Wild Unknown Tarot: Modern Intuitive Reading, Animal Archetypes & Nature-Based Symbolism

BY NICOLE LAU

In 2012, artist Kim Krans self-published a tarot deck that would go on to become one of the most beloved and widely used decks of the 21st century. The Wild Unknown Tarot did not follow the established conventions of the Rider-Waite tradition. It did not encode Kabbalistic correspondences or Hermetic philosophy. It did not attempt to restore a historical tradition. Instead, it did something more radical: it reimagined the entire tarot vocabulary through the lens of the natural world, replacing human figures with animals, plants, and celestial phenomena, and inviting readers into a fundamentally different relationship with the cards.

The result was a deck that resonated with a generation of practitioners who felt alienated by classical tarot imagery—and that introduced millions of new readers to tarot for the first time. This guide explores what makes the Wild Unknown Tarot distinctive, how to read it effectively, and how to build a genuine practice with this modern classic.

The Origins of Wild Unknown Tarot

Kim Krans: Artist, Author, Visionary

Kim Krans is a Brooklyn-based artist, author, and musician who created the Wild Unknown Tarot as a personal artistic project before recognizing its potential as a published deck. The original self-published version sold out rapidly through word of mouth, leading to a partnership with HarperOne that brought the deck to a global audience.

Krans's background is in fine art rather than occultism or esotericism. She approached tarot as an artist and intuitive rather than as a scholar of Western magical traditions. This perspective—bringing fresh eyes to an ancient system—is both the deck's greatest strength and the source of its most significant departures from traditional tarot.

The Wild Unknown Tarot is accompanied by The Wild Unknown Tarot Deck and Guidebook, Krans's companion text that provides her personal interpretations of each card. Unlike Waite's Pictorial Key or Crowley's Book of Thoth, Krans's guidebook is accessible, poetic, and deliberately non-dogmatic—it offers starting points rather than definitive meanings.

The Aesthetic: Black, White, and the Selective Use of Color

The Wild Unknown's visual language is immediately distinctive: black-and-white ink illustrations with selective color accents. Most cards are rendered in detailed pen-and-ink work, with color used sparingly and deliberately—a burst of rainbow light on The Star, the deep red of a rose on The Lovers, the golden sun on The Sun card.

This aesthetic choice has several effects on the reading experience:

• The high contrast of black and white creates strong visual impact and emotional immediacy
• The selective color draws the eye to specific symbolic elements within each card
• The overall palette feels simultaneously timeless and contemporary—neither the rich jewel tones of RWS nor the geometric complexity of Thoth
• The ink illustration style evokes natural history illustration, field guides, and folk art—connecting the deck to traditions of careful observation of the natural world

The Animal Archetypes: Wild Unknown's Core Innovation

The most significant departure from traditional tarot in the Wild Unknown is the replacement of human figures with animals in many of the Major Arcana cards. This is not arbitrary—each animal was chosen to embody the essential quality of its archetype:

Major Arcana Animal Correspondences

• The Fool: A chick hatching from an egg—pure potential, the moment of emergence, the beginning before experience
• The High Priestess: A white tiger—mystery, power held in stillness, the feminine principle in its most sovereign form
• The Empress: A hen with eggs—fertility, nurturing, the abundance of the natural world
• The Emperor: A ram—authority, stability, the masculine principle as protective structure
• The Hierophant: A bull—tradition, groundedness, the weight of accumulated wisdom
• The Chariot: A horse—directed will, momentum, the power of focused movement
• Strength: A snake—the integration of instinct and consciousness, the kundalini principle
• The Hermit: A rooster with a lantern—the inner light, solitary wisdom, the one who illuminates the path
• The Moon: A moth drawn to moonlight—the unconscious, illusion, the pull of what we cannot fully see
• The Sun: Two horses running free—joy, vitality, the exuberance of full expression
• The World: A snake eating its own tail (ouroboros)—completion, the eternal cycle, wholeness

These animal choices are not arbitrary substitutions—they are genuine reimaginings that often illuminate the archetype's essential quality more directly than the classical human imagery. The chick hatching from an egg captures The Fool's quality of pure potential more viscerally than the classical image of a young man about to step off a cliff.

The Minor Arcana: Nature as Symbolic Language

The Four Suits

The Wild Unknown uses the same four suits as the RWS tradition, with the same elemental correspondences:

• Wands: Branches—Fire, growth, creative energy, ambition
• Cups: Chalices—Water, emotion, relationship, the interior life
• Swords: Swords—Air, thought, conflict, truth, challenge
• Pentacles: Pentacles—Earth, material reality, body, practical matters

Pip Card Imagery

Unlike the Marseille tradition's abstract pip cards, the Wild Unknown's numbered Minor Arcana cards are illustrated—but with natural imagery rather than human scenes. The Three of Wands shows three branches growing from a single root. The Eight of Cups shows eight cups arranged in a geometric pattern with a crescent moon. The Five of Swords shows five swords crossed in a chaotic arrangement.

This approach is closer to the RWS tradition than to Marseille, but the absence of human figures changes the reading experience significantly. Without people to project onto, readers engage with the cards' elemental and energetic qualities more directly.

The Court Cards

The Wild Unknown court cards use the traditional RWS titles (Daughter/Page, Son/Knight, Mother/Queen, Father/King) and assign animals to each court position within each suit:

• Wands courts: Salamander (Daughter), Snake (Son), Lioness (Mother), Lion (Father)
• Cups courts: Swan (Daughter), Turtle (Son), Swan (Mother), Heron (Father)
• Swords courts: Bat (Daughter), Owl (Son), Cat (Mother), Owl (Father)
• Pentacles courts: Fawn (Daughter), Horse (Son), Doe (Mother), Stag (Father)

These animal assignments create a rich typological system that many readers find more immediately accessible than the classical human court card figures.

How to Read Wild Unknown Tarot: The Somatic Approach

The Wild Unknown Tarot invites a reading methodology that is fundamentally different from the analytical approaches of the Thoth tradition or the narrative approaches of RWS. Krans herself emphasizes a somatic, intuitive approach: feeling the cards rather than decoding them.

The Somatic Method

Before consulting any guidebook or memorized meaning, sit with the card and notice:

• What is your immediate physical response? Does the card feel expansive or contracting? Warm or cool? Heavy or light?
• What emotion arises? Not what emotion the card "should" evoke, but what you actually feel.
• What does the animal or natural element in the card communicate to you directly, before interpretation?
• Where in your body do you feel the card's energy?

This somatic approach is not anti-intellectual—it is a different kind of intelligence. The body often knows things that the analytical mind has not yet processed. The Wild Unknown's imagery is designed to bypass the interpretive layer and speak directly to this somatic knowing.

Intuitive Reading Without Memorization

The Wild Unknown is particularly well-suited for intuitive reading without memorized meanings. The animal and nature imagery communicates directly—a card showing a snake shedding its skin speaks of transformation and renewal without requiring any prior knowledge of tarot symbolism. This makes the deck genuinely accessible for beginners with strong intuitive tendencies.

Working with the Guidebook

Krans's guidebook is best used as a conversation partner rather than an authority. Read her interpretation after you have formed your own response to the card. Notice where your intuitive reading aligns with hers and where it diverges. Both are valid—the divergences are often the most interesting and personally relevant information.

Wild Unknown vs. Rider-Waite: Key Differences

Who Is Wild Unknown Tarot For?

The Wild Unknown Tarot is particularly resonant for:

• Nature-based practitioners: Those whose spirituality is rooted in animism, ecopsychology, earth-based traditions, or a deep relationship with the natural world
• Artists and creatives: The deck's aesthetic sensibility speaks directly to visual thinkers and makers
• Intuitive readers: Those who find classical tarot imagery too prescriptive and want more room for personal interpretation
• Practitioners alienated by classical imagery: Those who find the medieval European aesthetic of traditional tarot culturally distant or personally inaccessible
• Beginners with strong intuitive tendencies: The direct animal imagery provides an accessible entry point that doesn't require prior esoteric knowledge
• Advanced practitioners seeking a different perspective: Working with Wild Unknown after years of RWS practice can reveal aspects of the archetypes that classical imagery obscures

Building a Wild Unknown Practice: Practical Recommendations

The Wild Unknown Tarot rewards a practice that honors its somatic, intuitive nature. The most effective approach combines regular card pulls with journaling, nature connection, and a willingness to trust your own responses over received interpretations.

For practitioners building a structured daily practice, the 30-Day Tarot Practice Workbook provides a framework that works beautifully with Wild Unknown's intuitive approach. The daily pull and reflection structure is particularly valuable for Wild Unknown practitioners, who benefit from recording their somatic and intuitive responses before consulting any external interpretation.

Wild Unknown's nature-based symbolism connects naturally to lunar cycles and seasonal rhythms. Practitioners who want to deepen this connection will find 8 Moon Phase Tarot Rituals: Align Your Practice with Lunar Cycles a natural companion—the moon phase framework provides a temporal structure that honors Wild Unknown's nature-based aesthetic and amplifies the deck's connection to natural cycles.

For practitioners drawn to shadow work—exploring the darker, more challenging aspects of the psyche that the Wild Unknown's animal imagery often illuminates with particular directness—21 Shadow Work Tarot Spreads provides a comprehensive framework for this kind of deep inner work. The animal archetypes of Wild Unknown are especially powerful for shadow exploration, as animals carry our projections of instinct, wildness, and the aspects of ourselves we have been taught to suppress.

The practice of tarot journaling is central to Wild Unknown work. Recording your somatic responses, tracking which animals appear repeatedly in your readings, and noting how your relationship with specific cards evolves over time—this is the practice that transforms Wild Unknown from a beautiful deck into a genuine self-knowledge tool. The High Priestess Tarot Journal provides a dedicated space for this ongoing practice documentation.

Wild Unknown and the Future of Tarot

The Wild Unknown Tarot's extraordinary success—it has sold millions of copies and inspired countless derivative decks—reflects something important about where tarot is going. The tradition is expanding beyond its European, Hermetic roots to incorporate a wider range of symbolic vocabularies: nature-based, indigenous, animist, contemporary.

This expansion is not a dilution of tarot's depth. It is an expression of tarot's fundamental nature as a system that can encode any symbolic vocabulary into its 78-card structure. The archetypes that Pamela Colman Smith painted as medieval European figures, that Lady Frieda Harris rendered in projective geometry, that Kim Krans reimagined as animals and plants—these are the same archetypes. The symbolic language changes. The underlying constants do not.

The Wild Unknown Tarot is, in this sense, a demonstration of tarot's essential resilience: its ability to speak across cultures, aesthetics, and symbolic traditions while remaining recognizably itself. Kim Krans painted a chick hatching from an egg and called it The Fool. Five centuries of tarot practitioners would recognize it immediately. That recognition is the measure of the tradition's depth—and the Wild Unknown's genuine contribution to it. For those drawn to this kind of deep, intuitive work, the 30-Day Tarot Practice Workbook offers a way to integrate daily reflection, while the 13 New Moon Rituals aligns beautifully with the lunar themes woven through the deck. The Tarot Journaling Prompts provide endless questions to guide the kind of somatic and intuitive exploration the Wild Unknown invites, and the 52-Week Tarot Journey offers a year-long structure for deepening that personal relationship with the archetypes. For shadow work specifically, the Shadow Work Tarot guidebook provides a natural extension of the animal archetypes into the terrain of the unconscious.