Druid Animal Oracle Study Group-Owl

2dogs

The scene is this card is very strange. The background at upper left depicts dead, leafless trees lit by a full Moon, and therefore a winter’s night. The foreground though is sunlit and shows the Owl sitting in an oak tree bearing the green leaves of spring or summer. This suggests this Owl is situated somewhere other than the normal physical world - perhaps in a dream world, the mind, some otherworld or magical place.

The oak tree is covered in ivy, which is an evergreen so in a sense never dies. There is also an oak apple with a hole where the insect has emerged, a form of birth or maybe leaving its home, and a couple of stone pendants hanging from leather thongs. One of these has a carving of a spiral which I believe generally symbolises entering and returning from the underworld in the cycles of initiation or death and rebirth, and the other has a carved face looking like a skull. These look like people have left them there in an attempt to gain some magical help, possibly communication with their ancestors or secret knowledge.

This Owl thus appears to be linked to the Moon, a mysterious creature of the night, shadow and dreams, able to visit other, hidden realms beyond everyday reality, the possessor and possible communicator of secrets to those able to attune themselves with it.

The white feathers on the bird give me the idea of purity and spirituality - maybe the Owl represents the Soul itself - the subconscious, instinctive, non-rational awareness of dreams, feelings and intuitions?

I haven’t really looked at this particular card but have received a couple of owl cards from other decks in last year’s monthly exchange readings. I had forgotten the details but going back can see I had read the Druid Animal guidebook so maybe some of it had stuck -

Sep 2014: (Me) I’ve just zoomed in on an image and noticed the owl in the card :bugeyed:. I got an owl card as advice in last month's exchange and the meaning was as in card 4 here (being detached and observant). In the Druid Animal oracle the Owl also sits in an oak tree and signifies detachment, wisdom and change in a death and rebirth sense. And it reminds me of when I was little and used to spend a long time in the garden sitting in a tree until it went dark :D.

Aug 2014: (Reader) This card shows an owl on top of a tree branch. It looks calm and quiet. Analyzing its situation instead of going insane or making rash decisions. It shows to use your wisdom when things do not go your way. Be calm and see things in a different perspective. Listen instead of talk and once you get your answer catch your prey with your powerful beak. And remember it is easy to blend with your surroundings.

(Me) I looked up the Owl in the Druid Animal Oracle, which was similar, and also found it on the Voyager Tarot Priestess card. This deck has its own system in which the characteristics of the Priestess are explained in further detail in another five cards.


That last sentence is particularly interesting as I was thinking of drawing five cards from other decks in the hope of gaining further information about the Owl card as I’ve just done with the Hawk card. I notice Full Moon is tomorrow morning at 4:54 AM here so it would seem most appropriate to try this when I wake up about 6 AM. The Moon may still be visible next to the bare trees in the garden and the Sun doesn’t come up till 8:24. It may be ridiculously optimistic to think I'll get anything this way, but I'll never know unless I try.
 

2dogs

The Full Moon was still up and fully visible among the light clouds when I asked ”what more information can you give me about the Owl card?”.

This reading was a bit more complex than that for Hawk - the cards link to each other and cross reference in various ways and have to be read several times in different orders to get more layers of detail.

The most obvious images are the cards to the left with images similar to the Moon in the Owl card -

The Ice Fountains of Enceladus indeed shows a moon - not our Moon but Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. This moon is completely covered in fresh, pure snow making it brilliant white - in fact the whitest object in the entire Solar System. At the bottom of the image you may be able to make out the ice fountains which spurt streams of crystals into space.

Azure looks like the Moon but far too bright. However, if our Moon was also covered in snow it perhaps would appear like this - and the rays also jet out like those ice fountains.

If nothing else then, this would definitely link the Owl card with the Moon, but there is more.

The other blue card is not one of the main Elements cards but a special key card explaining the meaning of the various letters, numbers, colours and symbols on the other (black) cards. There are even more details on the other side. It is thus a sort of Rosetta Stone. Taken together with the other multi coloured card above it, the Four of Crystals, which has the keyword Logic suggests the symbols on the other cards have deeper meanings and need looking at more closely.

A further obvious aspect of the Azure card is the deceptive nature of the image, the way it has more likely been created by draining all the yellow from a photo of the Sun. The top card, Heart didn’t seem to fit in for a while, but also contains a deceptive, hidden image - if rotated clockwise the background is revealed as a photo of a wooded hill, reflected in a lake in front and silhouetted against the sky to the rear, processed to remove all colour other than red. This is like turning the crystals in Logic around to see them from different angles, or looking on the back of the Key Card. I have also photographed the back of The Ice Fountains of Enceladus as the image resonates more than the close up of the fountains on the front.

Returning to The Ice Fountains of Enceladus, the text explains that although not directly detected, Logic (the Four of Crystals) applied to those fountains of ice crystals would indicate the presence of hot water under pressure hidden beneath the surface of this moon. Now the Heart card shows in the centre a heart surrounded by radiating blood vessels, hidden within the darkness of a body - another example of hot liquid under pressure. The petals of the pink flower on the card also radiate outwards. The hidden landscape in this card could also be a reference to the heart of Nature hidden within the Earth or underground. The keyword Health shows that these concealed forces are essential for life.

The question then arises of just why these things are hidden, and this is explained by the key phrase on Azure - Protect Yourself. If the Moon was as bright as on this card it would be dazzling and overwhelming - the Owl knows the keys to the mysteries but only reveals them a little at a time because it’s for own own good, the pure knowledge would burn us out. We may infer a little through logical deduction but direct vision is withheld from us.
 

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2dogs

It has since struck me how this reading has circled round the cards getting deeper into the meaning - much like that spiral form on one of the pendants. :lightbulb