Folklore's Shapeshifting Creatures as a Reading System

Oracle of the Shapeshifters is a forty five card deck Lucy Cavendish created with artwork by Jasmine Becket-Griffith, published by Beyond Words and Simon and Schuster in 2013. Its guidebook draws on folklore and legend around mystic familiars and shapeshifting creatures across cultures, organizing its forty five cards around that cross cultural cast for guidance on personal transformation, a structure that places it alongside Cavendish's Faerytale Oracle and Wild Wisdom of the Faery Oracle in drawing its cast from folklore rather than from a single named system the way her paired Oracle of Shadows and Light does.

Read intuitively for guidance on periods of change, the deck continues Cavendish's pattern of publishing a run of decks illustrated by a single fantasy artist, Jasmine Becket-Griffith here as on several of her other titles, giving the decks a shared visual identity despite each drawing on a different folkloric theme, faeries, mermaids, vampires or shapeshifters. Building an oracle deck around a folkloric category as broad and cross cultural as shapeshifting creatures, rather than a single documented tradition's account of them, is consistent with how the wider oracle genre typically adapts folklore into an original, non denominational reading system rather than reconstructing any one culture's specific practice.