The Little Witch’s Oracle Deck by Ariel Kusby & Olga Baumert

subtitled Symbols, Spells, and Rituals for the Young Witch.

While I’ve tried to slow down in my acquisition of Tarot and Oracle decks (I mean, really, how many does a person actually need?)(and don’t ask me how many I have, I’ve stubbornly stopped counting,) I was so pleased when this oracle deck, aimed at young readers, landed on my desk. It is absolutely the kind of thing I would have thirsted for as a child learning about the occult and esoteric.

As an adult with an active interest in both mindfulness and spirituality, I wish I could go back in time and hand this deck to my younger self. While the cards and their accompanying guidebook do touch ever so lightly on the religious practice of witchcraft, as a whole it’s a kit for getting in touch with your subconscious and working on manifesting the ideals of kindness and growth in your everyday life through ritual, no matter what age you are.

The deck itself consists of 48 cards, with an invaluable 100+ page guidebook accompanying it. The deck is divided into 4 parts, with representations of Creatures, People, Tools and Places making up the loose categories. Each card is printed on sturdy stock, tho my deck did come slightly bowed, if that matters to you (it does not to me.) The presentation box comes with a sky-blue ribbon in the deck recess to help lift out the cards. The box itself is adorned with imagery from the deck, as well as with charming nature and geometric prints. Olga Baumert’s whimsical style here draws from folk art to perfectly match the gentle, thoughtful nature of the kit.

And it’s very clear that a lot of thought has been put into creating this. The selections all embody archetypes in the mind of the imaginative child, making them easy to relate to while also covering all the aspects of young life in a way that is deliberately reassuring. Obviously, you won’t find any cards here about death or the devil, but there are cards like The Gate, which talks about boundaries, and The Shadow, which encourages readers to face their fears. This isn’t a deck of sunshine and roses — tho The Sun and The Rose are both represented as cards here — but it is a deck about facing up to the challenges in your life and taking positive steps to overcome them.

To further help kids feel like they’re taking control of these challenges, Ariel Kusby includes a little ritual or spell for each card. While some are very minor, like the Mad-Libs-adjacent spell of The Joker, others like the Web-Weaving Ritual of The Spider serve as powerful intention setters and goal markers. Even divorced from the practice of witchcraft as a religious belief, the mental and psychological (and sometimes even physical) benefits of these spells and rituals are impossible to ignore.

As readers of my deck reviews know, I always give my decks a test run before discussing them here. Because I have mumblemumble decks, I’ve found that I really like to switch out Tarot decks each month, to make sure I’m actually using them and not just letting them sit sadly on a shelf. It now being September — and coming up on the anniversary of one of the worst periods of my life so far — I decided I’d use La Muci’s Dark Reflections Tarot deck to help me hopefully and finally come to terms with the long tail of that awful time. It’s weird: I still have a lot of conflicted, even negative feelings pertaining to the who and what and why, but I’ve definitely made progress in learning to forgive and moving my life forward since then. But I’m not completely over it, which further shakes my belief in myself and the core resiliency of my nature. And I won’t lie, I’m a little afraid of shadow work, which is what this deck is primarily used for. I’m scared of confronting any residual negativity still lurking in the corners of my psyche or, worse, the sharp, wild pain of still unresolved grief.

So what better way to temper the stark solemnity of the Dark Reflections deck than with this gentle, encouraging Oracle? I laid out the combined spread I learned from the wonderful Jane Prompeng, and let me tell you, I was deeply glad of the influence of the Little Witch’s Oracle on this reading (pictured above.) The Dark Reflections cards gave me some super tough love but the kindness of the oracle cards made their advice much easier to swallow.

I don’t have the most experience with oracle decks, but this is definitely my favorite to date, which comes as much of a surprise to me as it might to you. I can be pretty hard on myself, so having this reminder that perspective matters, that the starkness of my real life as represented by the Dark Reflections deck can also be seen through the much kinder yet still honest lens of the Little Witch’s Oracle was unexpectedly calming. I really like this deck, both for yourself or for the young proponent of mindfulness and ritual in your life (or, honestly, anyone who could use a little reminder to be as gentle to yourself as you’d have liked to be treated as a kid.) Recommended.

The Little Witch’s Oracle Deck by Ariel Kusby & Olga Baumert was published yesterday September 3 2024 by Chronicle Books and is available from all good booksellers, including