I've really been enjoying the deck reviews I've been seeing lately, especially from Benebell Wen and yhlee, so I decided to do one for the deck I bought today. The deck in question is the Divine Muses Oracle by Maree Bento, who also designed one of my favorite tarot decks, the Antiquarian Tarot.
I used this interview spread, so off we go! I'm leaning heavily on the book since this is a deck that has all its own symbolism. It leans heavily on alchemical and magical progression, and I'm thinking of ways to use it for internal and shadow work.
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Tell me about yourself. What is your most important characteristic? - The Sin-Eater. This card is about letting go of guilt and mistakes so that you can grow from them. As an Anxiety Person I am reading that as the deck's interest in working with me as well.
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What are your strengths as a deck? - The Muse of History. This is not just history but storytelling as well. This is a deck that likes to construct stories and will help me structure my own.
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What are your limits as a deck? - The Psychic Portal. Mystical gateways and mediumship. I wonder if that means that for me, this is not a deck for messages from the outside? Given it has a variety of cards that stand in for Powers, that was not a limit I was expecting, but it seems to fit the feel I'm getting.
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What are you here to teach me? - The Great Mother. It wants to teach me to take care of myself and to be better.
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How can I best learn and collaborate with you? - The Muse of Comedy. Keep a sense of humor, or perhaps in the more traditional sense, look for the happy ending. XD
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What is the potential outcome of our working relationship? - The Magical Child. I think this is a neat card to get as an outcome when the card for what the deck wants to teach is a Mother.
It's funny, I was just having a conversation about how figuring out why I do certain things, or what specific broken thought loops mean, lets me figure out ways to deal with them. Fixing them might be difficult but I can at least learn to work with myself instead of against it as if I'm suddenly going to magically be able to do all of the Functional Adult Things easily like Real Adults do.
I may never not look at a full cabinet of food and not be able to consider any of it food, but I've learned that means I'm tired but it doesn't mean I'm not hungry, and I've also learned to make "soup!" my automatic response when I realize that's what I'm doing.
I can become a better version of myself, but that's not going to make me someone else.