Mark Ryan - Wild Magic: The Wildwood Tarot Workbook

The act of observing a tarot spread changes the tarot spread.

This simple statement, adapted from the physicists credo that the act of observing a particle changes the particle, comes from the understanding that tarot is a unique tool in the quiver of philosophical and spiritual arrows that we humans possess to help us connect and communicate with an ever more complex universe. Tarots psychological, synchronistic framework and dynamically interactive nature offer to the practitioner the opportunity to focus their latent thoughts, drives and enquiries. This enables us to manifest responses and solutions, bring wisdom and insight to unseen challenges, and effect changes in a dynamic and empowering manner. In my own life I use this simple three-step motif when dealing with lifes micro and sometimes macro challenges: strategize, prioritize, actualize. Tarot is a living map of the human condition and of our mutual psyche. It invites us to observe not only the currents and shifts in situations and relationships, but also to interact with and change them if we wish.

Some of what I am going to say here may seem out of place in the introduction to a book about tarot, but what better platform than a place where we discuss the nature of our mutually interconnected dependence on the global ecosystem, and the way we have to deal responsively, as a species, with our rapidly changing and dangerously complex world?

Tarot is much more than a means of telling fortunes, of looking into the future or reading the everyday problems we have in our lives. Its part of a bigger picture which looks into the black hole of human consciousness and the sometimes terrible effects that we, as a species, have on our environment. This is a book about deepening our awareness of the inner and outer worlds in which we live, and continues what was always the intention of the deck, from its origins as The Greenwood Tarot to its more recent incarnation as The Wildwood Tarot.

The World in Shadow

The simple fact is that we continue to damage our own environment at an ever-increasing and alarming pace, while the forces that wish to pursue this agenda for profit have grown in strength, political will and guile. Good sense and care for the common good will hopefully prevail, and the realization that self-preservation can only be achieved through major climate change agreements will bring some sense to the discussion, albeit almost too late.

When I started writing The Greenwood Tarot in the early 1990s, I observed that human beings were behaving like very bad guests at a party, and that if we vanished from the surface of the Earth tomorrow, we would just be as inconsequential as fossils found on the beach of time. I wrote then that The Earth may well dispossess her inventive but troublesome offspring and Maybe the rediscovery of a holistic view of humankind and nature is her final warning cry to us.

Little did I know then that halfway through the first quarter of the twenty-first century we would have a general scientific consensus regarding the effect that human activity has had on global climate change, but with politicians and corporations alike rebuffing and dismissing it as a hoax and politically motivated science. These corporations have heavily invested in fossil fuels and the control of their supply, as well as the most destructive means of profiting from them.

Although most people now accept the human contribution to global warming, the usual caveat is that nobody knows how bad it might get. Thats quite an alarming position and a chilling gamble to take with such a serious and pressing issue regarding our generational legacy and our childrens future.