HOW TO USE
As I looked over this book of fate, I decided to present The Temple of Cythnos in a different format. Each ‘season’ of life has just seven questions and seven possible answers each, and the inquirer is supposed to choose a number from one to seven inclusive in order to obtain their answer. So why not incorporate the two? I have recreated The Temple of Cythnos as series of card decks. For each season, sex and question, I created a set of seven answer cards for each question’s answers. One side of the answer card is a number from one to seven, and the reverse side of the card is the two-part prophecy from Fortune and Wisdom attending that number. This means that the first 28 pages of each PDF will need to be printed double-sided, a tedious process if you don’t have access to a two-sided printer. The last three pages of each PDF file contain two different recording-sheet options and a follow-up observations sheet.
The seasons and age categories are as follows: The ‘Spring’ season is for young people in the first stage of life, which ends at age 21. The ‘Summer’ season includes those adults in the stage of life which runs from age 21 to 42. The ‘Autumn’ of life is for those adults from ages 42 to 63. The ‘Winter’ of life is for those ages 64 to 84. For the Spring season of life, the 10 to 14 age range sounds about right for consulting this oracle, but if you know some mature nine-year-olds, have at it.
I’m not clear about whether you should have all participants take their turns in front of the group, or if it would be better to set up the oracle cards in a separate room, and have participants come in one at a time to make their choice. The book doesn’t make the process clear. If you have them all consult in front of one another, then it should be a group that trusts each other, because some of these answers could prove to be the sort of thing the inquirer doesn’t want to be known to the others. If your character is wanting, this oracle will not hold back. Do you want to receive the plain, unvarnished answer in front of others? It’s up to you.
How you arrange the cards for consultation is up to you. You could lay them out in a straight line, in a circle, or in stacked rows, as you see from the pictures here. You’ll see from the PDFs that I feature the question card first, so you can lay it out with the answer cards and the participant has the question in view as they choose their answer.
This oracle relies strictly on the inquirer’s intuition; they must choose whichever number feels right to them. Ideally, they should choose just one number, but it’s possible they may feel drawn to two or even three numbers.
On the following four pages you will find the PDFs for all eight Temple of Cythnos oracle decks. You will note that there is a coding system in the bottom-left corner of each card. It occurred to me that if you ever dropped the cards or a wind blew them around, you’d be well and truly screwed trying to get them back in order. So the coding system goes as follows. The first three letters are the season. The D 1 or D 2 indicates whether it is one of the female questions (D 1) or male questions (D 2). The Q number indicates which question the card relates-to. The A number indicates the answer number. I hope that helps.