12 Gorgeous, Inclusive Tarot and Oracle Card Decks

Oracle cards, on the other hand, are more fluid in their structure. A deck can contain any number of cards, any number of designs, and often comes with a booklet to offer insight into the cards and what they might mean. Many see oracle cards as more accessible to the common person, since there isn’t a standard template to them. Rather, you can simply be drawn to the messages or images of a deck and use it wherever feels appropriate in your life.

Do cards connect to something mystical? Maybe! But also maybe not. What makes cards — be they tarot or oracle — appealing for so many is that they simply offer thoughts. Being offered a thought gives a user something to think about or chew over, as well as potential insight into a question or challenge that they may otherwise not have come to on their own. They can offer a guiding idea for any number of projects, time periods, circumstances.

Tarot cards have a long legacy of sexism and racism associated with their use, as well as their iconography. The most common Western deck, the Rider-Waite, was developed by a woman of color named Pamela Coleman Smith, but the credit for its creation went not to her, but instead to the publishing company. Many alternate decks fall into problems, too, wherein the vast majority of images feature thin, white bodies, as well as female bodies positioned in ways that are disempowering. There are not disabled bodies, not bodies of people of color, not empowered female, trans, genderqueer, or otherwise non-cis white men centered in the images. Many decks also showcase patriarchal, Victorian-era conservative family models. For example, The Empress represents a mother who is “nurturing” while The Emperor, representing a father, is “authoritative.”

Part of why oracle cards have flourished is the freedom to move away from the structure and offer a wholly different — and more accurate — view of the world. Of course, that doesn’t stop some creators from appropriating language and images from other cultures, so do note that many decks will be off-putting because of this. There are, for example, a number of “spirit animal” style decks, both oracle and tarot, developed by non-Native creators for non-Native use.

But, because so many people have found interest in both types of decks, tarot, too, is finding itself better representing a wide array of human (and non-human!) experiences. In 2020, a wildly successful Kickstarter for BOTANICA: A Tarot Deck about The Language of Flowers highlighted the passion for different styles of tarot, as it brought in nearly 3/4 of a million dollars from backers.

Kicking off this roundup is a deck of The Literary Witches oracle cards. There are 70 different cards, written by Taisia Kitaiskaia and illustrated by Katy Horan. The images themselves include 30 female writers through history, including some who aren’t as well-known, alongside 40 spiritual tool images. It looks minimal but also gorgeous. $20.