Oracle of Shadows & Light

Next up, here’s another EBay purchase. The Oracle of Shadows & Light is a 45-card oracle deck, so not Tarot, but I couldn’t resist the lovely illustrations. The book is by Lucy Cavendish, the illustrations by Jasmine Becket-Griffith, published by Blue Angel Publishing in Victoria, Australia. It came out in 2010, and I think the first edition is sold out (meaning the publisher has sold all their copies to resellers, but you can probably still find copies somewhere) as Amazon is already listing a ‘release date’ for for what I assume is a reprint in 2012. It looks like the packaging has been redesigned on the upcoming edition, so I guess I have a first edition.

The cards and book come in a very sturdy two-piece, lift off box. The cards are larger than average Tarot cards, measuring 5 3/8” x 3 3/8” / 14 x 9.6CM (according to iruler.net. Yes, I was too lazy to put the computer down, get up and walk across the room to fish a ruler out of the desk. In my defense, I am surrounded by cards, book, and box – and cat – strewn all over the bed as I write. Too much to move or climb over). Call the book 6.5”x 4 5/8”. It’s a lovely little book, too. Each card gets approximately 2 to 2 1/2 pages, and there are a number of spreads.

So here are a few of the cards. I assure you the colors are very vibrant and rich, if they don’t look it on-screen. I specifically included the Violet Angel to show some of the color in this deck. There’s a great underlying steampunk theme here too, very evident on a number of the cards.

Love this one, kind of how I’ve been feeling since the whole Overseer/Stalker incident the other day. The streaks in her hair are bright purple, but if I correct for that I lose some of the background which is a darkish green. The scans were high resolution, but I compress them when I put them online so some integrity is lost in the bitmap-to-jpg conversion. I hope you can get a sense of them, though.

		Here’s the back of the cards. This fairy is also on card 21, Angel of Alchemy (Miracle).

All the cards have a main title and a keyword or phrase underneath. Even if you don’t normally go in for oracle decks (I typically don’t, although I have 5 or so) this is one to get. I even forgive her for the “Breaking Dawn” subtitle on the Violet Fairy.

If you’re not an EBay user, the seller has a shop with an online storefront, http://www.magicalomaha.com. She also included a stick of very nice incense, of which I think I may have go buy more. They also have a real store, if you happen to be in Omaha, NE.