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
.