With those and similar decks, the visual imagery is an important part of conveying the message - in part because of the prompts it conveys to us through less than fully conscious parts of our being, I suspect.
However, many of those are now well known, and have been codified into various books which “explain the meaning” of each card.
When, in the 1980s, I started working more formally at developing my abilities in this area, one of the exercises was to meditate on symbols - including various card systems (I quite liked Murry Hope’s “The Way of Cartouche” [a review is here] in those days [out of print and difficult to get now: one probably short term link, for example, is here] - note that this is NOT an ancient Egyptian divination system: it is a modern system using ancient Egyptian symbols). I have used that meditation exercise for a range of systems of symbols and sigils (see also this label) now, and quite liked the idea in Josephine McCarthy’s “The Exorcist’s Handbook” (which I wrote about here) of creating - as the author suggested - an Oracle card deck based on the concepts she described in that book. (She also has a separate, formally illustrated card system which is on my wish list - see here.)
I have nearly finished doing that, creating very simple, non-visual cards as prompts - including mention of the location in that book if I want to look up the meaning of each card. (Incidentally, I first made cards by hand when, in the 1990s, I attended a workshop run by my friend, Rune Master from the Bush, and he had prepared A4 sheets with card outlines for us to draw personalised versions of runes [see also this and this label] on - to be later cut out and laminated.)
So I don’t have the beautiful, detailed imagery (see image of example cards below), but I have access to a written description which works entirely at the conscious level (which has strengths and weaknesses), and a set of cards that can be shuffled and used in a layout (or randomly - I sometimes have people loosen a deck and throw it all up in the air, and read what lands on a target area) so I can gain extra insight into causes/cures of various situations.
However, I liked the concept of hand made cards to access knowledge so much that I have extended the deck beyond that initial set to also include cards for concepts such as types of units.
I may also adapt these crude cards into a very cut-down, crude looking spreadsheet version of an app - which just uses a random number generator and a bit of basic maths to identify a specific card. I open the file, consider the question, and press F9 to shuffle, then look up the card. How this looks is shown below (I originally developed this for working with elements, which is why the pentagram option is shown at the left).
Also shown below is how the cards I am currently working on look before I cut up the sheet, with a few final cards also shown.
The point of this is to illustrate that there are low cost ways of creating oracle systems - although the formally illustrated ones do have advantages, and of working with concepts you learn about or are of particular significance to you.
Food for thought, perhaps.
An in-progress sheet (the top three cards are the last from Josephine McCarthy’s book - apologies for the reflection of the light, but it is consistent with the card it is on 😊 [I used digital location for the earlier cards, but switched to page numbers for the later cards]) and several finished cards from the system I am creating are shown below (the Mirror of Hathor included in the backing is from Murry Hope's system):
The runes spreadsheet looks like this (the images are a mixture of the original cards from the workshop I mentioned above [no.'s 25 to 42, and yes, they are around 30 years old - too old to use physically, which was one of the drivers in creating the spreadsheet system], and an updated system I have been - slowly [glacially slowly] - working on):
The active page of the Yi Jing spreadsheet looks like this:
As noted, I have not included the moving lines yet, as I have not transcribed them all.
The internal links go to a page with the information on it, part of which looks like this:
(I work directly off a translation of the original texts these days.)
Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:
- there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;
- I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
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