Review by Chloe McCracken
This 52 card angel deck is absolutely beautiful, well-thought out and well-executed. All the images have the wonderful added touch of having silver highlights, which bring a feeling of radiance and three dimensionality to the pictures. The symbolism is simple, clear, and beautifully drawn. As well as the deck, the kit comes packaged in a top-opening box with an 80 page explanatory book entitled "Discovering Angel Energy".
The cards are good quality, laminated stock. Sized 4''3/4 (12cm) by 2"5/8 (6.5cm), about the same size as Lo Scarabeo decks, they may be slightly challenging to shuffle for those with small hands, but they're not too big. The backs are non-reversible, with a pale blue floating feather design.
The deck is structured into four "suits" of twelve angels each presided over by an archangel. These suits are denoted by the borders of the cards. White is for Gabriel, blue for Michael, green for Raphael and red for Uriel. In the book, each of these archangels is further linked to an element, direction, season, and various qualities, as well as an aspect of the human condition: heart, mind, body and soul.
As well as these coloured borders, each card has either the name of the Archangel or a keyword for the lesser angels. The symbolism is designed to complement these keywords. So, for example, "Communication" shows an angel playing on a harp, with a quill feather by her feet, while "Freedom" shows an angel releasing a bird from a silver cage, and "Creativity" has an angel painting the sky from an artist's palette. All the angels are represented by realistically drawn human figures who have natural looking expressions and bodies, other than the wings. There is some variety in age and gender, but all the "angels" are fair-skinned.
As for the book, it has a section on connecting with angels, including affirmations and meditations generally. It then gives specific affirmations for each angel card, and some of the cards also have a recommended meditation or other way of connecting with that angel. There are also three spreads, a basic past/present/future, a 4 or 8 card archangel spread, and a 9 card cube of head, heart and body.
The card descriptions in the book all come with a colour scan, an interpretation, some suggested symbols related to the angel, and an affirmation. For example: "Nurturing: My soul is nourished as I cherish myself and others. Symbols: Ear of corn, blue, pet, Virgin Mary, Artemis, cow, honey" The author suggests keeping an eye out for these symbols as reminders or reinforcement of the angel's message/presence when the card has been drawn.
For those who find visual symbolism helpful in accessing cards, these angels are lovely. In some other decks the angel images seem unrelated to their keywords, or you find the same symbols on many different cards. Here there is consistency and clarity, as well as pretty, radiant pictures.
Some of the cards that especially appeal to me are:
Healing - a female angel wearing a purple and turquoise gown sends radiance from her heart, through her hands, out into the universe.
Transience - an angel sits on a grassy plain with white clouds scudding by in a blue sky, and watches as the wind blows away leaves and the seeds of the dandelion flower in her hand.
Justice - an angel in deep blue holds up a scales balancing a ball of light and a feather.
Unity - an angel sits on the lower edge of a yin-yang symbol, looking out at the universe.
Truth - a purple-gowned angel sits on the grassy bank of a lake, holding a radiant bouquet of white flowers at her heart. The reflection shows a grassy hill and bouquet, but no angel.
Protection - a male angel with a dark blue cloak over a brown shift stands enveloped in an oval of multi-coloured light.
Insight - an angel stands in a twilight place, with a crescent moon rising behind, gazing into a ball of light held in the figure's palms.
This is a lovely deck to help connect with angel energy, or simply as a different oracle reading deck with beautiful, clear imagery.
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