The Cantigee Oracle by Rae Diamond and illustrated with watercolor art by Laura Zuspan is a deck that inspires mindfulness, compassion, and creativity. It seeks to motivate evolutionary change in both the individual and the collective. You’ll find homages to Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga, animism, and science.
This is a 52-card circular deck with standard cardstock and a slight laminate finish. Some of the oracle messages are omens, such as “A Swarm of Bees,” “The Coiled Snake,” or “The Exploding Star.” You’ll get messages like “Your Ears Become a Butterfly” and “Clouds Pass but the Mountain Remains,” evocative of the pithy figurative language often found in Taoist texts.
Mellissae Lucia’s Oracle of Initiation was first released a decade ago in 2012, but it’s new to me, and I am utterly in awe of the breadth and scope of this divination system. This is a review of the deck, but also its 400-page companion book by the same name.
The Oracle of Initiation is the narrative story of one woman’s descent into the underworld and return. It is a mesmerizing photographic memoir of loss, initial resistance with numbness, realizing you need to surrender, and reawakening your inner magic.
At the age of 33, Lucia lost her husband to cancer. She entered limbo. But then she chose to live, to thrive, and supported by spirit guides along the way, went on a 7-year vision quest. These images chronicle her Artemis Return, a concept coined by Lucia.
Artemis
Artemis is the Greek goddess of the hunt, the wild instinctive wisdom of the feminine within nature. She is a guardian of the untamed within all of us, the primal aspects of our original essence.
Working with Hecate
Like a Saturn Return, an Artemis Return is a cyclical return after a pivotal event in your life, in which you cross a threshold of catharsis, maturation, and awakening, and re-align with that wild instinctive wisdom within.
Key 21 from the Rosenwald Tarot Uncut Sheets (1501), Key 21 from the Soprafino Tarot (1835)
I shared my 2021 reflections last December, when Judgement was my year card. In 2022, my year card was Key 21: The World. And what a climactic, intense, fruitful, and life-changing year it’s been. I’m not quite sure yet whether “life-changing” is an exaggeration, but I mean, what’s transpired in 2022 has and will have a significant impact on the course of my life from here on out.
Bolognese Tarocchi (1442), Jean-Baptiste Madenie Tarot (1739), Arcanes du Tarot Kabbalistique (1889), & Grand Tarot Belline (1863)
It’s kind of crazy how my 2021 really reflected a Judgement year (Apocalypse, in the SKT, which was quite an apt descriptive for my 2021…) and 2022 a World year.
Dante Tarot by Guido Zibordi Marchesi (Lo Scarabeo)
Last year it was like the tectonic plates beneath my feet were tremoring. And this year, many of the pieces that fragmented in 2021 fell into place. Re-reading my 2021 year in review with the Judgement card, I sure vague-booked how crazy that year actually was. “Major life shifts happened to me in 2021,” I had written. Ha. What an understatement.
And in 2022, the tremors stopped, whatever pieces were quaking fell into position, and it just so happened that my luck shot up. All the pieces landed in all the right spots.
We have an abundance of persimmons this year and I remarked to the father-in-law about how I wanted to make hoshigaki, using the traditional method.
Crystallized sugars coming to the surface of the dried persimmons
Hoshigaki are peeled persimmons that you hang up to sun-dry for four to seven weeks (depending on climate/weather), and then you have to massage every persimmon weekly so it ferments evenly and the natural sugars get coaxed up to the surface of the fruit, forming this light dusting of finely crystallized sugar dust.
Sliced hoshigaki, final result
Is it magic or chemistry? I’m not quite sure. =) Meanwhile the fruit becomes deliciously gummy, like chewy candy. It is one of the sweetest and most delectable desserts you can have.
Final stage of hoshigaki — when it gets that natural crystallized sugar coating on the surface!
Immediately, before I could even complete my explanation of the process, the father-in-law shot the idea down, listing out all the ways this could go wrong, all the reasons this is not worth the trouble, just one negative statement after another.
This is his personality, his habit. He’s been doing this to James since hubby was a boy. If you’re sparked by an idea that’s just slightly more labor-intensive or slightly more aspirational than ordinary, the father-in-law’s immediate response is to shoot down the idea and be really negative about all the ways this is stupid.
Oh and if you haven’t guessed already, this is a personal blog post. Not in any way tarot, esoterica, or “in line with my branding” related. Just me sharing what’s actually been on my mind as of late, and ranting. Continue reading “How a Parent Makes or Breaks a Child’s Dream”→
I thought it would be fun to share my personal journey going through the Book of Readings so that even though you might be undergoing your journey at a different place and time, we can still share the journey and connect in this nonlinear way.
The second print run of SKT: Revelation will come with a complimentary Book of Readings, a workbook of 22 practica. But what about those with the first print run Revelation?
Many of the journaling exercises in this workbook build on previous exercises, and all based on the Immortal Order (there are a total of eight) that your Revelation deck will be assigned or sorted into.
As for those with the first print run Revelation deck– Can you still work through the Book of Readings with a first print run Revelation?
Yes, with the following preliminary divination exercise.
The Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn by Pat Zalewski and illustrated by David Sledzinski is a Golden Dawn based tarot deck, keyed to the four color scales, and also a Stella Matutina deck. Stella Matutina, or Morning Star, is one of the daughter organizations that branched from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
If there is anyone creating a Golden Dawn deck to pay attention to, it’s Pat Zalewski. I’m familiar with his work through his 2002 Talismans & Evocations of the Golden Dawn and am super excited to be working with The Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn, released by Aeon Publishing in 2022 (though I think this 2022 edition is a reprint of a deck by Pat and Chris Zalewski of the same name).
For the First and Vitruvian Editions of the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot, I included a complimentary add-on with your order, and that was the Twenty-Two Weeks with the SKT workbook.
For the first print run of the Revelation Edition, I adjusted that workbook so that it was no longer confined to a specific time frame, and it became a straightforward SKT study journal.
For this second printing of the Revelation, I’m changing that SKT study journal and turning it into something that transcends all its former iterations, and I’m calling it the Book of Readings.
Fleshed out into a sequential journey of self-discovery while also guiding you through basic primers of various esoteric traditions tangential to the tarot, the Book of Readings is now a course. A journey.
I’m super excited about the Book of Readings. I’m so excited that I can hardly wait to print out my own spiral-bound journal of it and get started, going through a journey of my own and documenting it in a video series.
Since I made reference to some of these regions, below is an excerpted Appendix E from I Ching, The Oracle (North Atlantic Books, forthcoming 2023).
While the maps are not drawn to scale (I did them myself, by hand…) at least they help to give you a mental reference of where these kingdoms or states are located in geographical relation to one another.
Excerpt from Appendix E of I Ching, The Oracle (June, 2023):
benebell wen 