Listen to the Animals: Wolf

For this Tarot Notes feature, I pull one card each week from a different animal-themed deck to represent an important message from that animal.

If you are interested in finding out who your own Animal Guides are, you can get an Animal Guides Reading through my _Etsy shop_ or my _Web Site_.

This week my deck is The Magical Menagerie by Mike Leslie, illustrated by Eric Hotz (Llewellyn). This deck blends ancient Greek and Celtic systems with modern magic and psychology.

My card today is the Wolf.

The Magical Menagerie

The subtitle for this card in this deck is “Teacher.” Keywords are “learning, communication, sharing” and reversed, “hoarding, miscommunication, isolation.”

As an astute blog follower pointed out a couple days ago, the wolf is a pack animal and as such, can symbolize “group support.” We also hear about the “lone wolf” whose isolation is referenced in the keywords for the reversed meaning of this card. Wolves can work alone, but typically the fruit of that work is shared.

Linked with all four elements in this deck (Fire, Water, Air, Earth), the Wolf is associated with developing self-knowledge and cultivating intuition. Yet there is also the sense of functioning successfully within community structures and group life.

Most of us realize that historically the wolf often represented such undesirable traits as greed, ferocity, cruelty, and evil. In European myth, folklore, and fairy tales, the “big bad wolf” was known as a predatory, demonic creature who struck terror in the hearts of innocent children.

We can idolize or demonize the wolf but those extreme points of view really make it impossible for us to learn anything from this magnificent wild creature. One of my favorite quotations about wolves comes from Amaroq Weiss, Defenders of Wildlife: “The wolf is neither God nor Devil; it’s a wolf.”

Edited to share a picture I took of a beautiful arctic wolf named Shadow at the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota!