The stone circle in these paintings exists, and you can walk it. Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary sits in the Allegheny Mountains of south-central Pennsylvania, and its circle has been under construction by hand since 1994: a contemporary sacred site raised by a living community rather than a Neolithic monument. Sophia Kelly Shultz first visited in 2005, started painting the stones, and kept painting for years. That grounding is what separates this deck from generic megalith imagery: the stones have names, positions, and people who put them there.
What you get
- 45 oracle cards
- 112-page combined guidebook and journal, with a meditation for each card and blank space to record your own readings
- Rigid box, 9 x 6 x 1.5"
- Weight 1.4 lb
- ISBN 9780764345500
- Sealed in publisher shrinkwrap
About the deck
Shultz built this to work the opposite way from a keyword deck. The written meditations are offered as one reading among several, and the design intent is that what you see in an image outranks what the artist meant by it. The journal exists so you can build your own interpretive record over time, which turns the set into a personal working document. A reader who wants fixed, authoritative card meanings will find the open-ended approach frustrating; this deck rewards people who journal and stalls for people who want an answer.
Imagery draws on several traditions alongside the circle itself, including ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, and Afro-Caribbean sources. The Afro-Caribbean cards depict orishas of the Lucumí and related diasporic religions, which are initiatory traditions with living priesthoods and their own protocols for who works with which spirit and how. Their presence here is Shultz's personal artistic synthesis rather than a devotional or lineage resource.
Provenance & tradition
Sophia Kelly Shultz is a Philadelphia-born painter with three decades of freelance work behind her, focused on spiritual and mythological subjects and on depictions of minerals. The paintings in this deck came out of repeated visits to Four Quarters beginning in 2005 and were developed over several years before Schiffer Publishing of Atglen, Pennsylvania released the set in December 2013.
Who this is for
Meditation practice more than divination. Journalers and anyone who keeps a written record of their readings. Readers who trust their own eye and dislike being told what a card means. Stone and megalith enthusiasts, and anyone drawn to modern sacred sites. Dream work. Practitioners in the mid-Atlantic who know Four Quarters or want to. Beginners who want to build interpretive confidence rather than memorize.
