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A mysterious gift of the occult
Jul. 12th, 2016 08:03 pmSome lovely person bought me a copy of Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven's Prophecy tarot deck off my Amazon wishlist. While most decks come with a little pamphlet that fits inside the card box, with a bare-bones explanation of each card -- usually one sentence or less -- this deck comes with a proper instruction book, although the result is that the box does not really fit the deck of cards. I'll need to find something to wrap them in.
The instruction book is called Illuminating the Prophecy and it's shorter than my main Tarot instructional book, but it's still more than enough to get a beginner started, and it's an excellent supplement to other materials. Stiefvater explains the artistic choices she's made for this deck in particular, which makes it easier to remember the card meanings when using it to do readings, It's also a very good explanation of tarot in general, so it should be useful to use for other decks, if you have other decks that come with useless tiny pamphlets like most of them. Each card is given a couple of keywords, then a page or two of explanation on how it fits into the greater patterns in the deck, what it can mean in different parts of a reading, how Stiefvater feels about the card personally, and anything else that she deems highly relevant. The personal stuff is quite useful--tarot readings are very personal and how one person reads something might not quite fit in the same way with how someone else reads it, based on a reader or querent's life/personality/relationship to the concepts represented by the card. The booklet also has much of Stiefvater's characteristic voice, if not quite as nutty as the one she uses on Tumblr, so it is quite entertaining as well as informative.
I've started entering some of the notes from this book into my own tarot notebook, which is a jumble of things I've learned from different sources but overall draws heavily on Tarot Plain and Simple, which has been my main instructional for years (I lost most of the notes I had from when I first started reading tarot, so now I only use the things I remembered from back then, which was more than a dozen years ago, so that's not a huge amount and it's not nearly enough to do readings from memory with). I think I'm going to end up incorporating a lot of what Stiefvater says into the way I read; I think it's a bit more on my wavelength than some of the tone of the other book.
Overall, A+ deck, A+ instructional booklet, would occult with again. Also, the Queen of Pentacles card is so preeetty.
The instruction book is called Illuminating the Prophecy and it's shorter than my main Tarot instructional book, but it's still more than enough to get a beginner started, and it's an excellent supplement to other materials. Stiefvater explains the artistic choices she's made for this deck in particular, which makes it easier to remember the card meanings when using it to do readings, It's also a very good explanation of tarot in general, so it should be useful to use for other decks, if you have other decks that come with useless tiny pamphlets like most of them. Each card is given a couple of keywords, then a page or two of explanation on how it fits into the greater patterns in the deck, what it can mean in different parts of a reading, how Stiefvater feels about the card personally, and anything else that she deems highly relevant. The personal stuff is quite useful--tarot readings are very personal and how one person reads something might not quite fit in the same way with how someone else reads it, based on a reader or querent's life/personality/relationship to the concepts represented by the card. The booklet also has much of Stiefvater's characteristic voice, if not quite as nutty as the one she uses on Tumblr, so it is quite entertaining as well as informative.
I've started entering some of the notes from this book into my own tarot notebook, which is a jumble of things I've learned from different sources but overall draws heavily on Tarot Plain and Simple, which has been my main instructional for years (I lost most of the notes I had from when I first started reading tarot, so now I only use the things I remembered from back then, which was more than a dozen years ago, so that's not a huge amount and it's not nearly enough to do readings from memory with). I think I'm going to end up incorporating a lot of what Stiefvater says into the way I read; I think it's a bit more on my wavelength than some of the tone of the other book.
Overall, A+ deck, A+ instructional booklet, would occult with again. Also, the Queen of Pentacles card is so preeetty.
