Showing posts with label Clarkson Potter Publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clarkson Potter Publishing. Show all posts

The Literary Witches Oracle by Aisia Kitaiskaia & Katy Horan

, 5 Jun 2021

This is one of the most interesting oracles I've come across lately. The deck relies and draws on a very-strong feminist array of women archetypes. All of them are writers with lives that are/were out of the ordinary. Their life and work is the basis for the symbolic portraits (major arcana if you wish), while their materials (symbols associated with their writing and/or lives) are in the sepia simple icon-like cards.

CLAP CLAP CLAP
> Original concept.
> Amazing 'odd' women and writers from different cultures, races, sexual orientations and historical periods (from historical figures to living legends), so the deck feels contemporary and in tune with the need of cultural diversity in our world.
> Beyond some renowned female writers, you'll get to know some others that are equally remarkable but not so well known.
> Horan's  art is just great. The illustrations of the witches are the most evocative and helpful for intuitive readings. I'll give you an example:
I asked, 'What I have to know in my relationship with guy X?" The card that came up was Octavia E Buttler's The Future. The image depicts a woman opening a young man's chest, at the heart level, as if she was healing a wound or just a opening his heart. The man seems to be dreaming, surrounded by darkness and subject to the hold of subconscious tentacles. The man is white and the woman is black, so she might be his shadow side. Can you see the beauty of the card and how this would work on a romantic question? You don't really need to know who Octavia E. Buttler is to use the cards because the imagery is rich and multi-layered. You can still go to the booklet, look up Octavia's story and add some further elements. The summary says, for example, that she wrote novels that reflected on power dynamics about sexes, so you could see that the woman  on the card has the upper hand in this relationship, she's bigger than the man perhaps she has power over him, she has power over his heart or is more mature, or more conscious. In other cases, the enquirer might find that the image depicts a woman breaking the guy's heart, for example. I took two other cards to clarify the message and I got the cat (a being that comes and goes, who attaches to people  freely but needs its own space) and the snail (a being that is slow in movement, has a shell, and has a small house). Just beautiful, isn't it?
> The quality of the deck is amazing overall.
  • Indie wonderful design.
  • Elegant practical keepsake box, beautifully designed inside out. The box has an inner pull-up ribbon to help get the cards out. 
  • Great quality card stock with flexible textured luxurious cards that shuffle beautifully and don't stick to each other.  
  • Good printing quality.  
> The deck seems to works for me. It gives precise answers to my questions. I have tried it with questions about people I know well, and then asked the cards, and boom, the answers have been spot-on. 
 

THUMBS DOWN
> I get that this is a spin-off of the eponymous book, but this booklet doesn't say much. The summary about each artist is good enough, and the Wikipedia surely has more information. The booklet basically says, use your intuition with this deck, which is great, but doesn't help explain the concept behind the oracle. So, what's the point of producing an oracle that has no oracle guidance? And really, I don't want to buy the book just to understand the deck.
> Some design issues. For example, the witches cards have their name and keyword on the front; however, the materials cards have the keywords in the booklet. That's bad design because it doesn't seem to show design congruence.
> The materials cards relate to the witches, yet, we aren't told why and which materials belong to to each witch.  
> The keyword attributed to each writer isn't always intuitive for me. Emily Dickinson is the epitome of the hermit and solitude. However, she's given the keyword 'soul' instead of 'solitude' which is given to Alejandra Pizarnik. This would not matter if both writers were unknown, but Dickinson is well known for her solitary life. 
> Lettering in the booklet is diminutive and you might need a magnifying glass to read the text.
 
 
MIND
> The strong feminist blueprint might not be some people's cup of tea and men with strong male energy might not relate to the deck at all.   
> This deck is bulky and the cards are on the large size so people with small hands might struggle shuffling. 

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