Eden Gray

I was hooked forever.

I got myself a couple of, I got myself a Rider-Waite-Smith and Eden Gray.

And I made flashcards and I remember, and I was off to the races.

Now you read me, I can still see it.

You can't If you read each card separately, you're not going to see that.

And a lot of people who get stuck, who pick up the tarot and aren't able to really progress deeply, where they're stuck is they're reading one card at a time.

Eden Gray, which was my first book and remains one of my favorites, talks a little bit about this queen is facing that queen or this queen is facing away from that queen.

I will tend to have a favorite deck for a couple of years and then switch to another deck.

But everything I've read, if you...

For example, if you read Eden Gray, she specifically says left hand.

Okay.

See, I don't-

So the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the Waite-Smith [chuckles] deck, published in nineteen ten, but it didn't achieve mass popularity really until much later.

It was primarily circulated among cultists and serious students of Western magical traditions, right? What changed was that in large part, the work of an American writer called Eden Gray in the sixties, published a series of books.

The Tarot Revealed, A Complete Guide to the Tarot, Mastering the Tarot.

And this translated the Waite-Smith deck into accessible, practical, everyday English for general readership because largely due to Waite, a lot of the writing up until that point around the tarot, especially a little book that, that used to come with it called A Key to the Tarot, um, was dense.

Waite's writing was, was eh, right? Really obscure for the sake of it.

Waite believed that, you know, things should, should be hidden.

So it's largely through Eden Gray's books that this Waite-Smith deck became the standard deck of the sixties and seventies.

This is the sixties and seventies.