The Ancestral Magick Oracle by Nancy Hendrickson and Stacey Williams-Ng is a divination tool designed to facilitate connection with ancestral spirits, enabling you to honor, communicate with, and seek guidance from your lineage.
Working with the Ancestor Communication spread (by Nancy Hendrickson)
It’s more than just a series of cards– it’s a sacred bridge built on love, the fierce protection and nurture of those who have come before you, whose legacy you carry, and most important of all, familial love.
Whether you’re seeking clarity on life’s challenges, offering gratitude, or requesting intervention, the Ancestral Magick Oracle empowers you, deepening your spiritual practice with ancestor veneration.
This is a 36-card oracle deck that came out back in 2015, and at this point, the production value shows its age, with images that are a smidge blurry, but I wanted to do a quick post so you can have a look-see of the cards.
This is not a deck review. It’s a walk-through where you can click on any of the photos and zoom in for a close-up viewing of the deck.
I’m currently in the process of packing away decks I never use and relocating them to storage. As I logged this deck into inventory, I thought, although I never use it, there’s something about it I really like, and so maybe you will, too. Hence, the quick pause before packing it away to take a few pics and memorialize them in my Deck Reviews archive.
The Playful Heart Tarot and the PipSpeak Tarot by KittenChops
You may be familiar with the Playful Heart Tarot by Kitten Chops (Zaara), based on the RWS, whereas the latest creation from the KittenChops studios is a Marseille-based pip deck, the PipSpeak Tarot.
After completing the RWS-based Playful Heart Tarot, Zaara redefined her work with the tarot by unpacking her RWS framework and re-learning the tarot with the Marseille. The result is the PipSpeak Tarot, which became a liberating experience. Likewise, this might just be the very deck to get a seasoned RWS reader out of a rut.
From the little white book (LWB) for the PipSpeak Tarot
“Fortune tellers and cunning folk have been reading with Marseille and playing card/pip decks for hundreds of years,” writes the artist. “Instead of esoteric intellectual prowess, these readers have been relying on their common sense, their understanding of human nature and key card reading wisdom passed down from generation to generation.”
In 2024 I shared 12 deck reviews, which I’ll assemble here in this “deck reviews in review” post. With my focus and time directed elsewhere, I haven’t been able to write up as many deck reviews as I had in years past, though you’ll find more decks covered on my Instagram feed with mini reviews, including deck hauls and snapshots of how I work with these decks.
All decks I feature on this site were either gifted to me or sent to me by the publisher for prospective (but never guaranteed) review.
Here’s a revisit of the 12 decks I covered on this site in 2024.
If you’re from the corporate world you might have heard of the Six Sigma quality management methodology or the acronym DMAIC blah blah but even if you haven’t, no worries. This is just a tarot spread inspired by Six Sigma principles and that process flow of D (Define), M (Measure), A (Analyze), I (Improve), and C (Control).
This card reading method (it’s workable with an oracle deck, not just tarot) is less in the space of mysticism or divination, and more in the space of pragmatism and driving you to be a more creative and critical thinker.
If you haven’t been watching the 2024 Marvel TV series Agatha All Along, it’s a spin-off from WandaVision focused on the character Agatha Harkness. And the episodes have been chock full of tarot (and witchy) goodness.
I love how the online tarot community is currently having fun with a fictional but bona fide tarot spread in the show, named the Safe Passages spread, a key feature in Episode 7 (“Death’s Hand in Mine”). It’s got Celtic Cross vibes in the formation of a pentagram.
(Ignore my graphic above; I squished all the card positions together, which is why you can’t really see the pentagram anymore. In the TV show, the pentagram shape is more pronounced.)
Just a head’s up: there may be spoilers in this blog post, but nothing too major; I’m focusing on the tarot parts.
Lord have mercy that the tarot card you were drawing on your birthday isn’t an omen of what’s to come for the year. Because I was “called” to work on the Five of Swords. Or I was “pulled” to, I dunno, I find all that New Agey jargon a bit fluffy but there it is. “I was called to” just means I don’t have a logical explanation for why I did what I did.
Birthed during the global pandemic, The Fool’s New Journey Tarot is a 60-card deck that reorganizes the familiar order of the traditional 78. “Sixty Triumphs for a New Dawn.”
First ten trumps of the Fool’s New Journey
Per the deck description on the box: “In 2020, the world changed. The arrival of a worldwide pandemic ensured it could never be quite the same again. In the same way, facing new issues at every level of life, it is time for Tarot to change. The Fool must begin a new journey.”
“The Fool represents the soul of everyman . . . and goes through the life experiences depicted in the 21 cards of the Major Arcana,” wrote Eden Gray over half a century ago. The Majors, noted Gray, were like archetypes of the subconscious.
But why only these 21 cards of the Majors, as depicted by Pamela Colman Smith no less, as the immutable model for every tarot deck produced?
Trumps 50 – 57 in the Fool’s New Journey
So begins the questioning that led to The Fool’s New Journey, a new sequence of cards that speak with the archetypal voice governing all beings on earth (to borrow language from Caitlin Matthews).
Second decade of trumps in the Fool’s New Journey
John Matthews then collaborated with artist Charles Newington for these new archetypal tarot images. Together, the two set out to create imagery that would be stripped of the traditional imagery as much as possible, and to keep these picture cards simple. Matthews then set these images into a new order, a reset of the tarot.
These 60 trump cards present a new look at the tarot, literally a new journey for The Fool. And yet it’s funny that we think of this as a diverging path from traditional tarot, because in its heyday, circa 15th and 16th centuries, we had the Minchiate Tarot of 96 cards, the 50-card Mantegna, which was also considered a tarot, and the quite popular pre-Golden Dawn Etteilla Tarot that has an ordering of the Majors to confound today’s RWS readers.
Cards 1 through 5
The journey of The Fool represents the journey of life itself, and so the premise here would be that we, the everyman, all begin before The Maze (Key 1). In the natural course, we then must embody The Believer (Key 2), but before we can move into the role of The Magician, we must confront The Shadow (Key 3). If The Magician is skill and cleverness, The Priestess (Key 5) is wisdom and intuition. I love that in this New Journey, The Priestess is Key 5, what had been the traditional position of The Hierophant.
“When rationality runs dry, it’s Red that will reconcile this world, a hue vibrant and vital inside its brown.”
And so opens Chapter 1, Zero, of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy by Christopher Marmolejo. This is going to be a tarot book like no other. I can tell already. :: hearts for eyes ::
“To be born, this work broke open my heart, and so let this reading be opened by my blood offering, a requisite pound of flesh…”
Marmolego’s writing is going to draw out your feels, that’s for sure. Either you will be fully onboard this train or you will be left scratching your head. You’ll see what I mean. Let’s continue.
Red Tarot is not an easy read, but it’s not intended to be. It’s filled with dense layers covering symbolism, mythology, history, present day politics, literature, and so much more. This book is about shedding red light on each card in the tarot to reveal it as a prism of political praxis, inspired after Prof. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy.
Each tarot card entry draws from four key disciplines:
literary fiction as political expression,
gender studies and theory,
anti-colonialist philosophy of education and decolonizing pedagogy, and
performance studies, whereby theatrics, divination rituals, ceremonial rites, and social expressions are revelatory of core truths in the human experience.
This is achieved by weaving in the teachings of Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and José Esteban Muñoz.
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