The Wild Unknown Animal Spirit

The Wild Unknown Animal Spirit is a sixty three card oracle deck created and illustrated by Kim Krans, published by HarperOne in 2018 as a companion to her earlier Wild Unknown Tarot. Unlike that tarot deck, which follows the standard seventy eight card major and minor arcana structure, this companion deck drops the tarot format entirely, each card presents a single animal in Krans's spare, hand inked style, read as a guide to the qualities that animal represents rather than through any fixed suit or trump system. That shift from tarot's inherited structure to an open, oracle style card by card format reflects a broader move Krans made across her catalogue, extending the visual language that made her tarot deck successful into a format with no historical structure to depart from.

At sixty three cards, the deck sits below tarot's seventy eight but well above the forty four to fifty five card range typical of many other oracle decks, giving it room for a wider animal cast than a standard sized deck would allow. Read intuitively, one animal card drawn at a time, it keeps Krans's tarot deck's hand drawn aesthetic while trading that deck's suit and trump logic for the looser, single symbol structure common across the oracle genre.