July Oracle of the Month Study: Earth/Nature Based

DragonFae

I know July is over but I was a bit preoccupied with life and neglected to start our monthly study. Since I am sure we all have some nature or earth based decks I thought we could play some "catch up" during August. What is your favorite nature/earth deck?

GRRRR...typo in title of the thread so if a moderator could fix it I would appreciate it.
 

Glass Owl

Oddly enough I have been a bit obsessed with nature themed decks recently and picked up a couple of them - Earth Magic, Animal Whispers Empowerment Cards, and Nature's Whispers Oracle.
 

2dogs

Glad you made it back DragonFae :).

I had Earth Magic for a long time, which was the first Oracle deck I bought. I really liked some of the images, such as the forest ones, but was not so keen on others. It's a patchwork deck of images from different artists and some seemed a bit out of place, such as Music, depicting two women in a renaissance style. I also struggled with the guidebook and didn't do very well reading the deck by itself. However, it got me into reading several decks together and looking for common images and words, so I guess it proved to be a valuable part of my education in this area :thumbsup:.
 

DragonFae

I have Earth Magic too. I bought it specifically to use for the July study (until life hit me in the head) but from the little I have worked with it...it just doesn't resonant with me. I'm not ready to give up on it yet.

I may toss the book and reflect/research/learn more about the images on the cards and just try intuitively to work with it a bit.
 

2dogs

The Nature-Speak Oracle was another one I had difficulty with. The cards have photos with keywords and are in groups of various natural objects. I liked the landscapes, weather and seasons, but never really get a feeling for the meanings people have assigned to trees and flowers. It's a shame really, I loved some of the images in these decks but the others broke them :(.
 

Glass Owl

I have Earth Magic too. I bought it specifically to use for the July study (until life hit me in the head) but from the little I have worked with it...it just doesn't resonant with me. I'm not ready to give up on it yet.

I love your expression "until life hit me in the head." It is times like that which can make it difficult to be in a receptive head space or have the time/energy to devote to making a connection. I know I have written off some decks too early in the "getting to know you" phase just for that reason, which is why I have been trying to be more open minded and not judge a deck so quickly. Good to hear you haven't given up yet. :thumbsup:

I may toss the book and reflect/research/learn more about the images on the cards and just try intuitively to work with it a bit.

The Nature-Speak Oracle was another one I had difficulty with. The cards have photos with keywords and are in groups of various natural objects. I liked the landscapes, weather and seasons, but never really get a feeling for the meanings people have assigned to trees and flowers. It's a shame really, I loved some of the images in these decks but the others broke them :(.

The Halloween Deck is one where I have to really stretch by intuition muscles as that deck like to talk to me in a way that doesn't often mesh with the book. The keywords are fine but then I have to go from there. Sometimes just a word or phrase in the card meaning helps me make the leap. That is one deck where I need to write out my own personal card meanings. Maybe that would help you both with the Earth Magic and the Nature-Speak decks. Plus, it may help you to bond with the deck.
 

2dogs

After building up a small deck collection and having some success with various combinations I started narrowing it down to what I could really believe in, stick to and study more deeply. I initially focussed on the nature based decks as being based on the real world but still had problems with the amount of mythology in the guidebooks and the meanings that other people had given the cards. Following a lot of repeated readings this year about decluttering I've parted with more and more, until now I've only been left with these two - The Photographic Card Deck of The Elements and The Photographic Card Deck of the Solar System and their companion coffee table books - which aren't Oracle decks at all, but are most certainly firmly based in reality as they simply describe aspects of the chemicals and atoms making up the Universe, and the large scale objects they have formed. Strangely I find it a lot easier to see the meanings in these images and texts than to try and relate the meanings given for the decks I had before to the question, and some of the phrases can be uncannily relevant.
 

Glass Owl

Wow, those cards sound amazing. A great way to learn facts and it sounds like they make for a cool oracle deck.
 

2dogs

Aleister Crowley said in The Book of Thoth that the structure of the Tarot pack "is necessitated... by the structure of the universe, and in particular of the Solar System". Well this is certainly true of The Photographic Card Deck of the Solar System which contains 158 cards of images and facts about the objects and phenomena making up our immediate cosmic environment - planets, moons, asteroids, comets, the Sun, rings, meteors, magnetism, gravity and so on - in the normal arrangement of astronomical books starting with an overview of the whole Solar System then progressing from the Sun outwards through the various planets and their moons and ending with the outermost cloud of material from which the comets come. The cards are double sided and contain images and quite a bit of text - mostly slightly cut down from that in the Solar System book. You don't need the book to read these cards but it's nice if you want to read about the objects in some sort of order and have shuffled your un-numbered cards beyond all hope, and the pictures are larger and a bit clearer. Being double sided the deck has to be shuffled with closed eyes but it's too thick to handle the whole thing, so needs a technique such as cutting, moving chunks around, then selecting just a portion of the deck for further shuffling and card selection. I find it surprisingly easy to read as an Oracle deck - just looking at the images and reading the text will reveal an analogy to the situation being enquired upon, and eerily resonant, even frightening, phrases will often appear. It could be used as a deck on its own, but I find that drawing pairs of cards in conjunction with The Elements deck will highlight some idea common to both cards, as in some synchronous "as above, so below" correspondence, and have been using this technique in the monthly reading exchanges here for the last few months. Not having any pre-defined meanings or philosophy, apart from what's possibly inherent in the Universe itself, seems to free it from the limitations of most Oracle decks, enabling it to give very blunt, factual or dark messages as well as the affirmations and spiritual meanings that many other decks focus upon :livelong:.
 

2dogs

The Photographic Card Deck of The Elements has 126 cards - 118 chemical elements, 2 cards for groups of elements, a title card and a few explanatory ones. I use them all and can always find some message in them. These cards though contain a lot of scientific, numerical data which only leaves room for a couple of sentences of text. It's more text than on most Oracle cards but I don't find it enough to read them on their own, they work better used in pairs with the Solar System deck. I've recently bought the accompanying coffee table book and this is much better, it includes far more text plus additional images and gives far more information to work from. I'm sticking to using both decks in pairs though as I'm very happy with the results. The structure of the deck is that of the Periodic Table which arranges the elements according to their subatomic makeup and electron configuration. This has its own set of rules and significant numbers, particularly 1, 3, 5, 7 orbitals in each electron shell, each of which can contain 2 electrons.