Playing with the Wildwood Tarot which I got in a trade with a friend where we both swapped decks we just couldn’t read with. I like it so far, but am reading with it intuitively and won’t touch the book. I find reading a book first can make one dependent on it instead of knowing and trusting the cards. I find the more decks Will Worthington does, the less cartoony his people become, but it’s plants, trees, and animals where he really shines. It’s not as wonderful and visceral as the original Greenwood Tarot, but it’s close and the primal shamanic-forest symbolism really speaks to me.
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I think this post has given me a breakthrough. I never thought to read cards solely on intuition. For years I have been unable to seriously remember card meanings – I’ve been putting it up to the fact that I am a full-time student and spend so much of my time memorizing other facts and meanings, when it comes time to study something for ‘fun’ it doesn’t stick. I have always had the idea that you use a combination of intuition and established meanings, but I never thought about only intuition. I occasionally do simple 3-card Major arcana readings – even with the cards whose meanings I do know I still find myself flipping through the book, usually to confirm my feeling or to confuse me because it says something contrary to my first reaction. And with a deck so rich in beautiful art, such as the one pictured, and especially for doing readings for yourself – intuition is the way to go. I have some visions to see. THANK YOU for everything you share here.
I adore deck swapping (I own about 15 now, some just for show, some I have no idea where they come from so I’m always looking to unload lol). My Morgan Greer and my Klimt deck are my babies though. Do you own any golden decks?
Nice to see someone else who doesn’t read by the book… sometimes the book simply doesn’t match the cards (and I wonder if the artist and the theme writer for the cards get seriously disconnected).
Hmm, thank you for this subject and photos. I loved the content of the Greenwood Tarot (this is when it first came out, so I am now well and truly ‘Dated’!). But found the print qualities of the images to be rather dull, coarse, and pastel. I fell for the Celtic Tree Oracle (I think that was what it was called) at about the same time, and felt the same about the image quality on that deck too.
I had a dream, I would find some commercial source to scan both decks (before digital-cameras were common), I would photoshop the crap out of them, cleaning up the lines and brightening the colours. Then amalgamate the decks with a common back, and do a one-off printing at photo-quality for myself… Never got to it, and when I did have time, they were long out of print. (When I got a bit serious, I checked the price$ for the used decks on e-Bay, and that finished that fantasy!!)
My dream was mostly ego, I think. At the time I was using a 111 card oracular deck, and I could never afford an illustrated deck of it, they were very rare, all hand-painted, the expensive antique ones on flats of ivory or starched silk, the ‘cheaper’ ones on bamboo veneer. So the deck I was using was just blank white file-cards with hand-written descriptions on one side. Worked just fine, LOL.
This one you show, the Wildwood, looks like it has possibilities. Of what I see of it, it *sings. I am going to look for it.
Blessings,
Robert
I love the Wildwood Tarot. Of all the decks I’ve owned (and found I couldn’t read with) the Wildwood seems to be the best for me as the art, the theme behind the suits and major cards and other things work really well for me. I like the fact that its naturey but not….flowery? Blessings.
I don’t know either the Greenwood or the Wildwood tarot sets and they are beautiful — ‘visceral’ as you say.
Um, I now have one of the Wildwood, And had some amazing results with it.
An unbelievable spread with *all Majors. And the reading nailed the situation to the wall.
Now a little bit shocked and awed.
Those cards look beautiful! I’m still pretty new to tarot in general so tend to read the book meaning and try to intuit what the cards mean to me. (I draw a card a day as a way to learn and familiarize myself with my new deck–Tarot of the Vampyre~)
These cards are really lovely