Eros Oracle Deck

I got this deck from a friend for my birthday. It impresses and amuses me for some fairly obvious reasons, and if you can see, you know that one of those reasons is the integration of 1920s Art Deco-influenced illustration. I’d suggest that the creator was spying on me, but the copyright year is 2007, technically predating even this blog. I’m tempted to file this loose association of mine under Shared Gnosis, but I know nothing about the creator and how they regard Eros, as a deity.

I say that I know nothing about how the creator regards Eros because the deck and little information pamphlet included mention nothing of Deity, but this could just be secularising it for greater marketability. The recommended divination in the pamphlet is also only concerning itself with relationships, but the symbolism is theoretically multi-purpose, and I can already think of other ways to use this.

At first, my favourite thing about this deck is the art —I’m just really not that into cartomancy, because I find the pre-set symbolism kind of restricting, in a way. I understand that some degree of intuition is necessary for any good divination, including cartomancy, but the fact that you’re building this intuition off an only moderately-random (at best) draw of pre-designed and selected images, whereas, say, tasseomancy is completely random in the symbols it can produce (and what those symbols actually are is often up to the interpretation and intuition of the diviner), and hydroscrying is also completely random and utilising no concrete symbolism, but a demi-trance state, I find giving divination from cartomancy harder for myself to trust —as it relies on my abilities to interpret someone else’s symbols in regards to the situation— but at the same time, I also occasionally do the Homeric or Greek alphabet oracles, and those are essentially the same principle of pulling meanings from an incredibly limited range of symbolism.

Here’s a scan of some of my favourite cards:

According to Tarot Dame, this deck is also available with an accompanying (limited edition?) book sold with some decks, which neither she nor I have seen, but I did just find a seller who has it at a price I can do, assuming it sticks around.

2 thoughts on “Eros Oracle Deck

  1. I really like the fact that it’s not a real tarot deck, though. Tarot decks are a very specific thing, and even variant decks conform to the definition of tarot, as opposed to all other decks, in the same ways. This is another kind of divinatory deck, and I do like it. I’ve just never really gotten along with tarot decks, but this one I can probably work with, in the future.

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