Light Grey Art Lab's Cosmos Tarot and Oracle Set

Oh, I wish I had the money to order it right now! A constallation-oriented deck is JUST what I'm looking for. I'm a stargazer and really love the concept of this deck. It's such a deep human pattern, finding the Lion and the Bull in the sky (you can really SEE these two animals, even if you find other constellations challenging - and the Scorpion, too, of course, and the Dolphin and Swan...), and every culture tells the stories of the constellations that never meet or follow each other or save each other...

For me, it's the most magical chapter of the human mind and the most exciting natural spectacle.

I'll have to save up for this deck.

I wasn't paying any attention until this thread. I looked because of the hubbub, saw that the King of Swords was Lynx, and promptly ordered one.

Curse all you enablers! I'm running out of shelf space.

Oh. Man. I got my deck about a week ago and I absolutely adooooore it! The art is just gorgeous, and the gold accents really make the whole deck. There is a lot of writing on the cards, but I personally like keywords, so that's all great for me. The only thing that I've found in the negative is that it's a little hard to shuffle the tarot deck sometimes. The oracle is njce and small for my tiny hands, but the tarot deck kind of falls all over the place. I'd still encourage anyone who wants to get it to do it, because it really is a beautiful and informative deck!

I tried a reading last night, for myself, using the Cosmos tarot (not the oracle) -- and I was surprised by how well the cards just "clicked" for me. They worked well as a tarot deck, even though the images are non-traditional.

What I had to do, though, was let go of my inclination to over-think things -- i.e. "but this doesn't LOOK like Temperance to me" -- and instead just read what was on the cards (i.e. just read the images that were there, rather than the images I imagined should have been there). Then, bam!, it worked.

I noticed an interesting detail on the cards last night that I hadn't spotted at first -- each card bears the name of its artist in very small print. The names are readable, but they don't intrude on the art at all. Very smartly done.

Annabelle said:

What I had to do, though, was let go of my inclination to over-think things -- i.e. "but this doesn't LOOK like Temperance to me" -- and instead just read what was on the cards (i.e. just read the images that were there, rather than the images I imagined should have been there). Then, bam!, it worked.

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Great tip. On my next reading, I'll give that a shot.... I do adore looking at the artwork.

Missing book

Well mine arrived, but there was no book inside.

I am cursed with faulty decks at the moment

rwcarter said:

I finally realized what the problem is - the lid is taller than the bottom, so the bottom completely nests in it. If they'd made the lid even 1/8" shorter, the bottom would stick out and you could grab it while pulling the lid off.

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Yes, not a great bit of box designing

RavenLuna said:

Thanks for mentioning tracking! I figured out that they sent the email to an old email address, so I looked it up and it's left London. Surely we won't have long to wait

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No customs to pay, and not signed for so didn't have to wait in *phew*

Collaborative decks never hold together cohesively enough for me. However I love the astronomical theme and loved one of these images enough to buy a print and am very much looking forward to framing it and finding a place for it, somewhere, on my crowded walls!

earthair said:

Well mine arrived, but there was no book inside.

I am cursed with faulty decks at the moment

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How disappointing! The book is quite nice; hopefully they can send you one?

Babalon Jones said:

Collaborative decks never hold together cohesively enough for me. However I love the astronomical theme and loved one of these images enough to buy a print and am very much looking forward to framing it and finding a place for it, somewhere, on my crowded walls!

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Here's the crazy, wonderful thing -- I was half way through the cards the first time before I even remembered that it is a collaborative deck. Yes, there are differing art styles from card to card, but there's a consistency and cohesion to this deck that is almost never seen in other collaborative tarots.

Annabelle said:

Here's the crazy, wonderful thing -- I was half way through the cards the first time before I even remembered that it is a collaborative deck. Yes, there are differing art styles from card to card, but there's a consistency and cohesion to this deck that is almost never seen in other collaborative tarots.

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I agree about the cohesion. I had originally seen the title of this thread, googled the deck, then blown it off (without looking at the cards) once I saw that it was a collaborative deck. My experience with them thus far has been the same as Babalon. But because this thread was getting so long, I began to wonder if this deck was worth a fair look. There IS a sort of cohesion to the cards that is difficult to explain. I wonder if, in addition to being given the prompt of the constellation theme, the artists were given a certain color palette to work from so that nothing clashed color-wise. Or maybe the images were post processed to have harmonious coloring.

I will say though, color aside, this collaborative deck has a far greater percentage of cards that draw me in-compared to other collabs.