Reading Wild Unknown VS Reading Rider-Waite Decks

barefootlife

My way of dealing with the WU deck was to just put aside the RWS almost entirely at the beginning and just use its LWB. No book, no notebook of meanings, just the LWB.

Once I started making connections between her keywords and the cards, the deck really opened up for me, with the concepts of the images morphing and growing as they connected to other cards in spreads. After that, I brought some RWS back into it, especially for the courts, which I find really difficult to interpret after the ease of the arcana and rest of the suit cards. For those, her keywords are insufficient, not really distinguishing enough across suits between the mothers and fathers especially. This deck in particular has deviated for me in its meanings in some cases fairly significantly from the traditional, and I like it that way.

In short, I think you have to embrace the WU as a journey that might weave in and out of the traditional RWS, but is also really about carving its own path. Sounds schticky, but it's held true for me.