I like to play with the idea of creating an oracle based on collages made for an occasion. When my partner turned 64, I made a Van Morrison Oracle in the spirit of Mlle Lenormand.

I put together 36 album covers and let their prophetic titles speak. As my partner knows every Van Morrison song by heart, he got a lot out of it. As soon as three cards hit the table, Van the Man got very oracular in the company of a true fan.

While this deck is not a commercial deck, as only my partner got a cut, I can read with it in quite efficient ways in spite of my complete ignorance of all things Van Morrison. While I can appreciate his musical genius, I’m a classical music devotee. And yet, when I went to a Van Morrison concert in Belfast in 2017, I was so moved by his drummer, Bobby Ruggiero, that I ended up writing a prose poem about his performance. As this text was shared on my social media, somehow Ruggiero stumbled over it and praised it highly. He said: ‘thank you for getting what I’m trying to do.’ It goes to show… Now this prose poem is part of my book of photographs and fragments, Being Besides Myself.

Book a reading with this fun oracle here, or read about the Drummer’s Gate below.