Today, to usher in the beginning of Fall on this side of the world, I’m rehashing an old blog post from 2018! September and October are mine and Tim’s favourite months. They have such a unique feeling, not to mention the weather and natural landscapes are so beautiful.

Around this time, I also engage with my practice a little differently, and as such, tend to use different decks. In this post, I’ll be sharing decks from our personal collection that I love to use this time of year; ones that have a bit of a dark, spooky or shadowy vibe.

We don’t do a huge number of deck spotlights on this site, however I couldn’t not write about the final deck in the Wild Unknown Series, Alchemy, by visionary artist Kim Krans.

And even though we’ll be talking about the deck at length, I wouldn’t regard this article as a review in any way. These will be mine and Tim’s personal thoughts, ideas on how we plan to work with the cards, and any stirrings that come from our initial impressions. We are huge fans of The Wild Unknown series and regard both the Archetypes and Animal Spirit oracle as some of our most loved and most used decks. When we caught wind of this newest installation, we were extremely excited to get our hands on it, and even more thrilled that it overtly tackles alchemy; a subject that underpins much of our work, conversations and contemplations, especially as of late.

A year ago I made a post comparing the Wisdom of the Oracle cards to tarot cards as a way to better commit them to my memory bank. It worked well and I know that article has reached plenty of people, so I challenged myself to do the same with the Animal Spirit oracle.

I do this because as many of you know, I’m a much bigger fan of tarot than I am of oracle. And while I think these oracle decks can completely stand on their own and need no association to be used thoroughly, I can’t help but always look at things (oracle or otherwise) through a tarot-centric lens.

So please honour the deck as it was intended, but also use some of this insight to help you further understand and assimilate those meanings!

I also want to note that I am absolutely in LOVE with the animal spirit oracle deck by Kim Krans - author of the Wild Unknown. And I’ll even go on record to say that I avoided this deck for a long time because I didn’t actually think we’d get along. It was only one day when I was itching for a new deck and found myself in Indigo that I reached for the package and let’s just say, I’ve basically not put it down since.

And with that, let me share with you how I’ve compared each card. Perhaps if you’re more familiar with this deck than you are with tarot, this list may even help you understand tarot cards in a new way! Some of the associations were very obvious to me and some of them took some flexing on my part. Have a look after the cut and see what you think!