Cupid Cards: The Oracle of Love (Paperback)

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Review

When he was well into his nineties, my great-grandfather still kept a picture of his wife by his bed and I remember him telling me that he really didn't mind dying because he knew he'd be reunited with my great-grandmother. They'd been married over half a century and when I was a child, they were my role models for the kind of rock-solid commitment I believed marriage demanded. With Valentine's Day fast approaching, it's a time to look at love in all it's glory, splendor, and yes, disappointment.

"Who do you love?" one rock group demanded in the Sixties. "All you need is love," another responded. "Love is what makes the world go round." An endless round of cliches circle the topic, yet it remains a mystery. In spite of all the confusion, love seems to be the one thing we all need most and understand least.

In an attempt to make order out of the confusion of love and to share their secrets of successful love, Monte Farber and Amy Zerner have created a new tool in the quest for love: Cupid Cards.

"The first question people always ask is about love," Monte, who has been a professional astrologer for over fifteen years says. "We created Cupid Cards in response to questions about love."

The thirty-six cards and compendium volume of instructions took months and months of thought and modification. "It started out as Valentine angels and fairies," Amy says of the creative process, "then it got deeper and deeper." "We don't let anything out of this house unless it works," Monte adds. The couple already holds to their credit Karma Cards, The Enchanted Tarot and Psychic Circle, among the items they term "spiritual power tools."

Cupid Cards consists of a deck of thirty-six cards and an illustrated instruction booklet as a sort of guide into the mysteries of the heart. You pose a question and then you shuffle the cards in three piles, sorted by color and then flip over the top cards and read the results. It's really much more simple than reading Tarot cards which requires a knowledge of the significance of each card or at least a text describing their meanings. You simply read the cards.

I did a sample reading at home and got the following results: The Lover Communicates Partnership. That is the heading in answer to my questions. Next the cards tell me that I am surrounded by possibilities for pleasure. I must say, I liked that idea. Then they advised me to "share my thoughts" and to "work with another to reach all goals." It may sound cryptic to you, but it makes perfect sense to me.

Listening to Monte and Amy describe what they have learned about love in over twenty years of marriage, helps explain why this tool which could simply be another parlor game can be of value to others. "This was more of a struggle than our other books," Amy admits. "But love isn't smooth sailing all the time. It's about finding out who you really are."

"The basic premise of Cupid Cards is that if you're going to bring love into your life," Monte maintains, "you're going to do it. Cupid Cards has every secret for what has helped us have a happy relationship all these years."

"It's about empowerment," Amy adds. "A lot of it is putting the responsibility back on the person."

"These are the real issues of love," Monte believes, "not the stuff about what color lipstick you should wear."

"It's about forgiveness, about letting go," Amy says. "The oracle helps you look within. If you really want love you have to work on yourself."

"Amy really is the oracle of love," Monte contends.

"No, you're the oracle of love," she counters.

While who is the love oracle may be at question, who does what in their creative enterprise is not. Amy creates the art work. Monte creates the words. In the case of Cupid Cards Amy created thirty-six collages depicting images of love and relationship which the two of them laid around the floor of their East Hampton studio and proceeded to name. The Warrior. The Healer. The Lover. The Friend. Amy's mother Jessie created borders for the images and Monte went to work on the text, creating no less than thirty-six original poems to match the images.

Asked why people are so confused in issues of love these days and so needing help in this area, Monte first cited astrological reasons. Pluto is in Sagittarius and Uranus is in Aquarius which he said means that everybody is looking for something new. "People who have compromised in the past are being called on to express their originality," he said.

But there is more. "The media and society stress the superficial," Amy added. "To find your own truth, you have to search for it. To really find out who you are it takes a lot of work and once you are being who you really are, then you can look around and find what you want in a partner."

But that doesn't happen overnight. "We have brought the idealism of our youth into this time period and we've proven to ourselves that we weren't wrong," Monte says. "It takes longer than some of us thought, but it does happen. Spirituality is practical on a financial level, on an emotional level, on a romantic level."

"Love is the only answer," Amy concludes. "We want other people to have it in their lives, too." -- Dan's Papers, Feb. 1995

Product Description

The oracle that guides you to your soul-mate and beyond: 36 full-color cards guide you to love using symbolic art and poetry. 128 page book reveals the secrets of finding and keeping your soul-mate.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Studio (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670857475
• ISBN-13: 978-0670857470
• Product Dimensions: 12.1 x 8.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,872,851 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Tarot, but still good, April 26, 2000

By	Sarah (USA) - See all my reviews

I am an avid tarot reader and I thought these cards would be similar; they're not. Three decks of 12 cards are included, an amythest deck, a red deck and a turquoise deck. The querent draws one card from each deck and reads across, for example, 'The Lover' 'Loves' 'Self-Esteem' was the first reading I did. The book is helpful in interpreting the cards; the words on the cards are not that helpful, but after becoming familiar with the book and the meanings, it makes sense. This is NOT a Tarot deck, but cards to be used for relationship questions.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cupid Cards Help Attract Love, August 2, 2002

By	"faemoon" (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

The Cupid Cards are an Oracle deck consisting of 36 cards divided into 3 sections of 12 cards: Amethyst, Ruby, and Turquoise. Unlike most decks, the artwork is designed to be face up all of the time, while the backs are only seen after the individual cards have been chosen.

The Amethyst deck is comprised of personalities, such as The Storyteller, The Worker, The Jeweler, etc. The Ruby deck features actions like Creates, Communicates, Worries About, etc. And, the Turquoise deck pinpoints personality nouns like Truth, Self-Esteem, or Isolation, and so on. It is clever how the titles of the cards make a sentence when read from left to right: The Storyteller Communicates Truth, as an example. Right from the beginning you have a basic answer to your question. The included book contains detailed information about the cards as well as how the reading relates to your life or situation.

I purchased my deck specifically for the lovely artwork by Amy Zerner. However, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that the readings from this Oracle are serious, not fluffy, and can help delve into the psyche to find out why we resist love, the very thing we crave. While this deck was designed to help concentrate on finding true love, it has a lot of valuable information for living each and every day to the fullest.