#my tools: sotw ostara oracle

[khajiit-reads]

Deck First Thoughts: Seasons of the Witch: Ostara Oracle

authored by Lorriane Anderson and Juliet Diaz & illustrated by Tijana Lukovic

So, whenever I get new decks, I like to generally go through my first thoughts. Now it’s being shared on Tumblr now that I’m on Tumblr! Not quite a review, but a review-like format.

So, generally, I really enjoy the Seasons of the Witch series. But Ostara Oracle just kinda... miffs me.

Let's get right into it, shall we?

Well, before I do, I want to note: I'm no historian, I might be misremembering some details about Ostara and Eostre and other things, so please call me out in reblogs or replies if I get a bit of history wrong. Genuinely.

This deck has a lot of history misinformation. It spreads that Ostara = Easter, it spreads that Eostre is an ancient goddess, it might spread more that I haven't quite picked up on yet. It also conflates a LOT of Easter Christian to Ostara traditions, such as Ostereierbaum, or the Easter Egg Tree, the Easter Egg Hunt itself, and painting eggs.

The Lamb card is so freakin' bold as to outright state "Lambs or young sheep are associated with the more Christian version of Ostara, or Easter..." and I fucking recoiled when I pulled this card and read it in the guidebook. (For a bit of context into my reading style, I usually read card meanings when I first pull the card instead of reading the whole book before beginning with the deck... so that also means there might be more cards with this glaring issue I simply have not come across yet.)

I get that Ostara can be kinda difficult to gather up old traditions, because Ostara is not that old, but that doesn't excuse picking up Easter traditions and plonking them right on into Ostara traditions. Because unless you're a Christian as well as a Wiccan (or... well, in my case I celebrate the wheel without being Wiccan because the more excuses I get to celebrate the better lol), you're not likely to actually be celebrating these Christian traditions.

The other decks I own (for clarity, I own Mabon, Samhain, Yule, and Imbolc; I cannot speak on any deck I don't own), they mostly stay within their lane and talk about actual historic traditions, or even newer traditions within the lines... Yule also uses a lot of Christian imagery, but in my honest opinion, it's a lot less egregious as it's more imagery than outright "You can / should do Christmas traditions as Yule traditions".

And yes I understand that that's because those holidays have other historic precedents... whereas Ostara is a relatively new invention. It was invented because Gerald Gardner wanted to celebrate more than four spokes of the Wheel, so they added the solstices and equinoxes.

And let's not even get into Eostre. Eostre has been attributed to being an ancient goddess for a hot minute thanks to being attributed to it by Saint Bede... which was a generally unsourced and now understood to be unsupported argument. The card for Eostre also directly states her to be the namesake for Easter, which is plainly untrue.

[ sigh ] Okay, I'm done complaining about all of that. I don't really feel properly qualified to keep harping on about it. So what about the actual quality of the deck?

Well, like all the rest of the SOTW decks, it's good and high. Good cardstock, beautiful art, easy to understand and grasp guidebook with a good few spreads within it, as well as some cards having extra information about a ritual you can perform alongside the card, but not all cards have that.

There are a lot of cards that are uniquely Ostara, at least as far as I can tell. They focus more gardening and things of that sort, which I think fits into the theme of Spring returning just fine. These cards are great! But the Eostre card and all the "this is a Christian Easter tradition" cards... [ siiiiiiigh ] They miff me so bad!

As it stands, would I suggest this deck to others?

Depends, how bad do you feel about the Easter and Eostre stuff?

For me, I'm happy to own this deck overall. I've been wanting to collect all of SOTW and so I'm happy to have another deck in my collection. Owning other decks in said collection do boost the score a bit.

But it is REALLY hard to look past the Easter and Eostre stuff. To the point that it enters a zone of "Do I really wanna suggest this to others?"

I'd say that best one can do if they decide to own this deck is understand the actual history behind Ostara and Eostre, and why it's a generally bad idea to conflate Ostara and Easter. There's too many reasons that I can't really list concisely, and it's a hot discourse topic that comes up every year around the Spring Equinox in witch circles.

Here's some posts about it:

Hex Positive Podcast: The Easter-Ostara Debacle (links to a tumblr post about the podcast with a spotify listen link in it)

breelandwalker: this very long post about Easter and Ostara

If you have more posts on it, feel free to link in the replies, I'll gladly read them!

Thanks for reading my very long post on this deck, bit of a really long "first thoughts" but I had a lot to complain about.