If you were devising your own system...

Looking at the Cast-a-Stone site yesterday, I got to thinking (again!) about getting a custom set of stones done. I can't afford them, but it's a nice dream.

I could probably burn something on little oak discs, though, if I can find someone to slice up a branch for me! That might be very nice, stained and rubbed with lots of linseed oil. Oak is sturdy, too, and allegedly has oracular powers.

So I was thinking about how I would do this last night. I limited myself to 21 symbols. I like that number for personal reasons. Got some ideas, but it's not there yet, and I'm open to suggestions.

One thing I see in a lot of systems is that they have Sun, Moon, Man and Woman. I could probably get by with just a solid I-Ching style line for Yang, and a broken one for Yin. Male-female, active-receptive, hot-cool, etc. But what would I use for combinations that would tell me whether they were talking about a person or not?

I'd retain the Dog from Lenormand (probably just make a pawprint glyph). Also the Snake, Heart, and maybe the Scythe (or maybe I'd just make a little stilletto knife glyph, that might be better?)

I don't know about the Ship. Maybe I could pack "Ship" and "Roads" into Highway?

I'd like a Miracle glyph. The one you're always happy to see, the deus ex machina. A hand from a cloud, an Angel...anything active, that doesn't just sit there all aloof. I'd probably do Tara's seed syllable, TAM:

or this slightly fancier one:

I'm not sure if it's quite proper to do that, though, so I'll check first.

A Money glyph! Maybe $. Or a euro glyph, or BPS, since our dollars are no good anymore.

Message/letter/phone call? Probably a Mercury glyph. That would cover them all.

An Eye, like in Biedermeier, Gypsy Witch, and Witch's Runes. "You are being observed with interest..." It's also a kind of Eye of God/constancy thing.

And if you have an Eye, you have to have a Mouth! Mouth-Mercury would be someone telling you something, but Mouth-Money would be a financial drain, "another mouth to feed"!

I'm still adding and discarding ideas. It's fun, but I'm not ready to make them, because I'll change my mind.

How would you do yours?

I've got a proto-model for it.

Who's got questions? I want to test-drive it.

Actually found a pile of trimmed oak branches on the way to work yesterday and got myself a short branch. Hopefully my neighbor is slicing it up as we speak. It's fatter than I originally intended, kind of silver-dollar sized, but that's okay, I can do more detail that way, actual little pictures and not just glyphs.

Here is what I came up with. There are 22, not as a derivative of tarot, but because I needed all of them. Limits are like piecrust - made to be broken. This is a personal set, i imagine if I made them for someone else, they would be a bit different.

MIRACLE - TAM glyph. Tara, very lucky break, transcendence. Active, dynamic divine energy.

GOLDEN APPLE - Eris's golden apple. Chaos. Stirring the pot. Chaos contains both order and disorder. Strife, but also creativity.

PENTAGON - A pentagon with crossed rifles. Order.
Imposed order and chaos escalate in direct proportion to each other. A little order is good. Too much order is fascism. Well aspected: organiization, neatness, etc. Ill-aspected: prison, military, controlled environment.

SUN - A sun with a man's face. I had a little trouble making such a round face look masculine and experimented with facial hair, etc., but what I finally did was to do the features like Sitting Bull's, and it looks fine. Sun, man, active, yang, etc.

MOON - Moon with a woman's face. Lunar, woman, receptive, yin, etc.

STAR - A star. Same as Lenormand.

EYE - An eye. You are being observed with interest. Constancy, eye of God. Alternately, spying, stalking.

MOUTH - A mouth. Consumes. Could also indicate speech.

HAND - A hand. Work, job, human endeavors, efforts, help.

HEART - Human lives, love, affection.

MERMAID - A mermaid. (If I make a smaller version, I'll probably just draw a perfume bottle.) Strong attraction. La Sirena! Beware of rocks. Music, flirtation, pleasure.

GHOST - A ghost. Things that haunt, keep coming back, won't go away. Illusory things, things that are hard to pin down.

SNAKE - A snake. Same as Lenormand.

MERCURY - Communication, letter, phone call, email, message, etc. Also speed.

MONEY - Dollar signs, euro signs, etc. Money.

DOG - Friend, loyalty, protection, vigilance, fidelity. Like Lenormand.

SPROUT - A tiny plant. A child, a new project, new idea, anything just beginning.

RAIN - Raindrops. Depending on what it is next to, could mean "a lot", life-giving, or tears, "raining in your parade"...

SCISSORS - Scissors. "Cut off." That's it. End. Over. Separation.

PITCHFORK - A pitchfork. In this age of farm machinery, a pitchfork is generally only used for mucking out stalls. In other words, there's a lot of BS around.

HOUSE - A house. Same as Lenormand.

HIGHWAY - A highway. Travel. Distance, either literal or metaphorical.

No takers? I really want to do some readings with these and de-bug them before I make the permanent set!

I got my slices last Thursday - the guy used a little electric saw of some kind, with the wickedest blade he had. Oak is HARD.

When I got them, they weren't sappy, but they were moist enough that there was a fine sawdust caked all over them. I had to knock it off with a pocket knife. Here they are, right after that:



As you can see, they are very white. They are darker than that now, since I rub them with linseed oil every night. I'll stop when they stop soaking it in.

I haven't had time to burn very many, but I did manage to do a few. Here is TAM, the "miracle" symbol:



I haven't added any tints yet. I'm going to wait until all this oiling is done. But when I do add color, it's going to be very minimal.

This one is kind of crude, but you can tell what it is, so it's okay:



I'm not very good with things like that. I think the Pentagon is going to be the hardest one for me.

I'm happy with the Mermaid:



I touched her up a tiny bit after that, brought out the contrast a bit and made the tail fin behind her head just a little more prominent, but this is basically it.

You've heard the old blues songs that say "the eagle flies on Friday", but what I remember the old people actually saying was that the eagle shits. I'm guessing the expression was just cleaned up so that those songs could get on the radio. So here is my Payday symbol:





I lost a little wing tip when the bark chipped, but that's okay.

Here is the Eye:



This one has also been touched up a bit since I took the picture. I used a different camera phone when I took this, that's why it looks reddish. As I mentioned, I haven't put any tints on them at this point. The darker shading in the iris is the natural variation in the wood, and all the black shading is burn. I've touched this one up a little since I took the picture, too, neatened up the "eyeliner", but this is basically it.

Here are some on a dollar, just to give you an idea of the size:




It's more fun than it is work, actually.

I did some more last night. Here is the Sun:



As mentioned earlier, it's an Indian-type face, I thought of Sitting Bull while I did it.

Here is the Moon:



It's the face I imagine seeing on the moon, kind of a 1920's feminine ideal. I don't know why I see it that way.

The Pentagon is on the rough slice, from where they trimmed the tree. Enforced order!



I might add the crossed rifles later, I don't know.

Here's the Star:



Those actually aren't red like that, I took the pictures at night with a different camera phone and that's how they came out.

Eris's Golden Apple:



And the Dog:



That makes eleven. Half-done. It's fun working out your own symbology. I'd recommend this to everybody - if you don't like wood, get some Fimo or something.

I'm thinking about doing away with one of the ones I haven't done yet and making a Harpy one, to warn of malice. The Snake doesn't quite say that - snakes, after all, bite when you're about to step on them.

I made some more. Here is the Hand:



Houses in oracle decks always look like mansions. I made a simple little house:


Here is Mercury. You can't see it here, but I put the planetary glyph on the sandal. I'll try to take a better picture, but in the meantime:


Here is the Road. Zoom!

Again, I kept it simple and didn't add utility poles, signs, strip malls, road kill, etc., etc.

The Harpy isn't quite what I wanted. I might do it over:


And here is the Rattler!

Update (if anyone reads this thread.... )

I've made more of sets. This one's been sold:
https://s524.photobucket.com/albums/cc322/fennario99/oracle/set2/?start=all

I had trouble with the finish on that batch, (had to varnish it! ) so I switched to mesquite. Nice hardwood, only needs linseed oil. Here are the beginnings of two sets I'm working on:
https://s524.photobucket.com/albums/cc322/fennario99/oracle/mesquite/

This isn't final. I might redo some of those. Right now I'm just watching things take shape.