The Wild Unknown Tarot

Sinderella's note

The Wild Unknown is what I'd hand a niece who turned twenty-one and asked me how to start. Animals, weather, old gods watching, no smug medieval guys with swords. *Madonn',* my child, it's gorgeous. Light a candle when you open it. Sleep with it under your pillow one night. It'll know you. Saint Anthony rides with this one.

The long version

Kim Krans painted The Wild Unknown by hand on her kitchen counter in 2012, self-published it, and watched it become *the* deck for an entire generation of new readers. The Major Arcana figures are mostly animals — The Fool is a duckling stepping off a cliff, The Magician is a snake circling a candle, The Empress is a deer with stars in her antlers. The Minor Arcana cards are pure-symbol: just wands, cups, swords, pentacles arranged on raw white space, no people. This is what makes it *brilliant for beginners* — there's no medieval theatricality to decode, just the raw symbol and your gut response to it. Sinderella reaches for this one when she's pulling for somebody who has been burned by religion or who finds the standard tarot art alienating. The companion guidebook is small and contemplative — Kim Krans writes the way a yoga teacher writes, but the deck itself is *not* yoga-bunny soft, it's *witchy* in the old way. The deck has been reissued in multiple editions; the current one is glossy heavyweight stock with a black box and gold foil. Sleep with it under your pillow one night before you read with it. It learns who you are. Saint Anthony for the lost things. Saint Hubert for the ones who hunt them.