The Apothecary Spirits Oracle is an as-yet unpublished collaboration that I’ve created with Eric Maille and Michael Anthony of The Diviner Life to celebrate the wisdom and healing magic of herbalism. The original concept of the deck started as gay flower fairies, and I was going to create a playful, sexy deck to honor my Venusian natal chart, but then I realized I wanted to make something useful more than I wanted to make something silly. (That’s a separate healing journey.) Plant magic was how I entered into the world of witchery and spiritual questing, but I largely abandoned it until recently, so it’s been nice to see it come back into my life in a new way. Sure, it was there in the background, but I wasn’t doing much with it proactively. And Michael, a trained herbalist, has brought practical knowledge to this oracle deck that’s been so lovingly illustrated by Eric.

If you’re wondering what my part is beyond initial ideation, it includes project coordination, layout design, editing, communicating with the printers, and shipping. But the most interesting part for you as the user is a thorough early section of the guidebook on using the deck for divination, from single-card prompts to forecasting and more in-depth spreads. My chonky section is really a guide to using oracle decks in general because I wanted to include the type of information I wish I had had when first conducting oracle card readings. So now the world gets that knowledge without having to spend years figuring it out on their own, not that there’s anything wrong with experimenting, as the deck will show us.

If you want to read that and see the deck come to life as more than a prototype, you can back our project on Kickstarter. It runs March 20–April 19!

As always now, I used my own deck interview spread, which you can find explained right here on my blog.

Interviewing the *Apothecary Spirits Oracle*

**What major lesson are you here to help me learn?** *Coffee*
**Through which divine energy can we best communicate?** *Gardening Tools*
**In what area can you aid me to help others?** *Vinegar*
**In what area could your guidance be easily misunderstood?** *Ghost Pipe*
**What can I do to keep our communication clear?** *Measuring Spoons*
**How can I use your guidance for the highest good?** *Lily of the Valley*
**How will I know when we’re ready for a new lesson?** *Garlic*

What a delightful return to deck interviewing the Apothecary Spirits Oracle has provided me. As a deck I’ve been working on and discussing with two other creators for nearly two years, I’m very familiar with what our intentions behind the project have been, so it’s nice to see where my own personal connection reflects that while also diverging in some surprising ways, notably in the appearance of Coffee in the first position.

Coffee is the card of passion and excitement and a lust for life. There are other cards that might mean passion in different contexts, but coffee is very much an elixir of life for me, a necessary start to my mornings and a real pleasure midday. I have no doubt that I’m addicted to its caffeine, but I actually don’t drink that much coffee; I just drink it regularly, and I love it. Good coffee—not just a quick pot of whatever’s convenient—is one of the few luxuries I indulge in regularly, and I like how the deck is reminding me of how important that indulgence is but how it's only a part of the puzzle.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what excites me and what I want to be doing in my free time rather than simply going through the lists of tasks I assign myself. It’s a methodical way of going through life, but it’s hardly fun. This deck is a reminder of how fun it is to create and play and work in partnership with others. This last part is intriguing since I’ve restarted deck interviews for that exact reason, the desire to connect with others—you the readers, who are interested in how they could be using other decks, and the creators themselves.

This excitement and my use of the deck overall—much like my coffee intake—needs to be measured and proportionate. It’s about helping others to heal and maintain their own inner work, the lesson of Vinegar, not about wallowing, a downfall of Ghost Pipe. This is surprising to me for more than just the apparent paradox of encouraging a lust for life and the need for moderation. It’s surprising to me because Ghost Pipe was one of the first three cards we worked on. To get a sense that we were all on the same page, I suggested we do a card of wisdom, a card of desire, and a card of mourning. The specific choice of mourning was a nod to the queer experience of loss since this is an inherently and sometimes explicitly (not that kind of explicit) queer deck. And although there’s a lot of beauty and life to celebrate, there’s been a history of death and loss as well, and I wanted to make sure that we weren’t skipping over that for light and love.

But of course Nature is nothing if not balanced, and you can’t wallow in loss when there’s so much life to live. This is a healing deck, but it may not be a shadow work deck, at least not for me. It’s so much more about supporting the maintenance of life. Herbalism as a general practice is very much rooted in prevention and administering early correctives to help rediscover healthy balance and natural flow. While there may be loss, there’s no point in focusing on it except for how it’s affecting the present. Acknowledge it, help process it, and move on.

The “higher cards” of Gardening Tools and Lily of the Valley are also a bit of a pleasant surprise for me. I associate both of them with Eric since he wanted to include green carnations somewhere in the deck (they’re in the basket) and his favorite flower is Lily of the Valley. For me, I would have expected to see Lily of the Valley in the second position as it’s a card of wonder and curiosity and of fairy magic (as well as the dangers posed by that), while the Gardening Tools card doesn’t feel especially magical or divine. As the card of planning and preparation, it feels the least connected to the magic of the earth itself and the fey goddess work that I had originally thought I was working toward with my original deck concept. But I’m reminded of my strongest spirit guide, Vulcan, a craftsman (and fiery destroyer), and there’s something divinely inspired by the Fibonacci spiral, the perfection of heavenly ideals found in mundane form. Remembering the distinction between the plant spirits of this Apothecary Spirits Oracle and the plants themselves seems key here. They are related but not the same thing. The plant (or fungus or tool) is an entry point, but it’s As above, so below, not As below, it is what it is.

And as for what happens next with the deck? Garlic as the card of everyday magic feels like a clear sign for kitchen witchery. This deck will no doubt encourage me to reinvigorate life and reconnect with my passions, such as art and plants, while also inspiring me to rekindle the magic of the kitchen. And that’s a lesson I am excited to take on. See? The excitement begins already.

You can back the Apothecary Spirits Oracle on Kickstarter March 20–April 19. The version shown here is a prototype, and we have some enhancements planned as part of different stretch goals, including a cardstock upgrade and extra cards.

Deck Interview: Apothecary Spirits Oracle