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“Wizardology: The Book of the Secrets of Merlin” is a charming, entertaining, and at-times amusing book. Done in faux-antique style, it has a number of folded, openable inserts and even moving parts which make reading the book an active, hands-on experience. As a recently-retired librarian, I can tell you the library’s own copy of the book got a lot of attention in the children’s room, and its interactive parts took quite a beating. A few parts quickly disappeared. One part which disappeared the fastest is the eight-card deck, secured in a pocket, on page 23 of the book.

At first glance, I considered the small deck in my own copy of the book unworthy of my notice. I left the eight cards in their well-designed pocket in the book. Surely, the authors and artists only included this card deck in their book as a joke. Only eight cards and sixteen possible meanings? How could you get anything useful out of that? I eventually chided myself for my own narrowmindedness–there’s only sixteen symbols in Ifa/European geomancy, and you can get a host of answers from that. I decided to take a second look. To work with these cards and decide what use they could be to a diviner.