The Oracle of Rewilding

An exquisite bestiary oracle that combines vintage photographs with animal spirit paintings, imbued with a surrealism that provokes reflection on our deep kinship with all beings.

Welcome to a world where humans and animals inhabit each other’s lives in surreal, dreamlike realms of the imagination. The imagery in The Oracle of Rewilding is part of an ancient, primordial story of profound kinship that intimately connects human and animal worlds.  

This oracle deck and guidebook calls upon us to bring healing in a time when the fate of humans and other earthly creatures is threatened. The oracle gently leads us to consciously cultivate a visionary relationship with the world, a kinship with all things. We must “rewild” ourselves for the preservation of all. The imagined, uncanny, even strange animal/human hybrids in this card deck represent the Trickster at a time of chaos and disruption, and speak to a unity of being and hope.

Alexandra Eldridge’s paintings employ glass-plate negatives from 1880–1920, an era when there was excitement about Darwin’s findings that emotions exist in both humans and animals. Concepts of land conservation and wildlife preservation emerged at this time, along with modernism in the arts, and the invention of photography and the X-ray. Séances, spirit photography, myriad ideas about “animal magnetism,” and occultism became popular.

The forty-four cards in this deck present universal animal archetypes and the symbolic qualities they represent. The full-color guidebook by Sherry Salman features stories, symbols, fairy tales, poems, and myths and explores each of the card’s meanings in depth, offering a variety of ways to consult the cards—and a way to engage an altered state of mind that fosters kinship with all things.