Greenwood

First published by Thorsons in 1996 and long out of print, the Greenwood Tarot is one of the tradition's genuine legends: Chesca Potter's art and Mark Ryan's writing built a pre-Celtic mythic forest, the Wheel of the Year underneath a journey structure, and the deck's reputation has only grown since it vanished from shelves. Its imagery and system later lived on when Ryan returned to the material with the Wildwood Tarot, but originals command devoted prices and the Greenwood name still carries a particular awe among collectors. The deck earned it. The forest here is not scenery but cosmology, animals, seasons and ancestral figures arranged into a coherent mythic ecology that rewards reading as a system rather than card by card. It suits students of the British mythic revival, Wheel-of-the-Year practitioners, collectors of the great out-of-print decks, and anyone tracing how nature tarot became a serious genre. For most readers its successor is the practical door in; the Greenwood is the shrine.