A mushroom is the smallest visible part of a fungus. Most of the organism lives underground as mycelium, a branching web of fine threads that breaks down what has died and trades nutrients with the roots of living plants. The Mushroom Oracle builds its reading method on that structure. Each card you pull is treated like one fruiting body of a larger network. You read it for what it says about you, and also for what it says about your ties to other people, to the place you live, and to the season you’re in.
What you get
- 44 oracle cards
- A guidebook with words by Ellen Freeman
- Artwork by Bethany van Rijswijk: original collages made from vintage botanical illustrations
- A lidded box measuring 5.3″ × 3.8″ × 1.3″, with the booklet and cards nested inside
- Factory sealed in shrink-wrap
- Published by Broccoli
About the deck
Every card represents one of four things: a mushroom, a part of the forest, a mushroom person, or a fungal structure. Each card also carries the layers and connections its subject holds. The publisher suggests pulling a card at four kinds of moments: new beginnings, forks in the path, closings, and changes of season.
Like most oracle decks, it has no fixed suits and no major arcana to memorize. A single card can be read on its own, laid in a spread, or added to a tarot reading for another angle on the question. The guidebook gives the meaning for each card, so you can start reading without knowing anything about fungi.
Provenance & tradition
Broccoli is an independent, women-led publisher that launched in 2017. It makes art magazines, books, and a line of 44-card collage oracles, including the Flower, Garden, and Fairy Tale decks from the same artist and writer.
The oracle deck as a form has roots in nineteenth-century European parlor cartomancy. The best-known ancestor is the 36-card Lenormand deck, which grew out of a German card game called Das Spiel der Hoffnung and was sold under the name of the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand after her death in 1843. Modern oracle decks keep that freedom: each creator decides how many cards there are and what they mean.
Fungi have their own long folklore. The circles of mushrooms called fairy rings were explained in British and continental tales as the dancing grounds of the Good Folk. Biologically, they form when one mycelium grows outward from a center and fruits along its edge.
The fly agaric is also often tied to Norse berserkers. That link starts with a theory the Swedish professor Samuel Ödmann proposed in 1784, and no Old Norse source mentions it. The mushroom earns its place in the deck as the archetypal toadstool of Northern European story.
Who this is for
- Beginners who want an oracle deck with a guidebook and no system to learn first
- Tarot readers looking for a companion deck to pull alongside a spread
- Green witches, forest walkers, and foragers who want a deck built on how woodland life actually works
- Wheel of the Year practitioners who mark seasonal transitions with a card pull
- Daily journaling and single-card reflection
- Anyone who collects Broccoli’s oracle decks
- A gift for the mushroom person in your life
