A Wheel of the Year Grown From an Earlier Greenwood Deck

The Wildwood Tarot, evolved from the earlier Greenwood Tarot, was created by Mark Ryan and John Matthews with artwork by Will Worthington and published by Sterling in 2011. It reworks the tarot's Rider Waite Smith derived structure into a pre Christian British woodland setting, renaming the four suits Arrows, Bows, Vessels and Stones in place of Wands, Swords, Cups and Pentacles, and draws on British folklore and seasonal myth built around its own mythic cycle of the Green Man and the Wheel of the Year, the eightfold cycle of seasonal festivals that structures much of modern British folk and Pagan practice.

Growing out of an earlier deck rather than starting from nothing gives The Wildwood Tarot a documented lineage within its own genre, evolving the Greenwood Tarot's woodland themes into a more fully developed Wheel of the Year framework across the same standard seventy eight card count. Read upright only, without reversed meanings, it keeps the traditional Major and Minor Arcana structure Worthington and his collaborators inherited from the Rider Waite Smith tradition while replacing every one of its suit names and setting, showing how thoroughly a deck can rename and re theme the tarot while still keeping the underlying twenty two and fifty six card framework intact.