Why there are no ill omens — the breakdown of the twenty-four
updated · 5 min read
Tarot has cards like the Tower and Death that make you brace at the sight of them. Oracle decks generally do not carry those. The premise is not to produce a result that only leaves the person low.
Then again, if every card were encouragement, it would stop being useful. If whatever you draw says the same thing, there is no point in drawing.
Twenty-four cards in three kinds
Each deck here has twenty-four cards, sorted into three kinds by the nature of the card. The division and the counts are the same in every deck.
| Nature | Count | What sort of card |
|---|---|---|
| Forward-looking | 12 | The current moves, you receive, something ripens |
| Neither one way nor the other | 7 | Not yet settled, watching, a turning point |
| Go carefully | 5 | Reduce, check, do not hurry now |
Half are forward-looking and half are neutral or cautious. Exactly half the cards you might draw are not there to push you on.
The distribution is identical across all five decks. There is no deck — love, say — weighted toward the forward-looking.
The cautious cards are not ill omens
The five cautious cards do not announce that something bad will happen. They are written as constructive notice that there is value in stopping here.
Thick Clouds, in the overall deck, marks a stretch where it is hard to see ahead. Its text says that holding a decision back is allowed, and that whether you can wait until the material is in is the dividing line.
Not announcing what will happen, but saying how to hold yourself now. The cautious cards keep to that most strictly of all.
No card's text makes any assertion about health. Announcing something about a person's condition as a result of a reading leads to unfounded worry. The whole deck avoids it.
The subjects are kept apart
There are five decks here: the overall current, love, wellbeing, work, and the people around you. Each is built on its own imagery, sharing neither pictures nor text.
| Subject | Deck | Imagery |
|---|---|---|
| Overall | The Sky Oracle | Sky, phases of the moon, stars, the passing hours |
| Love | The Oracle of Love | Flowers, water, light, doorways |
| Wellbeing | The Oracle of Cycles | Seasons, trees, wind, rest |
| Work | The Oracle of Building | Tools, building, roads and bridges |
| People | The Oracle of Ties | Thread, lamp wicks, the table, boundaries |
The subjects are kept apart so that anyone trying several does not feel they are seeing the same cards in different colours. A different subject should show something different, and we wanted the pictures to say so too.
Light in the love deck and the lamp wick in the relationships deck are close in subject, so the first leans toward light falling and the second toward the object that carries a flame.
The same card reads differently by period
Each card carries four readings: today, tomorrow, a month out and three months out. Twenty-four cards gives ninety-six. Drawing the same card, the content changes with the point you read it at.
Even a cautious card describes the view beyond it in the three-month text. Being in a stretch that calls for care, and that state lasting indefinitely, are two different things. The span of time is how that gets said.
The card is decided from your name, your date of birth and the day's date. The same person drawing the same deck on the same day gets the same card however many times they reload. It is not built to be redrawn until something satisfies you.
Note: the person asking questions in this article is fictional. This is not a record of a real consultation.
Common questions
- Can I draw again to avoid a poor card?
- On the same day, drawing again gives the same card. Spend the day with it. When the date changes, so does the card.
- Are some decks luckier than others?
- No. All five have twenty-four cards with the same distribution of natures. What differs is the subject and the imagery.
- Where does the artwork come from?
- It is all drawn for this service. No artwork or text from any published oracle deck is used, by imitation, translation or otherwise.