Frequently asked Questions

The Venelestis project is an artistic exploration of nature and building a relationship with it regardless of where we are, because we are nature and are in contact with it every day to one degree or another. Nature is not just the wilderness, the woods, meadows, rivers, and oceans. It is fields, parks, gardens, cobwebs in the cellar, and the produce in our kitchen and staples in the pantry. Through the Venelestis botanical oracle decks, we explore the budding and deep relationships we have with the natural spirits around us and enter dialogues with them to receive wisdom, communication, and support for our lives and our practice.

Most of the Venelestis botanical oracles are open-ended oracle systems that allow you to create your own divinatory language and vocabulary to communicate with plant spirits, your guides, deities and patrons, or your own Higher Self. My offerings also include a Lenormand-style oracle deck that adheres to the traditional Lenormand system, while also incorporating the deeper philosophy of allowing the cards to speak to you in a manner you understand as you are in the moment of divination.

There are many plant and botanical oracle decks out there that offer gentle guidance and include keywords or whole guidebooks. And all of them are wonderful. But what if your own experience with a plant, your culture, or background disagrees with the author’s perspective on that plant? Do you accept someone else’s explanation, or do you continue to work with this deck feeling this dissonance and continue to question your own feelings, intuition, and experiences? What if I offered you a deck that, in exchange for not offering any authorial guidance, allows you to work with it in a way that is completely personal, customizable, and exploratory, and which by design also will grow with you in size and symbolic depth as your knowledge, experience, and relationship with these plants deepens? Is the initial difficulty not worth it in the long run?

In the beginning, if a plant is completely unknown to you, you can interpret and read the message on the card purely on its face value. Observe the colors used, the shapes of its leaves or stems. Is there a fruit or a flower depicted? Are its roots wispy or solid and tuberous? I have illustrated these cards with great care to depict them botanically accurately, and that is because the shapes of our bodies and the bodies of plants and animals tell a story about their way of life. You can read into all of this quite accurately without any additional context. As you grow in your practice and get accustomed to these cards and plants, your knowledge about their invisible, metaphysical, medicinal, or toxic properties will grow, as will your ability to notice them in your natural surroundings (I promise you will be amazed how many of these are around you every day without you even noticing!) and the vocabulary you have built will expand. You will be able to see meaning in their correspondences, effects on the body and mind, places you have seen them, and memories you have made with them. And if even that doesn’t feel like enough, you can read about them in herbals, online, in encyclopedias, and more. But to understand what your divinatory message is on the spot, in the moment of pulling cards and laying down a spread, you only need to enter that space with a clear and open mind and notice images, words, phrases, sentences, and sensory feelings.

Absolutely not. You do not need to be a herbalist (magical or medicinal), botanist, or any other kind of plant specialist to benefit from using these oracle cards. These botanical oracle decks are tools for creating a relationship with plants on a personal, individual level. To receive natural wisdom and see your own life mirrored in the natural world, you do not need any prerequisite knowledge. Your herbal and botanical knowledge may grow as far as you let it through working with these decks, but it is not needed. You only need to be open to listen, trust your intuition, and learn to stop second-guessing your instinct by referring to outside authority.

I have chosen to include only Latin names of these plants for several reasons: The Latin name of the species pinpoints exactly which plant is depicted on each card. By using the scientific binomial name, all language barriers are mitigated because these names are the same across the board. A plant can have a different common name from village to village, let alone across regions or nations. This way, we avoid all confusion and you are allowed to call a plant by the name that most suits you. If you find getting used to the Latin names and connecting them with the common name of the plant in your region difficult, consider writing that name on the card directly or creating your own personal guidebook where you write these notes and any other insights about each plant.

Reading cards or divining at face value is to some degree equivalent to the concept of intuitive reading and intuitive divination. It is deriving meaning from any associations that may come up from the purely visual examination of the spread. On top of that, you may take notice of how the cards behave during shuffling, if there are any jumpers, or if you notice a card multiple times during the shuffle, noticing if any images, visions, feelings, or emotions come up during the reading, and more. Reading at face value trusts that the important information and cues already are a part of your subconscious, and the cards that appear are there to bring relevant bits to the surface. On yet another level, if you treat divination as a dialogue with spirits, guides, and deities, you can rely on and trust that these guides will offer the needed messages and answers in a way you are capable of understanding with your current knowledge and symbolic vocabulary.

You can scry with cards and almost any other object by allowing yourself to enter a soft trance state, where your analytical mind is set aside and your intuitive, visual, and instinctive part is allowed to softly gaze at the card (or object), to see with your second sight, inner sight, or third eye what images, visions, words, and sensory feelings may appear in your mind.

Not only can you, I would encourage you to mix different Venelestis decks together if you are inclined to do so. That way you can truly personalize your deck with plant allies you feel most connected to, understand the best, and create a truly unique and personal divination and spirit work system tailored to your needs, one for action and dialogue. By design, you then create a secondary deck, one that invites you to explore, make new connections, and get to know new plant spirit allies. A deck for new experiences, growth, and possibility.

If you are a complete beginner in botanical and natural oracles and the concept of diving into divination without any guidance seems daunting to you, it is you I have created the Venelestis Naturalis Lenormand for. The Lenormand deck features the traditional keywords and numbers printed onto each of the cards with the combination of the Latin binomial name of the species depicted. This invites you to explore both the archetypal meanings of the keywords (Child, Dog, Bear), as well as examine the cards and the depicted organisms on face value. Each has been carefully chosen to embody and enhance the possible meanings behind the archetypal keyword.

To keep with the spirit of purely naturalist divination, I have elected to exchange human figures and man-made objects that traditionally appear in Lenormand for their naturally occurring counterparts that carry that same or similar symbolism through their appearance, cultural association, lifestyle, or behavior. In combination with the unchanged keywords, this is also to teach a deeper reading of symbolism based on face value and attributes that are apparent at first glance or through popular knowledge.

You can be connected to nature even in a big metropolitan city. Even concrete jungles are not removed from nature completely, and you can find many of the plants included in the Venelestis botanical oracle decks growing in the cracks of the sidewalk, residing on grocery store shelves, adorning public parks or gardens, and inhabiting your own pantry. Being open and willing to find, create, and nurture this connection every day is the first and only necessary step.

Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. Traditional folklore has not been created in a vacuum and reflects the average human experience with many plants across centuries and millennia. Your experience may mirror the experiences and discoveries of people before you, or it may be more unique or on the fringes of the common folkloric concept. That does not make it wrong. It makes it your own, individual experience and, even so, is a part of the average. If you have to choose which interpretation to prioritize, go with the one that is more personal and closer to your own experiences, worldview, and intuition.

No, these decks are printed in small batches at a local small printer in a village near Prague, Czech Republic. The process of illustrating them, creating them, putting the data together, and ordering them is done by a single person, their author (aka me, Mariana), and the production/printing process is a similarly small-scale artisan manufacture. The production of these decks is financed only from the pre-orders of newly released decks, so the price is a little different than you may be used to from mass production. This is so that I can keep as much of the creative control as possible, as well as keep production local, producing as little waste as possible.

No tarot or oracle deck or their guidebook will tell you the exact correct answer, nor will they highlight the relevant bits of the guidebook for you to help you avoid doing any work. Starting your divination journey with the help of a guidebook is perfectly fine and a great beginning to the journey, but most readers will graduate from relying on the guidebook sooner or later in favor of their own experiences and insights into the cards they have developed over the years. What the Venelestis “system” is offering is a chance to jump straight into this opportunity, without the need to unlearn or amend pre-existing knowledge. It is not about the work of building your own meanings from scratch, which you would have to do before you start working with these decks. It is about the invitation to discover them as you go without the pressure to memorize and the need to step away from the divinatory moments to open a book and double-check yourself. Working within a closed system and an open one both have a space within a spiritual practice. One teaches method and discipline, the other teaches freedom, self-reliance, and trust in your intuition.