Divination: The Chakra Wisdom Oracle Cards by Tori Hartman

 

Chakra Wisdom Oracle Cards

Tori Hartman

The Chakra Wisdom Oracle Cards by Tori Hartman are a 49-card oracle deck that combines chakra symbolism, colour, intuitive divination and short spiritual fables. It is quite different from a conventional tarot deck: rather than using a fixed symbolic system such as the Major and Minor Arcana, the cards concentrate on emotional patterns, personal transformation, spiritual lessons and the energies surrounding a situation. 

The deck was originally developed from Hartman’s experiences following a near-death experience. She describes receiving a series of colourful fables from angelic or spiritual beings, eventually associating the stories with the seven principal chakras. The original cards were independently released as Color Wisdom Cards in 2010 before becoming the Chakra Wisdom Oracle. 

The 49-card structure

There are 49 cards — seven groups of seven, corresponding to the seven principal chakras.

The chakra association isn’t simply decorative. Colour is one of the fundamental interpretive principles of the system, with each fable and card carrying its own colour energy. 

The Fables

One of the most unusual aspects of the deck is its use of fables.

Rather than simply giving a keyword such as Love, Change or Abundance, each card represents a story containing a particular psychological or spiritual lesson. Hartman says the original stories were revealed to her by angels in association with colours. There are 49 original fables in total. 

Some of the card themes include:

• Renewal
• Soulmate
• Perfection
• Complacency
• Insecurity
• Discovery
• Acceptance
• Guilt
• Grief
• Mysticism
• Facade
• Destiny
• Quest
• Enlightenment

This gives the deck a somewhat psychological and initiatory character. A card isn’t necessarily saying “this event will happen”; instead, it can ask “What is this experience trying to teach you?”

The Seven Aspects

A particularly interesting feature for an experienced tarot or oracle reader is Hartman’s Seven Aspects approach.

A card can be explored through different layers, including:

1. The Journey / Life Lesson
2. What has been inherited
3. What is happening now
4. The journey ahead
5. The Darkness
6. The Dawn
7. The Light

This makes a single card considerably more versatile than its keyword might initially suggest. 

For example, a card associated with Guilt needn’t simply mean “you feel guilty.”Depending upon the position, it might suggest inherited guilt, a current pattern, the shadow aspect of guilt, or the possibility of moving beyond it.

How the deck is used

The accompanying guidebook gives instructions for one-card readings, intention-setting spreads and more elaborate chakra-based layouts. 

A simple reading might be:

Question: What do I need to understand today?

Draw one card and consider:

Card → Colour → Chakra → Fable → Personal reaction

The important part is that Hartman’s system encourages the reader to pay attention to their own intuitive response rather than treating the guidebook as an absolute definition.

This makes it particularly useful for:

• meditation
• journalling
• shadow work
• identifying emotional patterns
• intention-setting
• spiritual development
• chakra meditation
• personal transformation
• intuitive development
• complementing tarot readings

Chakra Wisdom Oracle and tarot

For someone already interested in tarot, I think this deck is particularly interesting as a companion rather than a replacement for tarot.

Tarot tends to provide a complex symbolic language involving archetypes, numbers, elements, astrology and suits. The Chakra Wisdom Oracle is more immediately emotional and introspective.

You could therefore use them together.

For example:

Tarot: What is happening?

Chakra Wisdom Oracle: What is the deeper emotional lesson?

Chakra: Where am I energetically blocked or challenged?

Fable: What story am I living out?

This can produce a remarkably layered reading.

The spiritual philosophy behind the deck

Hartman’s approach is essentially one of transformation through awareness.

Rather than regarding difficult experiences simply as negative, the system encourages the reader to ask what lies beneath them. A blockage, fear, relationship difficulty or recurring emotional pattern can become a doorway into self-knowledge.

That philosophy is expressed particularly strongly in Hartman’s current teaching, where she describes apparent “blocks” as potentially containing overlooked guidance. 

There is consequently an interesting connection between this oracle system and modern psychological approaches to shadow work: the difficult part of ourselves isn’t necessarily something to destroy; it may contain information about what needs attention.

A deck for intuitive readers

One thing I particularly like about the Chakra Wisdom Oracle is that it doesn’t require you to be an expert in chakras before you begin.

The chakra framework provides the underlying structure, but the fables make the cards accessible. You can read them literally, psychologically, spiritually or intuitively.

For a witchcraft or Wiccan practitioner, they could also be incorporated into ritual work. A card could be drawn during a full-moon reflection, healing ritual, meditation, sabbat working or divination session, and the corresponding colour and chakra could then be incorporated into the ritual.

It is worth remembering, however, that the chakra system itself originates in Indian religious and philosophical traditions, while Hartman’s particular seven-chakra oracle system is a modern Western esoteric interpretation, rather than an ancient Hindu divination system.

Companion books

Hartman has also produced a more detailed book, Chakra Wisdom Oracle: How to Read the Cards for Yourself and Others. It expands considerably upon the basic guidebook and explains the Seven Aspects, intuition, personalised spreads and reading for other people. 

There is also a 52-week Chakra Wisdom Oracle Toolkit, which takes readers through the 49 fables as a structured programme involving intention-setting, colour work, journalling, exercises and meditation. 

Overall impression

The Chakra Wisdom Oracle is best thought of as a self-discovery and transformational oracle rather than a straightforward fortune-telling deck.

Its most distinctive qualities are:

49 cards → 7 chakras → 7 colours → 49 fables → multiple layers of interpretation.

The combination of colour magic, chakra symbolism, storytelling and intuitive divination makes it quite unusual among oracle decks.

For someone interested in tarot, witchcraft, crystals, energy work and spiritual symbolism, it offers an interesting bridge between divination and personal development. It can be used to ask not merely “What is going to happen?” but the much more interesting magical question:

“What is this experience trying to teach me, and what can I transform through understanding it?”

The deck is readily available from most sources including:

https://www.hengeshop.com/products/chakra-wisdom-oracle-cards-by-tori-hartman

About Tori Hartman

Tori Hartman is an American intuitive, spiritual teacher, author and creator of the Chakra Wisdom Oracle system. Her work sits at the intersection of oracle cards, chakra philosophy, colour symbolism, intuition and personal transformation. She is particularly known for turning a collection of spiritual stories she says she received following a near-death experience into the Chakra Wisdom Oracle Cards. 

Her early experiences

Hartman says that she became aware of her intuitive abilities when she was very young. She grew up in Greenwich Village, New York, during the 1960s, in a highly creative environment. Her mother was interested in astrology and supported Hartman’s unusual experiences. Hartman describes having psychic impressions and experiences with spirits from childhood. 

One of the stories she tells about being eight concerns her apparently knowing that her father was going to receive a cheque for $308, despite there being no apparent reason for her to know this. She regards experiences such as this as early evidence of her intuitive abilities. 

The near-death experience

The pivotal event in Hartman’s spiritual life occurred in her early twenties, when she experienced what she describes as a near-death experience.

Following it, she says she began having encounters with angelic or spiritual beings who communicated a series of brightly coloured stories or fables to her. She wrote these down, sometimes in the middle of the night on whatever paper happened to be available. The stories subsequently became the foundation of the Chakra Wisdom system. 

This is important because Hartman doesn’t present the cards as something she simply designed intellectually. She sees herself as having received the original material intuitively and then developed it into a divination system.

The stories remained in a drawer for more than a decade before eventually becoming the basis for her cards. 

Creating the Chakra Wisdom Oracle

In 2010 Hartman took the considerable risk of self-publishing the first edition of her oracle deck. According to her account, she invested her entire life savings in producing it. The cards initially circulated independently, eventually attracting enough attention for Watkins Publishing in London to publish the deck commercially in 2014. 

The system consists of 49 cards organised around the seven principal chakras, with colour and emotional themes forming an important part of the interpretation.

The fascinating part is that the cards originated from the fables, rather than the other way around. The stories were the original spiritual material; the cards became a means of accessing and interpreting those stories.

Her approach to intuition

One of Hartman’s strongest ideas is that oracle cards shouldn’t replace intuition.

She argues that learning card meanings mechanically isn’t really the point. Instead, the cards should help people develop the ability to interpret symbols and recognise their own intuitive responses. In an interview, she compared intuitive reading to learning a language: the card provides the vocabulary, but the reader needs to learn how to “speak” it. 

This makes her approach rather different from simply opening a guidebook and looking up a definition.

Her philosophy is essentially:

The cards don’t contain your answers — they help you uncover the answers that are already within you.

Her present teaching continues to emphasise intuition, card-reading skills and discovering what she calls the guidance hidden inside our apparent “blocks.” 

Shadow and healing

Another particularly interesting aspect of Hartman’s philosophy is that she doesn’t divide cards neatly into “good” and “bad”.

A difficult card may represent something uncomfortable that nevertheless contains valuable information. Hartman has spoken about changing the way people perceive experiences such as abandonment, guilt or insecurity so that they can discover another possible interpretation of what happened to them. 

This gives the Chakra Wisdom system a strong shadow-work dimension.

Rather than saying:

“This is negative energy; get rid of it,”

the approach is closer to:

“What is this experience showing me?”

That makes her work particularly compatible with modern forms of spiritual psychology and introspective witchcraft.

Her books and teachings

Hartman’s principal publications include:

• Chakra Wisdom Oracle Cards
• Chakra Wisdom Oracle Toolkit
• Chakra Wisdom Oracle: How to Read the Cards for Yourself and Others
• Chakras: A Start Here Guide for Beginners
• Ultimate Energy: Using Your Natural Energies to Balance Body, Mind, and Spirit — written with Eliza Swann and Kris Ferraro. 

Her Chakra Wisdom Oracle Toolkit is particularly significant because it restores the full fables behind the cards. Hartman has explained that when Watkins published the deck, the longer stories had to be shortened in the accompanying booklet. Readers subsequently found that studying the complete fables gave them a much deeper understanding of the system, leading to the Toolkit. 

Hartman and tarot

There’s also an interesting connection with your previous question about the Chakra Wisdom Oracle.

Hartman has been a tarot practitioner herself, and she has described learning tarot from teachers who encouraged her to look at the imagery and interpret what she saw rather than simply memorising meanings. 

She has subsequently taken the Chakra Wisdom philosophy into the tarot tradition with Chakra Wisdom Tarot, a 78-card tarot deck that applies her seven-chakra framework to the traditional tarot structure. Her official site describes it as combining the traditional 78-card system with her ideas about intention, personal growth and intuition. 

So there’s a nice progression:

Tarot → intuition → chakras → colour → fables → oracle → back to tarot.

Her work with clients and public figures

Hartman has also worked as a professional intuitive outside the world of cards. Her biography states that she has worked with people in the entertainment industry, including Jeff Lewis, and has been featured in publications including the New York Times and Los Angeles Business Journal. 

She has also developed Life Purpose Divination, a system intended to help people distinguish intuitive guidance from ordinary mental thought and explore their sense of purpose. 

What makes Tori Hartman distinctive?

I’d say Hartman’s particular contribution to modern oracle practice is her emphasis on the story behind the symbol.

Many oracle decks give you:

Card → keyword → interpretation.

Hartman’s system is more like:

Colour → chakra → fable → emotional pattern → intuition → transformation.

That makes her work especially interesting if you enjoy tarot, crystals, colour magic, chakras, shadow work and witchcraft, because the cards can be approached not merely as fortune-telling but as a tool for meditation and spiritual self-examination.

And perhaps the most important idea running through her work is that the “problem” may actually contain the wisdom needed to resolve it. That idea is central to the way she currently teaches her Chakra Wisdom system. 

https://www.torihartman.com/about/