The definitive guide to the French cartomancy tradition. The images of Madame Lenormand lead you into a universe of symbols and depictions capable of evoking the everyday and connecting it to the magic that surrounds us. The cards permit the future to be revealed.

Oracle cards are a set of cards used for divination.  They are not divided up into suites like tarot–in fact, most oracle deck don’t have any divisions at all.  Each card has a picture and a name, and nothing else.  No suites, no elemental associations, no numerological or astrological associations aside from what’s given to the reader in the painting itself.  There is nothing outside of the oracle card to tell you what it means.  What I mean by that is, there is no association telling you that pentacles is connected to earth element and implies stability and fertility.  What’s in the picture is all you get to figure out the card.

How do you use these cards?  Pretty much like you would use a tarot deck.  You decide on a layout–one card, yes/no, three cards, crosses or lines, etc.–and phrase a question.  Shuffle how you wish and then lay out or pull the cards.  There are no reversals in oracle cards as far as I can tell.  Reversals would strike me as rather pointless, since oracle cards tend to emphasize positive occurrences by their very nature.  Then you read the cards to find the answer.

Because oracle cards don’t have number, elemental, or suit references to help read them, the reader is forced to be more intuitive in order to gain insight into an answer.   Unlike tarot, oracle cards tend to emphasize positive thought.  You won’t find something like the swords suit in an oracle card deck.  There are some cards that look negative on the surface, but if you look closely, they are actually framing that negativity differently than expected so that it is positive.  Which is very, very interesting to work with.