The Oracle of Rewilding

An exquisite bestiary oracle that combines vintage photographs with animal spirit paintings, imbued with surreal whimsy 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. But the images in The Oracle of Rewilding do not represent some fantasy. They are part of an ancient, primordial story of profound kinship that intimately connects human and animal realms.
 
This oracle calls upon our imaginations in the service of creation and healing. In a time when the fate of humans and all other creatures teeters on the brink of destruction, we must consciously cultivate a visionary relationship with the world, a kinship with all things. We must, in a sense, “rewild” ourselves for the preservation of all. The imagined animal/human hybrids in this deck are creatures for a Trickster time, a time of chaos and disruption, one that occurs periodically when cultural values have atrophied and start breaking apart. The uncanny, even strange, creatures in this deck speak to a unity of being and hope.
 
The forty-four cards in this oracle present universal animal archetypes and the symbolic qualities they represent. The full-color guidebook explores each of the card's meanings in depth and offers a variety of ways to consult the cards.
 
Alexandra Eldridge’s paintings employ glass-plate negatives from 1880–1920. The selection of that time frame is not an accident. It represents an era when there was excitement about Darwin’s findings that emotions exist in both humans and animals; it was the beginning of land conservation and wildlife preservation, the emergence of modernism in the arts, the invention of photography and the X-ray. Simultaneous with those developments, there was an enthusiasm for peering into the eternal beyond. A craze for seances, spirit photography, myriad ideas about “animal magnetism” and all things occult, it was the primal soup from which the idea of an active “unconscious” was born. Eldridge’s art reminds us that the world of imagination is at one with nature. The guidebook by Sherry Salman encompasses stories, symbols, fairy tales, poetry, and myth—all of which serve to enhance an altered state of mind that fosters a kinship with all things.