Zeph's Bookish Rambles

The TarotTube topic/hashtag I wrote about awhile back got a sequel, which reminded me I never came back to do the second half of the first one. So now I have even more prompts and this will probably be two more posts after this one. Woooooo.

The idea here is there are a bunch of dichotomies and you pick a deck in your collection for each.

Confronting vs Comforting

My confronting deck is the Arthur Rackham Oracle. It was the deck I worked with for my daily readings in September and it was just calling me tf out every single day. It's a beautiful deck featuring fairy tale/fantasy art and I love it to pieces. A lot of oracles kind of err on the side of positivity, and I was kind of pleasantly surprised by how many cards in this lean neutral to negative. Lots of opportunity to dig deep and work on things that needed attention.

On the other side, my comforting deck is Heart of Faerie Oracle. This is my “mom” deck, and I get it out when I need a hug. I think this might actually be the only deck I've ever pre-ordered (not counting Kickstarters). The Faeries' Oracle was one of my first and still a favorite deck, so even though the style seemed very different I was really excited for another Froud deck. And it is very, very different. But it still has that same approach to faerie that makes the world around me feel magical and hopeful.

Every Day Vs Every So Often

I struggled with this one a bit. There isn't actually any deck I use every day, what I do instead is pick a new deck for my daily readings every month. So at most it would be every day for awhile.

I decided to rework it and talk about one that is pretty much always appropriate to pull from and one that is very limited in use/scope. For both of those, I'm not talking about a published deck but one I put together myself! A couple months ago I had the idea to make some decks using old trading cards my (deceased) aunt would have liked and I wound up making a lot of them.

A good every day deck is my Vintage Disney Oracle. I didn't add anything to these cards or assign them to any existing system, just selected cards as they are. Each one has a still from an animated short film and a quote or plot note underneath. It makes for a good quick one-card draw when I just want to break up the day with something cute and fun.

Then I used some vintage Coca-Cola cards and made my own oracle I call Late Stage Capitalism. I picked out all the cards from this set that were the most horrifying to me and that I didn't want to include in the other decks I'd made from it. Then I wrote titles on each card, mostly words that are kind of ironically positive, like things my parents would probably think are good values but make me feel squicky. Examples are “Choices” for a card boasting you can have regular or giant soda bottles, “Trust Me” for one with a Coca-Cola logo force-feeding the globe a bottle of coke, or “Empire” for one that shows all the Mount Rushmore figures drinking Diet Coke.

It's a very gallows-humor sort of deck and I use it when I'm stressed about work or money things. Or sometimes just the need to interact with society. It'd be a real downer to use regularly, but it's pretty good for making me laugh when I already feel like crying.

Over-rated vs Under-rated

I'm approaching this one a little differently, too. I don't think any of my decks are actually over-rated because I think they're all great. But I do have one that I took for granted and that has taught me some valuable lessons on both sides of this.

The Celtic Dragon Tarot was one of my first decks. I loved it soooo much. I used it to read for friends even though I was brand new to tarot because the illustrations are so intuitive there wasn't really any need to have the meanings memorized. And there's dragons! So many dragons.

I lost my tarot decks when I went back to my parents' house for the summer. Luckily, my collection was only 3 decks at that time (all the ones my local Sam Goody carried!) and I learned my lesson not to start collecting again until I actually finished school and moved out. So when that finally happened and I wanted to start by getting my old decks, one was out of print and the Celtic Dragon had changed its card stock. I'd been thinking about that card stock for years. The texture was so specific, smooth and cool to the touch and flexible without feeling fragile.

The new deck I bought was nothing like it. And it made me so sad any time I tried to use it because even though it was still beautiful, it wasn't the deck I remembered. I felt so guilty for letting that first deck go and devastated that I might never feel those cards again. I found the original version on ebay recently and bought it. And it feels so great! Just like I remember. Now that I know more about cards and have seen a lot to compare them, I can see that the new ones are actually an improvement in basically every way. But I don't care, I missed these cards and I have them again!

For right now, I'm keeping both. The difference in texture gives them completely different vibes and I colored the edges differently to match those vibes. They both stay in the same bag, and they remind me to take better care of the things I value but also not to get too hung up on the way things used to be. I think I'll probably pass one of them on at some point, but I'm not there yet.

Light Work vs Shadow Work

The decks that made the most sense to me for this are another kind of matched set of oracles I made. In this case, they're both standard playing card decks. I assigned symbols for each card and wrote the titles in sharpie, sometimes with very simple illustrations or written in a way that the word itself is an illustration.

I won't get into the specific titles or descriptions because they're both connected to meditation/journey work I do and are very specific and private to me. But in general, the first one (light work) is based on fairy tales, Ghibli films, and similar kid-friendly stories about interacting with spiritual realms. The other (shadow work) is a chthonic deck inspired by myths of Dionysus, Persephone, Hekate, and Loki.