One of the reason I love working for Lo Scarabeo is the interesting assignments they give me. Their instruction of "make a deck called the Book of Shadows that is comprised of 2 different decks" was the most challenging. Their instruction to make a 32 card inspirational deck featuring cats wasn't quite as overwhelming, but still, there were challenges. What would be the structural feature? How would I decide what cards? What kind of art would I suggest? Unlike tarot decks with their built in structure, oracle decks are wide open. My first decision was that I wanted the cards to have some internal logic. Cat breeds have certain characteristics that set them apart from other breeds. So I

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Sara Wiseman, author of Becoming Your Best Self, Writing the Divine, Your Psychic Child, and the new Living a Life of Gratitude. In fourth grade, I got my first pair of glasses, after six months of declining grades due to the fact that I could no longer make out the increasingly vague chalk marks on the classroom blackboard. I was provided with what might possibly have been the ugliest pair of glasses available to a pre-teen girl in that era: chunky, black ovals that made my eyes look like I was wearing a bug costume, and I marched into my classroom accompanied by taunts of "four eyes" and "glasses face." But I didn't care. Because

When I was just a wee little thing (if I was ever such) I was fascinated by Saturday morning cartoons. This was in an era before cartoons were nothing more than advertisements for dolls...I mean "action figures," and commercials for sugary, overly-processed breakfast cereals were actually addressed to parents rather than easily-influenced ijits like myself. One of the shows I remember through re-runs was the King Leonardo show. This was typical of the era with amazingly bad animation and worse stories. If cartoons were so bad why did I watch them? It kept me busy and let my mother sleep in. Well, the King Leonardo show was a short-lived series that actually divided its half hour into

Earlier this month I mentioned that I asked my tarot friends if they had any beliefs or practices that they thought others would think was controversial. One commonly shared statement was that not letting the querent shuffle was outside the normal practice. And I recently shared my fledging idea that maybe the tarot doesn't always tell us the truth but rather what we need to know, even if it isn't the truth. Another allegedly controversial belief was that astrological and Kabbalistic correspondences are not necessary and may, in fact, be overrated in learning and reading the cards.  As usual, I am interested in your thoughts and experiences with these systems. I know that I did