The artwork is photographic. Franklin built these images from staged photography of costumed models composited with landscape and animal photography, so the gods look like people you might meet at a moot rather than like painted archetypes. This style divides readers; some find the human faces immediate and grounding, and some want painted abstraction and will bounce off this hard. The cards run oversized against a standard playing-card deck, which suits the imagery and makes them a stretch for small hands and for one-handed shuffling.
What you get
- 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana in Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentacles
- Full-color guidebook with upright and reversed meanings for every card
- Meditations, pathworkings, and ritual material in the guidebook
- Ribbon-hinged rigid box
- Card size larger than standard
- Weight 1.92 lb
- ISBN 9780764349003
- Sealed in publisher shrinkwrap
About the deck
Structurally this is a Rider-Waite-Smith deck. The Majors run in the familiar order, the four suits carry the standard elemental attributions, and a reader trained on RWS can pick it up and work immediately without relearning anything. What sits on top of that structure is the pagan material: each card carries gods and goddesses drawn from several pantheons, and the guidebook uses their myths to link cards to each other and to tie the Majors to the Minors.
The Wheel of the Year is built into the court cards. Franklin links queens and princesses to the seasonal festivals, which makes the deck genuinely useful for sabbat work and for reading a question against where you actually are in the year. If you run a seasonal practice, that structure will do more for you than the art will.
The deities are eclectic rather than reconstructionist, gathered across traditions in the general-pagan and British witchcraft frame Franklin works in. Readers who practice inside one specific tradition — Norse, Hellenic, Kemetic — should expect the pantheon assignments to be Franklin's synthesis rather than a lore-sourced correspondence set.
Provenance & tradition
Anna Franklin is a British Pagan priestess, High Priestess of the Hearth of Arianrhod, and a long-published author on witchcraft, herbcraft, and the Wheel of the Year. She created the Sacred Circle Tarot and the Fairy Ring Oracle before this one, so the deck comes out of two decades of deck-building rather than a first attempt. Published by Schiffer Publishing of Atglen, Pennsylvania in 2015 under the Red Feather Mind Body Spirit imprint.
Who this is for
Pagans and witches who want a deck that speaks their own vocabulary back to them. Wheel of the Year practitioners and sabbat celebrants. RWS-trained readers who want familiar structure with different content. Beginners, since the guidebook gives upright and reversed meanings plainly and does not assume prior study. Anyone who works with deity cards, pathworking, or meditation from a drawn card. Coven and study-group use.
