If you pre-ordered the 2nd printing of the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot: Revelation, then your input is requested. And… so sorry… I need it, like, in the next 24 hours because I’m about to submit to the factory and start the production process.
UPDATE: Visit here to see the final proofs for the second print run box design.
This is a crash course on the Wu Xing 五行, Five Dynamic Movements, though you’ll often see it called the Five Elements of East Asian metaphysics. These are five alchemical agents of change to describe how yin and yang qi create, destroy, and thus transform the physical world.
1/30/2023 Erratum Update: A few of the correspondence rows in the Metal and Earth columns got flip-flopped in the subsequent reference chart. If you downloaded the table before 1/30/2023, please delete it and re-download the rectified version. ❤
I say “East Asian” here because it’s not limited to any one culture, ethnic group, or nationality, not to mention the concept itself is much older than modern-day borders.
I’ll start by saying it’s gimmicky to claim a list of “the most auspicious” hexagrams in the I Ching. The Book of Changes doesn’t work like that. Not to mention as the sequential lines move through the Changes, line 1 up to line 6, different points of that movement of change can indicate different turns and degrees of auspices.
And so while I Ching practitioners wouldn’t necessarily say there are “good” vs. “bad” hexagrams, in moments of fun, sure, everybody’s got their own shortlist of favorite hexagrams.
Here are my top six.
Continue reading “List of the Most Auspicious I Ching Hexagrams”
We got behind schedule in terms of when to place our purchase order with the manufacturer. And as some of you already know, Lunar New Year is basically an entire blackout month of no production. That means if you don’t start something until after the Lunar New Year, you’re effectively now one month behind schedule.
My plan was to place our order and at least get the uncut sheet samples in hand before Lunar New Year, and then production would happen, and then we’d be on target for March and April mail-out delivery.
However, now it’s more likely April to May mail-out delivery of your pre-ordered decks.
The Penumbra Tarot by Australian artist Eris Elizabeth and Ethony is an enchanting and multifaceted deck that is both a perfect gift for a beginner and a versatile professional reading deck that seasoned readers will love.
This is an RWS based deck while the color palette is reminiscent of Lady Frieda Harris’s art in the Thoth, with more naturalist human representations than the Thoth.
Continue reading “The Penumbra Tarot by Eris Elizabeth and Ethony”
Lisa Hunt’s art style is one of my favorites, with its intricate detailing, expressive features, and delicate grace. What she does with watercolor is nothing short of spectacular.
Hunt had mainly done high fantasy and mythology-inspired art in the past, so to see her take on the traditional American landscape painting is a treat. Look at how she rendered the quilt patterns in the Eight of Pentacles, the softness yet precision of Hunt’s lines.
The Pastoral Tarot celebrates the idyllic life of small towns of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, through the countryside of the Mid-West, and the coastal regions. Each landscape piece is a scene out of Americana, a call back to 20th-century North American life.
Continue reading “Pastoral Tarot by Lynn Araujo and Lisa Hunt”
Wisdom from the Epics of Hind is easily one of my favorite oracle decks, and the production value is perfection. The artwork is beautiful, I love Rahul Das’s style, and you’ll learn so much about how to approach professional divinatory readings from Pankhuri Agarwal’s guidebook.
This deck brings in influences from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Vedas, Puranas, and the Upanishads, just to name a few. Practical advice is offered for every card, such as guidance on forest bathing (walking, breathing, and meditating through the woods to restore your health) and including foods that contain vitamin E and omega fatty acids in your diet, to the spiritual practice of kindness, how you can be both kind and shrewd at the same time and taking note of the moon phase whenever you’re feeling moody to see if there is a pattern emerging. And learn the moon mantra: Om Chandraya Namaha.
Continue reading “Wisdom from the Epics of Hind by Pankhuri Agarwal and Rahul Das”
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.
Continue reading “The Cantigee Oracle: An Ecological Spiritual Guide to Spark Your Creativity”
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 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.
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.
Continue reading “Oracle of Initiation: Rainbows in the Dark by Mellissae Lucia”
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.
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.
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.
Continue reading “Reflecting on My 2022, A World (Key 21) Year”
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