Show notes
This week, the Tarot Podcast brings you one of the best-selling tarot decks of all time: the Wildwood Tarot. Creators Mark Ryan and John Matthews joined me to discuss the roots of this deck in pre-Celtic mythology, earth-based shamanism, and the lore of Sherwood Forest. (Artist Will Worthington was unfortunately unavailable for the interview.). Anchored to the Wheel of the Year and the earth’s seasonal cycles, the Wildwood Tarot has proven to hold enduring appeal for pagan practitioners and mainstream readers alike.
As always, there’s a patron reading using the deck at the end of the episode. If you yourself would like to submit a question for a reading on the Tarot Podcast, sign up as a paid member! You’ll find out when readings are happening on Patreon or Discord and be able to share your question then!
This week’s Patreon bonus content includes additional readings AND the Bow Spread from the Wildwood guidebook.
Mark Ryan (b. 1956) is an English actor, singer, author, and action director whose career spans West End musicals, television, and film. He's best known to mainstream audiences as the voice of Bumblebee, Jetfire, and Lockdown across the Transformers franchise, and for his iconic portrayal of Nasir in Robin of Sherwood and Mr. Gates in Black Sails, alongside work as a swordmaster and fight director on films like King Arthur and First Knight. Before entertainment, he served with British Army Intelligence and Special Forces, later working as a licensed US private investigator (as described in his 2015 autobiography, Hold Fast). Ryan's most enduring contribution to tarot is the Greenwood Tarot, created with artist Chesca Potter, which he later reworked with John Matthews and illustrator Will Worthington into the internationally bestselling Wildwood Tarot, followed by a 2017 companion workbook, Wild Magic.
John Matthews, dubbed "Oxford's answer to all things mythic," has worked as an independent scholar since 1980, building a lifetime study of Arthurian legend and, more recently, the history of piracy, across a publication list topping 200 titles — among them Pirates, a number-one New York Times bestseller for 22 weeks in 18 languages. He has advised on major films including King Arthur, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Prince of Persia, and won a BAFTA for the King Arthur education DVD. His tarot work began with the Arthurian Tarot, devised with Caitlin Matthews and now some 150,000 copies deep across three editions. He went on to create the best-selling Wildwood Tarot with Mark Ryan, along with The Shaman's Oracle, The Camelot Oracle, The Lost Tarot of Nostradamus, and The Sherlock Holmes Tarot. His latest publications include The Sleeping Beauty Oracle, The Circle of the Sidhe, and Merlin's Mirror Oracle.
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