Cult of Tarot Forum

Some people prefer Yarrow stalks and coins, which is wonderfully meditative if you've ever used that traditional technique.

Some people prefer to use oracle cards.

The design elements of this deck look very sophisticated and sumptuous:

https://pyroskin.com/catalog/?SECTION_I ... NT_ID=3305

BTW, I don't own this deck, I'm only going by the pictures.

It's very lovely. I have this one: I Ching Holitzer Deck by US Games. The calligraphic artwork is deceptively simplistically beautiful, but as far as I remember the I Ching gives quite specific answers, and the first time I used it the answer was a shock and I never touched it again.

Pen wrote: ↑07 Apr 2020, 15:34 as far as I remember the I Ching gives quite specific answers, and the first time I used it the answer was a shock and I never touched it again.

In my experience the I Ching pulls no punches. I don’t use it for little questions.

Merrick wrote: ↑07 Apr 2020, 16:13
In my experience the I Ching pulls no punches. I don’t use it for little questions.

Lots of big questions around at the moment, although now is probably not the best time for me to to try it again (just in case).

It occurred to me that since there are numerous I-Ching Oracle decks, there might actually be Oracle decks based on Sun Tzu/Art of War. After all, The Art of War is inherently a strategy based text and possibly suitable as a template for an oracle deck.

Apparently there are such decks.

However, unlike the I-Ching which has an established structure of 64 hexagrams, Sun Tzu's body of work is basically a stand-alone philosophical text.

Therefore, it seems to me that any oracle based on The Art of War would be very subjective because the artist/author would have to cherry-pick passages according to their personal preferences and base their body of work on what they deemed to be the most commercially viable approach.

It's akin to taking passages from the quatrains of Nostradamus.
There's no real objectivity or cohesive narrative, and to my mind prohibits any real sense of clarity.

Also, there's the matter of difficulties arising from translating the quatrains, which apparently were penned in an archaic form of French (apparently archaic even by the standards of his own time) with Latin and Greek sprinkled in. IMHO this was deliberate obfuscation.
In addition, Nostradamus was a fairly astute political creature with personal agendas, which give rise to many debates about his integrity, or lack thereof.