I just purchased The Wooden Tarot and I love it. A friend of mine had purchased it earlier and photographed three cards, Temperance, The Magician, and Queen of Blooms, tagging my wife and I on FB when she posted them since I work as a magician (that was how this friend and I initially met, she was in the audience of a lecture/show I gave at Coney Island's Congress of Curious People), and my wife is a wildlife photographer who volunteers at the aquarium here in Brooklyn and previously in Seattle so she is crazy about both otters and octopi. When I saw that Temperance was an otter with a third eye I knew I had to have this deck. I simply love it. The artwork is beautiful as is the printing, I love the way they feel in my hands, and I love how they feel so "other" for lack of a better word.
I usually read TdM professionally, either Flornoy's Noblet deck or the Jodorowsky Camoin deck and I primarily use Jodorowsky's numerogically based system when dealing with the pip cards so reading any deck or even playing cards is not a problem. I know a lot of people feel that pictures on the pip cards help their intuition but for myself the opposite is true, I feel rail-roaded by the pictures. I think Enrique's poetic system has a lot of truth to it. Please realize, I am only speaking for myself here and my own experiences, but that being said, The Wooden Tarot was like being freed one more time, from an encumbrance I hadn't even realized was ever there. That being the traditional association of swords, cups, wands, and pentacles. True, they are there if you want to fall back on them, he has provided them, but in my free time this past week I have been loving contemplating what should be the association of bones, stones, blooms, and plumes.
Yep, I think it's pretty obvious I love this deck. It's so beautiful. It reminds me of my beloved Olympic Peninsula, hiking in the Ho rain forest, and camping with friends to wake up salt encrusted and bleary eyed trying to get a fire started to make coffee on the second beach of La Push. I just wish there were elephants large enough to have old growth Forests on their heads, and the idea that animals have their ajna open and aware shouldn't be that hard to grasp. As John Michael Greer has pointed out, the reason research into animal language has remained criminally underfunded is probably an unconscious fear of what they'd say to us if we could understand them.
In closing, I don't doubt for a second this deck will take a lot of work for the individual seer to tune and use. It comes with no LWB and no tradition. Much like Linda Falorio's Shadow Tarot it is completely alien and other in feeling, but where the Shadow Tarot has Falorio's own paperback book, Kenneth Grant's oeuvre, Crowley, HPL, and others, the only suggestion I can give for The Wooden Tarot may be Clive Barker's Imajica and the seer's own imagination. Because that's how this deck feels, like it comes from a land that overlaps, but is not wholly our own. I'd say if you want a deck that will delight your imagination and make you squeal like a 15 year old school girl (and like I said, this is coming from a 46 year old staunch traditionalist that absolutely loves Meditations on the Tarot and usually loathes Deck of the Week), this is a great deck. But it will take a lot of work to tune into a working deck for yourself. And please remember, this is just my own opinion, I am known to magpie frequently and am a bear of limited intelligence. ;-)
