I have been absolutely blown away by the reaction from people around the world to my beautiful Moonology oracle cards. (I feel I am am within my rights to say they are beautiful since the actual *physical* beauty of them is 99.9% attributable to the artist Nyx Rowan and the team at Hay House UK!)
The real story behind the cards…
That’s the physical beauty, but then there is their intangible beauty. I know where that comes from and I wanted to share it with you, in case it inspires you in one of your own projects.
What happened with the cards was that I had long wanted to make a deck of oracle cards. In fact, for the past few years, I had been quietly working on a set, bringing in astrology and angels.
After my book Moonology was published in 2016 and started to sell so very well (thank you!) my clever publishers at Hay House suggested that we do a set of oracle cards to go with the book.
I loved this idea but it was also a bit left field for me. I had been working on a deck of angel astrology cards. Now I was to do Moon cards?
Moreover, the first suggestion was that I would do 28 Moon cards within the deck, as the backbone of it. This wasn’t at all what had first occurred to me with the cards. I wanted to focus on the 8 phases and the 24 New and Full Moons through the signs.
I struggled with the 28 Moon cards since that’s what Hay House had asked me for, but I couldn’t seem to make it work. It all felt really wonky. (For the record, I have now worked through this blockage and in the working through of it, learned a TON and actually hope that one day the 28 Moon cards deck might see the light of the day and the light of the Moon!)
I spoke to my lovely friend and fellow Hay House author Sonia Choquette and asked her what to do. She said “Just ask them Yasmin!”
So, filled with trepidation, I asked if I could have a meeting at Hay House about the cards. I told the fantastic team there that I wasn’t feeling the 28 Moon cards and could we please do it as I had in mind.
They were like, “Yes, of course, Yasmin ! You just had to ask!”
So off I went. By this stage I was feeling a tad discombobulated about it all.
A few other things happened, too.
For one thing, my emails to Nyx, the artist I was so-called working with, went unanswered. The only communication between us came via Hay House. I found this really weird. It wasn’t until the cards were literally all done that I discovered I actually had the wrong email address for Nyx!!!!
Plus we had lots of going forwards and backwards about the words on the actual faces of the cards. This seemed to change every week and I could barely keep up.
And then I had issues with the first font that was used.
I was so worried that the cards were just not working for me and worried they wouldn’t be the cards we were all dreaming of.
So I then asked my friend Rebecca Campbell, another fellow Hay House author and maker of her own beautiful deck of cards, what to do/what she thought. I was still in the process of writing them and it just didn’t feel like it was flowing… She suggested I do some prayers, pujas and ceremonies around them.
OH MY GODDESS, OF COURSE!!!!
So I finally abandoned the idea of trying to do get these cards done through the sheer strength of my will and wit. Instead, I finally did what I do best. I surrendered them to the Divine.
I have been to India many times and learned about how to do fire pujas, or yagams, which are super powerful devotional ceremonies. So using a portable fire pit I picked up in India in my backyard, I started to do pujas for the cards.
Let go. Give in. Give up. Surrender…
The first one I did was to Ganesha, the Hindu Elephant God, who helps writers and also helps all of us get over obstacles. I asked him to help to break down whatever barriers there were between me and the cards. I actually think my ego was in the way, for various reasons I won’t go into here!
It only took about 20 minutes and I felt better straight away. If you are into chanting, here is the chant that I did.
Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha
I did the puja fire ceremony with the express intention of making the cards amazing for everyone who used them.
A few days later, I did another fire ceremony, this time to the Goddess Saraswati, who is the Goddess of Divine feminine wisdom and language.
Then I did one for Lakshmi, for Durga, and then I did one to the Goddess Narayani, who is the Goddess who embodies the triple Goddess of Saraswati, Lakshmi and Durga and so on.
Every time another block came up, I did another fire ceremony.
I work with Goddesses, Ganesha and angels too, so I also called in the angels for help. I ask Archangel Michael to cut through my fears and the dramas I had created around the creation of these cards and I asked Archangel Raphael to help me to heal any upset I had so that I could make the best cards possible for everyone to use, and I asked Archangel Gabriel, who helps writers and artists, with the text for the cards and the interpretations booklet.
This went on for weeks, as I wrote the cards.
Eventually they were approved and sent off to the printers.
I can’t say I *knew* they were going to be lovely because here’s the thing; I wrote the text but because my emails to Nyx weren’t going through, I didn’t really have a very strong sense of how the text and images would marry up. I was sent the images to look at, of course, but they felt somehow outside of my and very separate from my contribution.
