Connect with ancestral wisdom with gorgeous full-color art featuring postage and vintage stamps from the American past!

This 40-card oracle deck is created from vintage stamps and postage from letters sent between my grandparents from the 1940s through the 1970s.

My grandfather, Captain H.B. Smoak, was a Merchant Marine and spent much of his life aboard a vessel at sea. For nearly forty years, he and my grandmother Hester wrote letters almost daily from the United States to the the ports and connections where he could receive mail.

My grandmother saved every piece of this correspondence and eventually it was passed on to me. In going through each letter and scanning it for historical preservation, the idea for this deck came to me. After scanning countless envelopes into digital images, I realized that the postage and stamps on these letters, telegrams, cards and other ephemera, sent primarily via air mail, could form the heart of the Air Mail Oracle deck.

This deck features full color front and back imagery. The back of the deck is a collage of different stamps and postage from around the world. Each card carries a simple, direct message combined with scans of actual stamps and digital clip art that enhances the meaning of the card.

These cards are clear, simple, and direct with their messaging... just like the advice you would receive from your grandma or grandpa, auntie or uncle. Because they were created with actual artifacts that I inherited from my grandparents, these cards are charged with ancestral wisdom, particularly that of past American generations. One goal of this deck was to create a divination tool that is authentically derived from my own cultural past, so that I can connect with and begin to understand both the positive and challenging contributions of my ancestors to modern American culture.

Rather than try to glamorize my grandparent's life, I instead thought about the frank and direct wisdom that their generation could provide based on the challenging realities of the past. Advice such as "pinch pennies" and "be sweet" use language taken straight from the pages of my grandparent's correspondence. In so many ways, this deck carries beautiful postage and messages from the past.

The cards are a standard Tarot deck size (2.75 x 4.75 inch) professionally printed (I use Game Crafter) on 12pt 320gsm black-core matte card stock. The deck includes a matching tuck box that I designed and comes shrink wrapped from the manufacturer.

The cards come with a free digital PDF guidebook available for download. A link is on my website below and a link is also provided with the card deck. For an additional charge I include a printed version of the guidebook. Please be sure to select the option you desire upon checkout below.

You can download the free guidebook and see pictures of my grandparents at my website here: https://sgstasidesigns.squarespace.com/projects/air-mail-oracle

If you want to see the deck in action check out my Instagram @sgstasidesigns where I use it in Tarot and other readings.

Thank you for shopping at s.g. stasi designs!