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(Note: I am reluctant to name this deck outright since the creator used to have an online presence and has replied to/commented on almost every review of this deck on the net and… I have less nice things to say about it than the other reviewers.)

I got a new oracle deck recently, bought with a giftcard. I wanted something vivid and symbolic to help inspire me to write more poetry, and this deck fits the bill. I had seen the cards online and knew it had a lot of female nudity in it, and that didn’t bother me. I knew the deck said it was a whole religious system centered on women’s experiences, dedicated to “all women on Earth,” but the art and the companion book was created by a British man with no input from actual women. I was expecting this deck to have its problematic parts and its moments of mansplainin’ but… I wasn’t expecting it to be binarist, cissexist, homophobic, and sexist to boot!

Yep, it’s supposed to be for “all women” but dismisses the experiences of “people with homosexual preferences” as “claims.” I don’t think the word gender is used once in the book – people are referred to as by their “sex” and over and over again it is stated that “we were created with opposite sexes, and we live in a dual world.” It asserts sexist stereotypes of women as facts more than once, and continually portrays men as being unthinking slaves of their libido who need to be taught control by women. (So gross.)

And for it to be a thealogy (its promotional material says it’s the first!) that “explains […] creation from an exclusively woman’s point of view in a logical, holistic, and scientifically correct manner,” (which they already failed massively on because – hello intersex people?!) well… there is one card representing a virgin, one card for a post-menopausal woman, zero for menstruation, and zero for childbirth. I’m pretty damn sure all of the above are parts of different women’s points of view. The only card in the whole deck that represents celibacy also represents slut-shaming, sex-negativity, and rape and I really hope I don’t have to explain how screwed up and offensive that is?!

As you can tell from my list, this deck is not for all women; it’s seems to be for childless sexually-active ciswomen between the ages of, say, 20 and 35. All other women don’t seem to exist in the artist’s world, especially when he defines the stages of a woman’s (ALL women’s) life by things like “first full sexual contact with a man” and “pregnancy and childbirth” (which deeply upset my friend who can’t have a baby without most likely dying). (This did result in me joking with her and since we can’t/won’t enter Stage Four, pregnancy and childbirth, and Stage Six is death, by that logic we can’t die!)

But the thing is… this deck can be inspirational. When I close myself off to all of its bullshit, I can lay out some cards and find the inspiration I was looking for. Its colors and visual richness speak to me in a way that makes me write poetry. Yet I cannot in good faith recommend this deck to anyone. That’s pretty sad you know?

As I was showing this deck to a dear friend of mine last night (she wanted me to show her and I let her know from the beginning it was beyond problematic), as she got angrier and angrier and I got angrier and angrier… she said she wished she could throw the companion book away and use the cards without it. I said for all its bullshit, the book does contain some important information about symbolism and has some moments of beauty in it. She said she wished I could just summarize this information in a text document for her. So then, I suddenly started redefining the cards. Card representing a “passive” woman who “enjoys being used” and participating in “rape games”? It’s now a card about going with the flow, letting things come to you, and being unconcerned by things you can’t change. The aforementioned sex-negative card is now about self-reliance. And when we got to what is hands down the worst card in the deck, I wound up changing it too.

This card is “The Bitch,” the male artist’s attempt to reclaim this word by… drawing a naked woman spreading her legs and showing the viewer her vulva. The companion book says this card means honoring your husband and sacred prostitution (which is just asdfghjkl;’ ). Nope it doesn’t mean that anymore – it means having no shame about your body, being assertive, aggressively pursuing your goals, and leadership. It’s the women who wears bitch as a badge of honor and offers help and support to all (legitimately all) women as best as she can.

Ultimately, my friend saw the exact same potential in the deck that I did. When the artist linked each of the four elements to a different form of art… the veiled dancers showing different types of self-expression… the three cards showing the three Fates… it is beautiful. And while one cannot scrub the binarism and cissexism from the deck completely, my desire to redefine the worst of these cards has been amplified. When I first got the deck and I disgusted by what I was reading, my partner asked me “can you salvage it?” I was unsure at the time, but now my answer is a YES. After our conversation my friend said she wants a copy herself for her own art (singing), and when she does she won’t have to give that companion book another glance; I’m going to have my own person stack of notes to share with her instead.