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What an Oracle Deck Entry Covers

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What an Oracle Deck Entry Covers

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An oracle deck entry records a specific published set of divination cards, its creator or creators, its publisher, its card count and its stated method of use, distinct from a tarot deck in following no fixed traditional suit structure or fixed card count, each deck instead setting its own imagery and its own rules. Decker, Depaulis and Dummett's history of the occult tarot traces how eighteenth and nineteenth century card readers first attached esoteric meaning to an older card game, the documented root the modern oracle deck genre grew from.

An entry records a deck's documented publication history, its stated theme, its card count and any accompanying guidebook, since an oracle deck's meaning is set entirely by its own creator rather than by an inherited traditional structure, which makes recording that creator's own stated intent part of the deck's basic documented facts.

Where a deck draws explicitly on an existing religious or cultural tradition, an entry records that borrowing honestly, including where practitioners of the tradition itself have raised concern about how their symbols were used, rather than presenting the deck's own marketing description as a neutral account.

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A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot
Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, St Martin's Press, 1996View the Source
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