The Oracle of Rewilding

2025 Foreword INDIES Gold Winner in the Body, Mind & Spirit category

An exquisite bestiary oracle that combines vintage photographs with animal spirit paintings, imbued with a surrealism that provokes reflection on our deep kinship with all beings.

Welcome to a world where humans and animals inhabit each other’s lives in surreal, dreamlike realms of the imagination. The imagery in The Oracle of Rewilding is part of an ancient, primordial story of profound kinship that intimately connects human and animal worlds.

This oracle deck and guidebook calls upon us to bring healing in a time when the fate of humans and other earthly creatures is threatened. The oracle gently leads us to consciously cultivate a visionary relationship with the world, a kinship with all things. We must “rewild” ourselves for the preservation of all. The imagined, uncanny, even strange animal/human hybrids in this card deck represent the Trickster at a time of chaos and disruption, and speak to a unity of being and hope.

Alexandra Eldridge’s paintings employ glass-plate negatives from 1880–1920, an era when there was excitement about Darwin’s findings that emotions exist in both humans and animals. Concepts of land conservation and wildlife preservation emerged at this time, along with modernism in the arts, and the invention of photography and the X-ray. Séances, spirit photography, myriad ideas about “animal magnetism,” and occultism became popular.

The forty-four cards in this deck present universal animal archetypes and the symbolic qualities they represent. The full-color guidebook by Sherry Salman features stories, symbols, fairy tales, poems, and myths and explores each of the card’s meanings in depth, offering a variety of ways to consult the cards―and a way to engage an altered state of mind that fosters kinship with all things.

Alexandra Eldridge cofounded Golgonooza, a center for the arts based on the philosophies of William Blake. She has had over forty solo shows and has participated in many group shows throughout the US and internationally. ARTnews, art ltd, Art on Paper, New American Paintings, and American Art Collector are just a few of the outlets that have featured Eldridge. Her work can be found in many collections, including those of William Hurt, Steve Buscemi, and Edie Falco. Follow her on Instagram @alexandraeldridge8.
 
Sherry Salman, PhD, LP, is a Jungian analyst, teacher, and author. A founding member and first president of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, she now serves on the faculty and has contributed to the education of many Jungian analysts and psychotherapists. She was associate editor for three professional journals and is a consultant for the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. Salman has published in numerous journals, books, and the popular press. Her latest book, Dreams of Totality, is about symbols and imagination in postmodern life. Salman lives in the Hudson River Valley of New York.