The Wildly Tarot deck by Holly and Esther of the Wildly Tarot Podcast is unlike any other deck that I’ve used. The cards are colored, front and back, depending on whether they are part of the majors or part of a minor suit, so it’s easy to see in a glance the predominant elemental energy of the reading. I say “front and back,” but it’s not clear that such terms apply. The deck features the card’s title (e.g., “Ace of Wands”) on one side, and the other includes three keywords or phrases, as well as an additional lens, such as the astrological correspondence for the majors or the numerically related major arcanum for the minors. The only imagery on the cards is a glyph of either the associated element, for the minor arcana, or the astrological correspondence, for the major arcana. It makes for a very direct reading and one that fits well with the complementary Wildly Lenormand deck that the duo just released. It will also be great fun to use the majors and their keywords with my keyword-driven Tarot Tableau and the color-coding for working with an elementally inflected reading like the Golden Dawn reading.

As a side note, the deck includes cards for the lunar phases, but they don’t appear in this reading.

Deck Interview spread with Wildly Tarot — **INTERVIEWING THE WILDLY TAROT**

**What major lesson are you here to help me learn?** *The Empress*
**Through which divine energy can we best communicate?** *9 of Cups (reversed)*
**In what area can you aid me to help others?** *4 of Pentacles*
**In what area could your guidance be easily misunderstood?** *The Hanged Man*
**What can I do to keep our communication clear?** *5 of Wands*
**How can I use your guidance for the highest good?** *Ace of Wands (reversed)*
**How will I know when we’re ready for a new lesson?** *Strength*

What I get from these cards and this interview in particular is the simple beauty and shift in perspective for what tarot cards can be. It’s not that the cards or their meanings require a new perspective, but they help refine and hone the interpretive angle. There is an obvious removal of some of the artistic interpretation and story-building that an illustrated card would have, and I can find good use for that. In stripping out the illustrated narrative, the Wildly Tarot leaves you with either the logical, keyword-driven reading or the deeply intuitive reading of the divinely connected medium. Stick with me here.

With the keywords printed directly on the card (or not, if you’re using the title side), you tap into either the card’s meaning as written before you or your pre-existing lexicon of card meanings. You can piece together other meanings in a structured, logical way using the correspondences, but it’s still based on what you already know rather than some new sense that you get from a detail in the imagery of the cards or the interaction of the figures on the cards. That’s what I mean by a logical reading. It can still be irrational in its connection to psychic cartomancy, but it feels very “left brain” in its use of pre-existing, documentable knowledge.

On the other hand (and brain hemisphere), you have the possibility of just listening to the divine echoes of the cards without having to worry about whether your subconscious has picked up on some feature of the image. If I start hearing messages from the cards about something totally unrelated to what I know the cards to be about, I know that it’s not because I saw some minor detail on a card that’s triggering some aspect of my psychology. (Let’s be clear: that’s a totally valid way for your intuition or guides or what-have-you to use image-heavy tarot cards, and I benefit from that style of reading.) I can trust in my role as a medium between the querent and the angel of the tarot or the Akashic Records or the white light of mass intelligence or whatever it is I believe I’m accessing through a deeply intuitive or psychic reading.

My own personal reading style mixes both, as I'm sure many others’ do, and this deck will provide some fun opportunities to get at those stripped-down methods of reading tarot that can be bogged down with an over-explanation of the interrelated images on the cards. As this interview suggests, this deck is not about fulfilling wishes or searching for deep insight while hanging from the World Tree. Instead it’s a deck that I should turn to for clear and concise readings, perhaps quicker readings that don’t require an earth-shatteringly novel approach or deeply meditative inspiration. That’s not to say that other readers can’t use this deck for those readings, but I know that I won’t need to.

I fully expect that my logical, lexical approach to cartomancy will take over most readings with this deck, but I also am quite aware that inspiration will strike or I’ll find divine communion while reading these cards, and it will have nothing to do with the cards themselves. And what’s liberating about that is that I won’t spend hundreds of words explaining why I came to that conclusion. Given their simple appearance, they might not be favorites at a party, but they would excel in that kind of environment. It will be fun to practice with their directness.

Deck Interview: Wildly Tarot