The Wild Unknown and The Animal Spirit Oracle

Did you read the article about how to play beat the devil with a tarot deck? If you did, then you can now go one step further and bring a companion deck into the gamed reading. The companion deck is used to count the points you will gain during the gamed reading.

After that, I showed you how to beat the devil with a tarot deck. This was done without using a companion deck, your fortune came from the pile of cards.

In this article, I will show how to have a more complex reading with both these methods. We will use what we know about the game beat the devil and use both a tarot deck and another deck to cast a fortune.

Choosing a Companion deck

The companion deck can be whatever you choose, another tarot deck, an oracle deck, or a playing card deck. The deck is used only for drawing a single card at a time. This is to keep score of how many matches beyond three you get in a reading.

Whatever deck you choose as the companion make sure it is different from the one you are reading with it. For example, lets say you choose a Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck to perform the gamed reading. It could be nice to have Crowley’s Thoth deck as your companion deck. It can be anything, but make sure that both tarot decks have distinct differences.

For this reading method, I chose the Wild Unknown Tarot and the Animal Spirit oracle both by Kim Krans. The cards are the same size, have similar designs on the back, and the artwork is consistent between the two. While they have similarities, the two decks are very different from each other. This makes for a great combination of decks to use for this reading method.

Counting the Cards

Use the rules in beat the Beat the Devil With The Wild Unknown to draw out the entire tarot deck. When all the cards have been used count each pile at the end. You will read from the pile with the most cards. If there are two piles with the same amount of cards, the one with the most major arcana cards is the one you will read from. Now tally up the companion cards to see your score. Take note of the ratio between both sets of cards. The ratio will also help you uncover hidden meaning in the cards as you read them.

TERMINOLOGY CHECK: the cards you got from your tarot and the companion decks are both called devil points. The devil points from your tarot will form devil path 1 and the points from your companion will form devil path 2.

Reading the Devil Points

Place your devil points in the order they appeared to make devil path 1. Now place the devil points from your companion deck in the order they appeared to form devil path 2. These will look like two horizontal lines with path 2 over top of path 1. In some cases your space may not be big enough to accommodate a horizontal line. In these cases arrange the cards in such a way to preserve their order.

This picture depicts the original order of devil path 1 and 2 from a reading 2 mentioned bellow.

The ratio of tarot to companion cards will be important now. If you have an equal amount of points you will be able to see vertical relationships between both paths. Reading space will be important for looking at both paths. If you have to break up the cards make sure you can see their original order.

Read the cards from left to right in devils path 1. Each card in path 1 represents a situation, something you need to know, hidden challenges to overcome, or an event to work through to get to your answer.

Now read the cards in devils path 2. Each card represents how to handle each devil point from devil path 1. This acts as a way to clarify and create deeper meaning with the first path.

In the picture above path 1 is on the bottom and path 2 is on the top. It looks I only got 4 points from the reading.

If you have an imbalance of points then you only have clarification from the points that line up. Not every reading will have a balance of cards. This creates a unique opportunity to use your intuition with the cards you do have.

Use the above structure as a guide to read the cards. In the end there is no wrong way to read the cards.

Creating Deeper Complexities

At this point, you can create deep complexities with these two sets of cards. Because Kim Krans Animal Spirit oracle deck have elemental designations built into the card design, one could explore elemental dignities. Benebell Wen has a great pdf that explains how to work with elemental dignities here.

Examples of Reading Data

I performed some readings with this method and Krans’ decks. I want to show you how the data can look afterward and what sort of point ratio you can expect to see.

November 4, 2019 – The question to the oracle: dear oracle give me an example of a good reading using this method.

Reading 1

Reading 2

Reading 3

Reading 4

Reading 5

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The Wild Unknown Card images courtesy of The Wild Unknown

Resources

How Tarot Cards Work

Your Path to Tarot