The Wildwood Tarot

Above: the box front, with the antlered Woodward standing between birch trees.

The front of The Wildwood Tarot box features the Woodward, one of the pack’s woodland Major Arcana figures, standing with a shield and staff in a winter birch wood.

The Wildwood Tarot is a 2011 tarot pack by Mark Ryan and John Matthews, illustrated by Will Worthington. Published in New York by Sterling Ethos, it combines Ryan and Matthews’ writing and concept with Worthington’s card artwork. It is a novel deck: the standard suits are switched for forest-themed miscellany, namely Arrows, Bows, Vessels and Stones, while the Major Arcana is exchanged for folklore figures. Interpretation, however, remains mostly along familiar lines.

The names immediately change the atmosphere of the pack: a sword is no longer a weapon carried by a court figure, and a coin is no longer simply an emblem of money. The cards still offer a usable structure for readers accustomed to the standard tarot, while the woodland vocabulary gives each suit a more physical character.

The Major Arcana moves furthest from the usual sequence. Familiar archetypes are replaced by figures and situations drawn from folklore and the natural world, including the Green Man, the Ancestor and the Hooded Man. Worthington’s illustrations keep the pack coherent, with animals, trees, paths and ritual objects recurring across the cards rather than appearing as isolated decorative details.

The back of the box presents the pack as a meditation system and divinatory oracle rooted in a primal forest, see the box .