Grandma opened the small, scented box. She had told me to sit quietly and she would show me a special treasure. As she lifted the lid, I could see a red silk packet inside, cunningly tied so that the silk ends looked like a flower. She stopped for a moment, holding her hand over the packet, and mumbling a few words, ending with “Amen”, before she reached in and lifted the small, oblong shape into the light of day.

Her arthritis-knotted fingers struggled a bit with untying the silk rose, I offered to help and she silenced me with a glance. She carefully unwrapped the silk until it lay in a large square on the table top between us. All I could see was a stack of cards with a design on the back. There seemed to be more cards than an ordinary deck of playing cards, and the shape was a little different, longer than usual.

Grandma had taught me how to read playing cards two years earlier, when I was six. And although my parents used them to play games, Grandma did not allow card games in her house, so even though I did not know what these cards were that she was showing me, I did know they were not meant for games.

She looked through the stack of cards before her, carefully separating them in five stacks. One stack had more cards – 22, I counted as she placed them carefully to the side of the red silk square.

The other four stacks she lined up in front of me, on the silk, face up.

And, thus began my first lesson with the Royal Road of the Tarot.

She explained how the four stacks before me were similar to the suits in playing cards, and carried similar meanings to those she had already taught me.

She set these aside, and picking up the taller stack of twenty two cards, began laying them in front of me, face up, beginning with a card that was number zero.

“This is where we all begin.” She said, pointing to a picture of a funny looking man with a knapsack over his shoulder about to step over the edge of a cliff, with a small dog nipping at his heels, trying to stop the man from falling. The words underneath spelled out The Fool.

I put my hands over my mouth and giggled, “Grampa says I can’t call someone a fool – that it is a bad name.”

Grandma smiled and told me that although I couldn’t use the word to describe another person, it was the place of innocence, yes, foolishness, where we all started our travels.

I liked the little dog in the card, saying he reminded me of my dog, Zipper, that I had lost the year before. I was a little jealous that the man on the card obviously still had his dog.

Grandma brought me back from my thoughts of my lost dog by placing the next card, The Magician, before me, and explaining that this card was my first teacher as I began to travel on the Royal Road. She told me to look at the card carefully, and to tell her what I saw in the card.

I described the card, exactly as it was printed, looking at the strange symbols he had on the table before him and what I thought they might mean.

Over the next two months, during the heat of the summer’s day in Northern Florida, each afternoon Grandma would once more teach me about the meanings. My mind quickly memorized the basic information that she taught me, and we moved on to learning how to ask questions of the cards. She encouraged me to “listen” to the card, and “hear” what the card told me about each question or situation.

We began with a simple three card layouts, signifying past, present and future, and moved on to more complicated ways of reading the cards, including a method that had been handed down by the women in her family for generations. She explained that our family had always had “the sight”, and in years to come, I might have to use this to earn a living.

She gave me a stack of blank 3x5 cards and let me draw my own set of cards. I wasn’t a very good artist, but I did love to draw and color, and this became my evening entertainment, after dinner and before bed.

By the time summer was over, I had my very own deck of cards, carefully drawn and colored with crayons. She gave me one of Grampa’s old handkerchiefs, red with a yellow stripe, to tie the cards in, and a small box that had contained cigars and still smelled of tobacco, that was just a little bigger than the card deck.

I was very proud of my deck of cards, and wanted to show everyone and read the cards for all my friends, but Grandma told me that I must keep this as our secret – that many people didn’t approve of the cards, and would be unhappy if I used them.

When my mother came to stay for a week at the end of the summer, I showed her my new “toy” that I had created, and she was very upset with Grandma, and told me to not let my daddy see them or he would throw them in the garbage. She thought it would be better if I left the cards with Grandma, and seemed frightened at what Daddy would do if he found out. Her fear was contagious, and I hid the cards well when we returned home.

As school began, and I entered the third grade, I forgot about the magic cards Grandma had helped me create, having put them in a hidden place in the back of my closet.

At the end of the school year, our family moved once more and the cards remained behind, well hidden in the closet.

I became interested in astrology that year, leading to a study of other occult subjects from numerology to hand writing analysis to a deeper study of the palmistry that my Grandma had taught me years before. I read all that I could find about the history of the different means of divination, trying them all out on my mother and my closest friends. I studied the I Ching, runes, and crystals. I created a scrying bowl by painting one of my mothers glass bowls black on the outside, and filling it with water. As my knowledge spread wider and wider, my understanding of these and other mysteries deepened.

I kept the knowledge of Tarot with me from that long ago summer, but it wasn’t for another 20 years before I took my next step on the Royal Road of Tarot.

I found a used deck of cards in the same Rider Waite pattern in an old book store, somewhere off Columbia Circle in D.C. I greeted the deck with a cry of delight, telling the friends that were with me about my Grandma and the handmade deck I had created many years before.

For some time after that, I asked the Tarot EVERYTHING! I tried to follow the guidance  I received, and found that it was a good way to sort out decisions. Then someone, in a psychology class, told me about Jung and his study of the Tarot.

I began to seek out books about the Tarot in the library and at the university where I was obtaining my Master’s degree. There were not many available, but I read those that I could find.

That year my life turned upside down again, and I escaped from an angry, abusive husband with my children, a few of our clothes and little else. My Tarot cards, once more, were lost.

We fled to my parents’ home in Oklahoma, where no Tarot cards could be found.  Not in the house, not in the state.

It wasn’t until many years later, and one more marriage and divorce, when I was given a new deck of Tarot cards that had just been released. Called the Motherpeace Tarot, it was a deck conceived and illustrated by Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble. I bought the accompanying book, and spent the summer relearning to read the Tarot, allowing the cards to guide and inform me. I discovered that a number of new books and decks had been created in the last 20 years, since the sixties, and I delighted in collecting new decks and learning to read for others as well as myself.

Now firmly on the Royal Road, some years later, I now own many decks of these precious cards, and always carry one or two decks with me. And here I am, after all this time, living my grandmothers prophecy and making a living by divining the future, and consulting the oracles.

When I was asked to participate in creating the Becoming an Oracle program (Nicki Scully, 2009, Sounds True, publisher) in the summer of ’08 I knew that the Tarot would be a keystone of this program. After all these years, I would be able to share what my Grandma taught me in the hot, Florida afternoons on her veranda. It has been a long and interesting trip, along the Royal Road of Tarot.

Gloria Taylor Brown

P.S. When my grandmother taught me to read and make those cards, she was breaking the law of the state of Florida, where we lived. Reading, or even selling Tarot cards was forbidden under state statutes of that time, and those laws were only repealed in the 1980’s, allowing cities and counties to determine whether there could be “fortune telling” in their district. Many areas still have existing laws that forbid the sale or usage for gain of any fortune telling device – including the Tarot!