INTRODUCTION
 

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These interpretations emerged from a kind of alchemical marriage developed between Sylvie’s visions and my attempts at seeing through her eyes, while looking to my own heart for their meanings. These translations are as much an open testament to the limitations, the struggles and the illuminations of my own labrynthian journey, as they are Sylvie’s. Book and cards were joined at birth as THE VERTICAL ORACLE

I first met Sylvie in 1989 at the Mandala Bookstore in Seattle, after presenting a ritual on "The Man/Woman Mysteries". I felt an immediate recognition with her as if we had known each other before. For the next six years, we entered an ongoing artistic collaboration during which many of her hypnotic soundtracks haunted my early videofilms. She has been, to me, a classic Gemini in the ways she’d adapt her rare talents and aesthetic to multiple mediums: painting, sculpture, music, video and now these cards.

Upon completing a prototype of her mysterious oracle (May ‘96), Sylvie made me a gift copy right before I left my Seattle home of eight years. I felt very much the archetypal Fool on a journey to greater unknowns; my future wide open to mishap, adventure and revelation.

   
 

Why I Wrote This Book In these chaotic millennium shifts, public media seems flooded with every brand of metaphysical system and spiritual trip imaginable with the hopes of alleviating, I suppose, the hyper anxiety people are feeling these days. Having recently quit my astrology practice, the last thing on my mind was producing "one more oracle" for the world. Then, these cards come along. In my own period of rootless flux they acted on me as an old friend, at once confirming my hunches while questioning my most naive assumptions about life. They did not really provide any pat answers as much as incite an imagination for making new connections between my inner sources and the out-there world.

No instruction booklet was included and this deck had no name. Both developed during the writing of this book. Sylvie’s cards were made from magazine cut-ups and then, rearranged into new works of visual art. Imagistically, they are very modern, infusing the ageless archetypes they represent with a sense of heat and immediacy.

Sylvie gave me free reign to interpret each card in my own way. I accepted her ofter with the condition that she could edit any text that did not, in her view, address the vision embedded in each image. She agreed and our next creative collaboration was underway. I also helped rename and re-image certain cards during their final phase of completion in early February 1997.

The Vertical Mythos
 
  These translations, like any other interpreter’s, reflect a bias and a world view. Each card in this deck depicts a story in a larger cosmology, or creation myth. I’ve chosen to call this mythos "The Vertical Oracle" after Walter Starcke’s ideas for addressing what he calls "the vertical and horizontal planes of existence" (from his book, The Gospel of Relativity; Guadalupe Press, 1988).

Vertical sources of energy and information might be said to include "the earth below, soul within and the heavens above", just as our more horizontal sources engage "the world of others, community, local & foreign culture". Their endless convergence expresses an innate spirituality common to many religious, mystical, and philosophical traditions Kabbalah, Tarot, Chakras yet open-ended enough to spark previously unknown contexts and meanings.

Spiritual hierarchy has no real place in this mythos. The Vertical isn’t meant to be superior or inferior to the Horizontal; both share equal status in a larger process for restoring some grace to a world out of balance. Extreme fixations in both vertical and horizontal realms exist everywhere. People stuck in the Vertical monks, mystics, and writers risk going mad from sheer isolation. Normal everyday folks also lose purpose and become spiritually drained by the Horizontal feeding frenzy of a hyper-materialistic society. Somewhere in the heart of this contradiction breathes a mystery worth living and where, I believe, the real action is.

   
 

Each page of interpretive text includes an astrological reference, namely a specific planet in a certain sign or house. These particular placements were specifically chosen to compliment the primary text and the image itself. (If you don’t understand astrology, not to worry; it you do, you may appreciate the complexity).

Cards referring to Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are meant to also symbolize entire generations and eras. For example, the "INTENT" card also refers to those born between 1958-72, when Pluto was in Virgo. The "DIVINE INTERVENTION" card also symbolizes the millennium shift, between 1998 and 2012, when Neptune remains in Aquarius. All twelve Sun signs are included along with a select arrangement of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn placements. All these placements were chosen specifically to serve the images themselves and the interpretations they elicited, rather than to serve astrology per se.

The choice to keep the astrological aspect somewhat incomplete was also intenti6nal. For personal reasons, I wanted to avoid producing another "astrological system" to explain things. I opted instead to use astrology as a tool for serving the larger task of interpreting my perceptions of images originating beyond astrological sources; I also know Sylvie wasn’t thinking of astrology when she made her cards.

This Is not a Tarot

 
 

A traditional Tarot is organized around numerology, four suits with trump cards and a major & minor arcana. The Vertical Oracle consists of fifty-two unnumbered cards, undivided into any caste or ordering principle; their linear sequence in this book is purely alphabetical (although, I admit the order of letters carries its own kind of magic). This oracle claims no pretense at being a Tarot nor is any disrespect intended to the Tarot. What The Vertical Oracle shares with the Tarot is its hands-on function as a divination device. Both can be used to extract information from unknowns through questions & inquires from the user: you.

THE VERTICAL ORACLE