…but didn’t.

This is a bit of a rant, so please bear with me.

At first glance, there’s nothing to dislike about this Oracle, published in 2021 by Lo Scarabeo. It’s based on the illustrations that Georges Barbier did for the 1922 edition of The Songs of Bilitis, a collection of Ancient-Greek-style erotic poems written by Pierre Louÿs and first published in 1894. The poems were so well-crafted and skillfully presented by the author that, for a while, they were taken for original ancient poetry that had miraculously survived for centuries and was recently rediscovered by an archeologist. The illustrations go perfectly with them, and while they bear a definite Art Deco flavor, they convey the particular Ancient Greek lack of embarrassment about depicting the human body and various pleasurable actions humans engage in.

What ruins this harmony is the titles on the cards (and the associated “stories” in the LWB). One of the cards is titled “Body Positive” – a notion much too modern and in all probability incompatible with how Greeks viewed the body. If anything, they were “body negative”, to the point when anything but a young, healthy, athletic, beautiful body was mocked and used as a metaphor for various negative character traits. The card itself depicts two women on what looks like a romantic picnic – they’re both young, beautiful, and quite trim, which makes the title of the card look misplaced. To make it worse, one of the women is a woman of color, which kind of pushes the card’s “body positive” message into some ugly alleys.

There’s a card called “Warrior of Love” – a young man on a horse. I have no idea what it means, aside from the toxic idea that one has to “fight” for one’s love – the idea that, sadly, sprouted quite a few creeps.

One of the worst cards in the deck is probably this one:

The associated story in the LWB mentions Cupid and “a vision of the ideal romance”. What the author of the deck, unfortunately, didn’t seem to realize is that the winged youth with two downward-facing, extinguished torches isn’t Cupid – it’s Thanatos, the god of death (at which point the title of the card – “Ideal Romance” – looks like dark sarcasm). Ironically, Thanatos makes his appearance not in person, but in the title of a different card – “Eros and Thanatos”, another anachronistic title with its Freudian innuendo.

What is particularly distressing is that none of this has to happen. Both the poems and the illustrations provide enough of various situations, ideas, and moods to make an adequate psychological tool for analyzing relationships. For example, the card titled “The Charm of Simplicity” is reduced to basically enjoying simple pleasures of life (and love). However, the image (censored 😛) and the story behind it tell something much more interesting.

Here, young Bilitis is in love with a young shepherd – she doesn’t know yet that he will first sexually assault her and then become her abusive husband. But in the image, look how differently they’re positioned. She’s standing up, and doves circle around her, landing on her open palm. Doves were associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, – and love is what’s on the girl’s mind here, in its most pure and sweet form. The young man is lying down – his legs are spread, and he’s playing an aulos, a Greek double flute that was connected with satyrs and the cult of Dionysus. He obviously isn’t thinking about love – all he cares about is sex. Some charm can (probably) be found in such simplicity – but the way these two lovers’ hopes clash is much more useful in an actual reading.

What seems to have ruined the potential of this deck is the unfortunate mix-up that exists in the very broad category of Oracle decks – the mix-up between true Oracles (divination decks) and all kinds of inspirational/meditation/affirmation cards (decks that advise and inspire, rather than analyze and predict). In an attempt to make the latter out of this particular deck, I think the author missed a good opportunity to make the former. To be fair, as an affirmation deck, it does work pretty decently – it’s just that it could have been so much more.