On Venelestis, Divination, and Meaning

I first wanted a tarot deck when I was about fourteen. Like most people at that age, I was looking for answers. More accurately, I was looking for myself, and for something that felt life changing.

I grew up on fantasy literature. Magic, as I first understood it, was loud and immediate. Fireballs, transformations, clear causes and visible effects.

Puberty has a way of dismantling that expectation very quickly into disillusionment and the world of the hope for possiblity turned into disappointment for while.

Still, divination and tarot specifically, felt like the closest thing to magic that existed and manifested in real time. The idea that you could ask a question and receive an answer immediately, through a known and established system, was compelling.

Cartomancy became a skill I carried with me for years. What never quite worked for me was memorisation. Fixed meanings applied formulaically always felt lacking to me. That approach explained symbols and their archetypal meaning, but it did not do anything to tell me how they apply to real life.

Divination is not only psychological

I do not believe divination exists solely as a tool for self development. It can be used that way, but reducing it to that is like using a plumbed kitchen sink to store water you carry in from outside.

At its best, divination is communication with forces, entities, intelligences, or spirits that are not you or the very least are your higher, divine self. Sometimes that communication brings information you have no obvious way of knowing. Sometimes it brings distortion or outright lies. Discernment matters, because not everything that answers is trustworthy.

On a more general note, while I think the psychological model of magic is real, as are the other 4 (energy, spirit, information, and meta-models), I think divination, magic and spirituality in their core are not merely psychological phenomena.

Why plants

Venelestis exists because most people lack a tangible, usable connection to nature in their everyday lives. Not a symbolic one. Not an aesthetic one. A practical one.

Plants are not abstractions. They grow in specific places, under specific conditions. They have histories, properties, limitations, and affinities and measurable effect on our bodies as poisons, medicines and nurishment. Working with them grounds divination in the material world. It prevents the system from drifting into pure metaphor.

A common misconception about my decks is that you need to already know the plants to use them. That is not the point. You will learn them by working with them, the same way people have always learned about plants, animals and each other. Through attention, repetition, communication and cooperation.

What these decks are, and are not

Venelestis decks are tools.

I am an animist. I know that things other than humans possess spirit and agency. Each deck has its own character and spirit and the work itself accumulates presence over time. None of that changes the fact that the purpose of these decks is to be used. They are meant to act as a tether, a spool of thread, from the mind of the diviner to the natural world, and to the living beings within it. They are not substitutes for engaging with nature directly. They are not meant to replace observation, cultivation, walking, touching, or learning.

If a Venelestis deck is used in isolation, without any attempt to commune with the natural world it references, something essential is missing.

A note on trust

One of the adventures of generic divination systems is that they can invite communication without asking you to specify who you want to talk to. You ask a question, and whoever happens to be listening may answer. With Venelestis, the interlocutors are named. These are plant and natural spirits. You know who you are speaking to, unless you deliberately widen the scope.

Meaning is not handed down fully formed. It is built through the relationship.

Who this work is for

Venelestis is not for people who want instruction without engagement. It is not for armchair divination, or for those who expect to receive knowledge without searching for it proactively.

It is for people who are willing to explore, test, research, and then do something with what they find. People comfortable thinking in images, metaphors, and symbols rather than literals. People in the process of refining, unlearning, and rebuilding how they relate to the world.

There is no objectivity here in the academic sense. There is no external authority to defer to. Personal autonomy, both in learning and in action, is non negotiable.

What to expect

This work does not promise certainties. It does not offer universal meanings.

What it offers is a way of practicing divination that is rooted in animism, oriented toward freedom, and shaped by the laws of nature rather than archetypal consensus of the human unconscious. It expects something from you in return. Attention, effort, and participation.

Meaning is built. Not given.