Tarot at Scargle Nargle

Hi I’m Colleen and I am the proprietor and tarot reader at Scargle Nargle. My mother was a tarot reader and clairvoyant from the mid 80s, so I grew up with it and I myself have been reading tarot for myself and others for over 20 years now.

The first thing to say is that there is nothing dark, spooky or evil about the tarot. This has been sensationalised through the media and entertainment industry etc. Through time a lot of people involved in the occult or esoteric activities have been given a very bad reputation, but the cards have been used for hundreds of years for divination purposes. This is often driven by the church/religious groups.

Also it is important to point out the difference between tarot cards and oracle cards. Tarot will always have 78 cards and are pretty standardised in their meanings. In decks of oracle cards there can be any number of cards and each of them will have a meaning assigned to them by the designer. Each will come with a book explaining what the meanings are etc.

We believe that tarot originated in Europe/Italy. The oldest tarot deck that we know of is in a museum and dates to the 15th century. It was created and given as a gift to a member of royalty and every card was handpainted. In the past, if you owned a tarot deck you most definitely would have been wealthy – you would not have been a regular person. It would be many hundred years before tarot cards were being produced on any sort of large scale. There was an old card game in Europe called tarocchi and yes the tarot were used for that but it appears that the tarot were a deeply immeshed part of European/Italian life. For example we know from the writings of Leonardo Da Vinci that they used to have massive parades especially for the tarot. There were massive floats designed and based around all of the major arcana. Da Vinci designed some of these floats and although there are no images, he made descriptions of these in his notebooks. Each float was meant to trump the previous one and even to this day the major arcana are still referred to as the trump cards.

Another line of thought is that the tarot date back to ancient Egypt. They definitely wouldn’t have been producing cards back at that time but there is a degree of validity to this in that there was an oracle system in the Temple of Thoth (pronounced da-hot). There were scenes painted on the temple walls and people would bring in reeds and throw them on the floor as a type of divination. They would then interpret messages depending on what the reeds were pointing at. But nobody knows with 100% certainty where the tarot originated.

Currently I offer two different tarot spreads:

The Celtic Cross: This 10 card spread is particularly effective for looking at one particular area of your life, relationship, career, health, family… Cost: £40

The Wheel of the Year: This 12 card spread provides a more general and future orientated reading. Cost: £45.

Service is completely confidential.