Ana Cortez and her father, C.J. Freeman, created the Playing Card Oracles together. Their decades of work began when C.J. began intuitively painting the 52-card deck to find startling and unusual imagery coming through. He then began writing stories for the characters and researching playing card history to find clues to what was appearing. His daughter became involved initially in the early 80's and together they completed the book around 2002. C.J. drew and painted Oracle images for the 52-card deck for nearly 30 years, to complete a very large body of original and provoking work. The image on the cover of the book came from a lucid dream conversation with "The Oracle" shortly before publication.