especially the ever popular Tarot, you may have heard many rumors and a few urban legends. The most popular one that has been around for about as long as Tarot has been used for divination is that it is bad luck to buy your own Tarot deck. Any cartomancer worth their salt will laugh at this implication and resume building up their hoard of decks. Seriously, most of the cartomancers I know have at least five decks. Then there's the serious collectors who have upwards of fifty. There's so much variety in decks that the sky (and your budget) really is the limit on this one.

The argument that it is bad luck to purchase your own divination tools or *gasp* make your own is strictly based in the premise that we must be gatekeepers of this practice. The persons who push this gatekeeping policy the hardest tend be the ones who feel that their livelihood is somehow threatened by transgressors: shop owners, professional cartomancers, other psychics, etc. If you look at the history of divination, you find that professional diviners had their trade secrets and they guarded them closely. One of the ways of doing so, was to tell people who were curious that divination was dangerous some how. The argument that attempting divination with out meeting certain arbitrary criteria (which differed from source to source) was ill luck is perhaps the most common one.

Today, we live in the era of open sourced divination. Diviners are networking and trading ideas at a rate never seen before. The market for Tarot decks is enormous and the uses ranges as widely as the different styles of decks that are out there. This old gatekeeping practice really needs to be abandoned so that new innovation can be encouraged in the age old practice of divination. Buy all the types of divination tools and books that your heart desires (and your pocket book can afford). You have no need to fear ill luck befalling you for doing so, just choice paralysis because there are too many varieties to pick from.