The TreeLore Oracle is a 35-card eco-printed oracle deck that includes trees native to Eastern North America. The deck channels the spirit of the trees through beautiful eco prints, allowing you to have deep communion with nature. Both common magical trees (Apple, Oak, Hawthorn, White Pine) and less common trees (Hickory, Spicebush, Witch Hazel, Maple, Black Locust) are included in this stunning deck. Enter the sacred grove with the TreeLore Oracle and commune deeply with the living earth. The North American TreeLore Oracle Deck and the companion book, The Magical Compendium of Eastern North American Trees: Ecology, History, Lore, Magic, and Divination form a partnership to explore the many magical trees in the Eastern North American landscape and their specific uses for magical and divination purposes. This project was created in collaboration with the living earth—trees that wanted to be included are included and their teachings.
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One of the most important things we can do to address the challenges of today’s age is to build authentic, lasting, and meaningful nature-based spiritual practices that are localized to our own ecosystems. We can build deep connections with that land and take up our traditional ancestral role in tending and honoring nature. The nature-based spiritual, divinatory, and magical practices we use are more meaningful if they are rooted in our local ecosystems. Gordon Cooper calls this practice “Wildcrafting”, which has a focus on developing eco-regional Druid and nature spirituality practices using a variety of resources: folk, ecological, and experiential. The challenge with wildcrafted practices is that learning like this takes a good deal of time and skill to master and thus, as regional communities, we can build these together. This present work serves as one contribution in building wildcrafted and eco-regional knowledge of how to work with the sacred trees found throughout Eastern North America.
One of my major motivations for this project came from a lack of magical lore and knowledge about the trees growing where I lived, the trees that I interacted with daily. Books on magical trees typically focus on European sacred trees, and while there is some overlap with trees like Oak, Apple, or Hawthorn, many of our common trees—like Maple, Hickory, or Ironwood—have little to no magical information available! Further, meanings and mythology from the Old World are not always applicable to North America. Thus, I began from scratch, working with each of the 35 trees in this project. I spent time researching each of these trees in-depth: gaining direct life experience with them, understanding their ecological functions, their traditional human uses, and their herbal and healing uses, and applying principles like the doctrine of signatures to understand their magical uses. I knew I needed to work with the trees for food, medicine, shelter, and other basic human needs to understand them. I studied herbalism, bushcraft and ancestral skills, natural building, wild food foraging, and much more to understand these trees. What seemed like a simple start later turned into a 12-year project: I started researching these trees in 2010, and the project was released in Fall 2022.
The TreeLore Oracle Book: A Magical Compendium of Eastern North American Trees
A Magical Compendium of Eastern North American Trees offers an in-depth exploration of 35 trees and includes extensive details about their ecology, human uses, history, lore, traditional magical uses, and divination. Trees include commonly found trees such as Apple, Hawthorn, Oak, and Holly as well as many trees unique to North America such as Hickory, PawPaw, White Pine, Sassafras, and Maple. Through a detailed exploration of all aspects of the tree ecologically, socially, and magically, this book presents a complete North American tree-based divination and magical system. This book serves as the companion book to the TreeLore Oracle but can also be used as a standalone magical reference. For samples of the first few chapters of the book, see: the Magical Compendium of Eastern North American Trees Table of Contents, the TreeLore Oracle Meanings, and the Magical Compendium Sample Entries.
This book is in two sections: the first section offers an introduction (Chapter 1) and key aspects of using North American Sacred trees for divination (Chapter 2) and working with the trees magically (Chapter 3). The second part of the book forms the majority of the text and serves as a magical Materia Medica for 35 sacred trees: presenting full entries with research on their ecology, history, lore, traditional uses, and magical and divination meanings. Part II of this book also provides recipes, magic, rituals, celebrations, and other methods of direct work with each of these sacred trees.