SOOTH - Divination Cards & Book
SOOTH - Divination Cards & Book
by Stefan Buczacki
SOOTH - a set of 28 visionary oracle cards & incantatory divinations created by Sylvia V. Linsteadt (words) and Rima Staines (paintings). They come in an eco-cotton bag stamped with the SOOTH sigil. The accompanying book includes suggestions about how to use the cards, and an essay by Sylvia and Rima about the process of their creation.
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. Seven 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.
About the Author
Sylvia V. Linsteadt is a writer, artist, and certified animal tracker. Her work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores the tenets of deep ecology and wild myth, and is devoted to radically transforming and broadening our human stories to include the voices, perspectives and dreams of the more-than-human world.
Her books include Tatterdemalion, (Unbound, Spring 2017), a novel, and The Wonderments of the East Bay (Heyday 2014), and Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area (Heyday, Spring 2017), both works of nonfiction. Her short fiction has been published in New California Writing 2013, Dark Mountain, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Golden Key and Deathless Press. She has a regular column with Earthlines Magazine, and her creative nonfiction can also be found in Poecology, Dark Mountain, and News from Native California. For three years (from 2013 to 2016) Sylvia ran a stories-in-the-mail business called Wild Talewort, in which she sent out rewilded tellings of fairytales and myths to the physical-post boxes of hundreds of subscribers around the world.
Sylvia’s story “The Midwife of Temescal” won the James D. Phelan Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation in Fall 2014. She has an Honors B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University.
About the Artist
Rima Staines is a Devon-based artist, painter, and illustrator known for her myth-inspired, magical realism, and folk-art style, often working in oils on wood. Born to artist parents in London, she creates "Otherworld" imagery, often featuring misfits and magicians, and was a 2018 World Fantasy Award finalist.
