SOOTH
Divination Cards & Book
by Rima Staines & Sylvia V. Linsteadt
We are thrilled, at long last, to introduce you to SOOTH, our forthcoming divination deck and guidebook…
We've created this campaign to fund the print cost for our beautifully, ethically printed decks and books —through pre-orders. The text, images, and design work are complete. All that remains to be done is to send everything to the printers!
Your pre-order of SOOTH will include a set of 28 visionary oracle cards painted by Rima Staines, and a guidebook with Sylvia V. Linsteadt's written incantatory divinations, as well as instructions about how to use the cards. These will come in a linen bag stamped with the SOOTH sigil.
If everything goes to plan, SOOTH will be ready to ship before Christmas.
We can't wait to share their magic with you!
About the Creation of Our Divination Cards
Sooth is an Old English word which means truth. It comes from an older Indo-European root of the verb to be. The word is still known in the context of soothsayer: a fortune teller, who is, in fact, a truth teller, a teller of what is.
SOOTH answers your questions by taking your hand and leading you into a place both deeply alive and ancient. It is a storied place, full of old welcoming. The messages may startle you with their strange poetries and uncompromising sagacity, but they are always kind.
SOOTH was wrought in the imaginal alembic of two friends. Six years ago we began an experimental process of throwing plans entirely to the wind and opening the doors instead to a new, more intuitive way of working together.
Our creative worlds are uncannily kin, and we have found great magic in previous collaborations as well as our friendship. This time, in an act of imaginative trust, we set aside our critical and literal minds for short bursts of time together at the kitchen table in Rima’s Devon cottage, with a candle lit for the spirits and quiet, door-opening music accompanying us. There, we began making SOOTH.
At first we worked in the moments when Rima’s eldest child was sleeping (her youngest, meanwhile, was still in the womb). We knew we were making a set of cards and accompanying texts, and we talked for a while under the apple tree in the garden about old English etymologies, almanacs, calendars of seasons and peasant divinations done by earth and star. But other than that, we had no preconceived plans for its content, only the willingness to keep returning to the kitchen table and our candles to find out.
Our working rules were not to put pen and brush down even when in doubt; not to consult with each other about the ideas that were coming up as we went—Rima couldn’t read what Sylvia was writing, Sylvia couldn’t ask about Rima’s paintings; and to produce as much as we could before the little one woke from his nap. For both of us, it felt like our creativity began to flow from a place of deeper trust than either of us was used to; from a wellspring beneath language, a source made up of cadence, rhythm, dream-image, and instinctive fertility.
And so it was that in the warm days of a late Devon summer and then again that winter, just after Rima had given birth, the first nineteen cards came to be. Undiluted images from some ancient land were born under Rima’s paintbrush and spells fabled and rich threaded from Sylvia’s pen. They remained mutual and yet mysterious until the nineteenth was complete, and Sylvia read aloud what she had written to Rima.
Only then did we sit down with the images and texts to discover how they spoke to each other—to be shown by Sooth which words went with which paintings. We were surprised and unnerved (and continue to be!) by the way they wove together, as if with a life of their own, and realised that we had opened a gateway to something profoundly compelling and wild that had wanted its story told for a long time.
The second set of nine came three years later; hurricanes of painful life experience had blown through our lives in the interim. We sat again by the evening fire through a long Devon winter while Rima’s children slept, to continue the project. We felt that the wild, primeval quality of the first nineteen cards (the Ways) needed to be balanced by a sense of sanctuary and of blessing. The Nine Our Lady cards (the Houses) had a little more conspiracy to their emergence, but not much; we agreed only on the nine names beforehand, and then we worked. These cards had a very different energy to them, a wisdom of holding, and much needed succour.
The process of readying the deck has taken us another several years. We have had to walk and work with the cards personally to discover their nature, what it is they are for and how one might use them. The first time we experimented with them, we both felt knocked between the eyes by their uncanniness. Though mythic as opposed to literal, Sooth’s communications are unflinching, earthen, and loving. We are still surprised and humbled by these cards when we study their images and read their words; we feel like we are truly just the messengers, and Sooth was here all along.
These divination cards and book are unlike any oracle you (and indeed we) have encountered before. We hope that they will inspire your own deepest knowing and creativity, and bring the balm of old truth to you, its light bent through the prism of art and poetry so that it might reach right into your heart.
