Also called oracle deck, angel cards, affirmation cards
Illustrated card decks with no fixed structure, each built around its own theme and guidebook, drawn for guidance or reflection. Unlike tarot's set 78 cards, an oracle deck can have any number of cards and any imagery.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Keep any candle away from the cards and the deck box. Cards are a reflection tool, not a substitute for medical, legal or financial advice.
John Lenthall's fortune-telling cards, first published in England in 1665, printed answers on each card. Robert Place identifies S. Hooper's Conversational Cards of 1775 as the oldest oracle deck he has found. These were games and parlor amusements as much as divination.
The 36-card Lenormand deck, the Kipper cards of Bavaria and the Italian Sibilla decks each have fixed sets of picture cards, such as the Ship or the Letter. Many readers count these as the classic oracle decks, read by combining cards rather than one at a time.
Doreen Virtue's angel card decks, launched in the late 1990s, made gentle, positive oracle decks a mass-market genre. In 2017 she renounced her past work after a conversion to Christianity and asked people not to use it, but the format she popularized continues through many other authors.
Fortune-telling cards are older than most people think. Fernando de la Torre described using cards to read love fortunes in fifteenth-century Spain, and John Lenthall's English fortune cards were printed from 1665. The illustrator and historian Robert M. Place dates the oldest true oracle deck he has found to S. Hooper's Conversational Cards of 1775. In Germany, Johann Kaspar Hechtel's Game of Hope of 1799 became the model for the 36-card Lenormand deck.
Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lenormand, Kipper and Sibilla decks were sold widely across Europe. The modern English-language oracle boom came in the 1990s, when publishers released themed decks of angels, goddesses, animals and affirmations, each with its own guidebook. Oracle cards differ from tarot in having no shared structure, so each deck must be learned on its own terms. Like other card reading, they have no demonstrated predictive power, and most users treat them as prompts for reflection.
Opening a respected book at random and taking the first passage your eye or finger lands on as an answer to your question.
Telling fortunes with an ordinary deck of playing cards, where each suit governs an area of life and each card has a set meaning. It was the most popular form of card reading from the 1700s to the 1900s.
Marking slips of wood with signs, scattering them on a white cloth and reading the ones you pick up. Built from Tacitus's account of Germanic lot-casting and modern rune practice.
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