The original edition of the Xultun Tarot and its companion book The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot by Michael Owen are available from Kahurangi Press at www.xultun.com

The Xultun Tarot was created by New Zealander Peter Balin in 1976. It is also known as the Maya Tarot or the Maya Book of Life. It consists of twenty-two cards of the major arcana plus two cards representing the masculine and the feminine principles and fifty-six cards of the minor arcana (Cups, Jades, Staffs and Swords). The Maya “x” is pronounced “sh” so Xultun is pronounced “shool-tun.”

Where did the tarot come from?

The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot challenges the Western-centric notion that archetype of the tarot belongs solely to one geographical place and one historical period.

Tarot cards first appeared in Renaissance Italy in the 14th century. With the late 19th century esotericism of the Order of the Golden Dawn, for example, the cards and their interpretations tended to become more and more arcane as with the Rider-Waite or Crowley decks. Early European decks, such as the Marseilles Tarot, give us a clearer view. Unlike many later tarot they are not burdened with self-conscious symbolism nor do they attempt to make the cards conform to a particular metaphysical or psychological theory. In the last twenty or thirty years there has been an explosion of New Age tarot decks. Unfortunately, most of these have little or no connection to the underlying archetypal structure of the tarot and are often a collection of pictures that solely reflect the author’s conscious intent.

Western culture emerged from the last physical Ice Age over 10,000 years ago but in the last 2,000 years it has succumbed to a spiritual Ice Age. The tarot first appeared in Europe when it was being ground under the glacier of Christianity and had been almost completely severed from its indigenous and instinctual roots by 5,000 years of “progress” and “civilisation.” We shall see the significance of this historical time period and the year 2012 in the Planet Earth card. When spirit and nature become estranged in a rational culture, as had occurred in medieval Europe, the result is that divination and other non-rational pursuits have to live in the shadows. At the same time they become increasingly needed, not to foretell the future but to bring about balance between spirit and nature, this world and the other world, head and heart.

Carl Jung said, “The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. This change became visible at the time of the Renaissance.” It was a time when scholars had returned to the only roots they could find that they thought were “civilised” enough and were in the neighbourhood—classical Greek and Roman culture. Their desire was to be reborn into an age of light out of the ignorance and superstition of what they called the “Dark Ages.”

The brilliant but highly specialised consciousness of the Renaissance later became the “Age of Enlightenment” of the 17th and 18th centuries. This philosophical and cultural movement, seen in the writings of John Locke, Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, for example, had an abiding faith in the power of reason to engender progress and enlightenment. However, this enlightenment came at a price. What was of the earth, the feminine and nature fell into the collective shadow. Just as a dream compensates for the one-sidedness of personal consciousness so archetypes compensate for the one-sidedness of cultural consciousness. The tarot emerged from the collective unconscious during the Renaissance as a compensation for the excesses of what was to become “Western” culture.

The tarot is a gift, created not by any individual consciousness or particular culture, but by spirit or, in psychological terms, the collective unconscious. It was not invented but emerged in response to a need for balance and beauty. Not balance between humans but for humans to be able to hold the balance between nature and spirit within themselves. The tarot allows spirit and nature to come into balance through the intercession of humans, a theme we shall return to throughout the book.

When an archetype emerges from the collective unconscious it arises in different places and cultures and historical times. The form of the archetype may be different but the essence is the same. We see the same archetype that underlies the tarot in the Cabala with its 22 Sephiroth, alchemical manuscripts like the Rosarium Philosophorum with 20 woodcuts and Splendor Solis with 22 paintings, the biological structure of DNA and the 20 or 22 amino acids, the Maya vigesimal system based on the number 20, the teachings of the Twenty Count, and the 20 + 2 cards of the Xultun Tarot major arcana.

What is the tarot?

The tarot is an aide-mémoire for the soul. It is an archetype in itself as well as a series of archetypal images that tell the story of the stages of spiritual and psychological development that are possible over a lifetime. It is the story of the flowering of the soul and how it participates in the great cycles of creation. It is a symbolic depiction of the soul’s journey from spirit to substance and back to spirit, from heaven to earth and earth to heaven, and finding heaven on earth and earth in heaven. If we look at the major arcana we see the Great Light at the top of the deck above the Fool and the Sorcerer. At the bottom of the deck we see the zigzag design symbolising the earth. All the human action happens in between and in the process both spirit and substance are changed.

The tarot embodies two principal archetypes. First, the archetype of the Self and how it manifests over a lifetime. Jung defined the Self as the organising centre of the psyche or the “God-image within.” Second, the archetype of number which Jung said was the archetype of order become conscious.

Differences

The Xultun Tarot is similar to other tarot decks in that there are twenty-two major arcana and fifty-six minor arcana. However, it differs in several important ways.

The names and numbering of the Xultun cards differ from the European tarot. Rather than Roman numerals, the Xultun cards are numbered at the bottom of each card using the Maya notation where a “dot” is one and a “bar” is five.

The Xultun is the only tarot where the major arcana, when laid out, form a picture. This is not an artistic convenience or an aesthetic gloss but a reflection of the fact that the tarot is an interconnected whole with multiple cross-connections between the cards. Although the illustrations in this book show a two-dimensional picture, the Xultun Tarot is actually a spherical, 3D hologram. Each card resonates with all the other cards in specific patterns that we shall explore further in the Loom of Time chapter.

As well as a richly cross-connected web, the cards also form a linear sequence that tells the story of the transformation of the soul. Many interpretations of the tarot lean towards considering the cards individually in isolation from each other rather than as part of a coherent and connected developmental sequence. Because the European tarot do not emphasise the developmental sequence of the cards they have blurred the difference between the first and second halves of the deck. The cards in the first half of the Xultun Tarot, from the Priestess (2) to the Balance (11), have more to do with personal and collective processes whereas the cards in the second half of the deck, from the Hanged Man (12) to Planet Earth (21), are more concerned with impersonal and archetypal processes.

The Xultun Tarot was the first tarot not based on traditional images derived from the medieval European tarot or the Western occult tradition. The imagery and teachings of the Xultun Tarot are indigenous to the Americas so the cards are less encrusted with the layers of European tarot interpretation that have accrued over the centuries.

Finally, because of its imagery the Xultun Tarot reveals more clearly the archetypal pattern that underlies all tarot decks.

Beginnings

Peter Balin was born near New Plymouth, New Zealand. A self-taught artist, he travelled widely and by the mid-1970s was living in Los Angeles. In a talk he gave in 1977 he relates how, on the evening of December 21, 1975, some friends came to his house and one of them had a tarot deck. It was the first tarot deck he had ever seen and Balin thought it was sort of medieval and uninteresting. Later in the evening one of his friends suggested that he should draw a tarot deck but Balin thought it was a silly idea and said so. Right in the middle of his protestation:

“Something occurred which had never happened to me before in my life, and which is extremely difficult for me to explain. The only way that I can do so is to say that it approximated a colour slide going on in my brain. That is all of a sudden, I was telling her how crazy I thought she was, and the next minute… Voom! I should say about like that, it’s very difficult to describe because it was not quite like that either. But this large thing appeared in my head it seemed, or somewhere inside of me, I just really don’t quite know where.”

The image was of the twenty-two cards of the major arcana assembled to make one picture and all the figures were in Maya dress. The next morning Balin had a tremendous urge to paint. He took a sleeping bag to the art gallery where he worked and slept on the floor. He painted almost day and night for three months. Balin said, “Apparently I had a lot of the qualifications necessary to be able to make this deck. One of [which] was that I knew nothing about the Tarot. Because if I did, obviously I would be tripped up by what I knew. There would be a great battle in my head.… Within a year of the time that the original cards were painted, they were printed and out on the market. Obviously something somewhere felt that it was very important to get these cards out.”

For the 2010 edition Kahurangi Press have reproduced the cards in their original size and vivid colours. And, in cooperation with Peter Balin, they have redesigned the back of the cards in cinnabar red with a new feathered serpent design and the box in green with a blue feathered serpent encircling it.

Historically, almost all tarot decks were named after their creator but Balin didn’t want the deck named after him. So he made a list of Maya place names and selected Xultun, the name of a Maya site near Tikal in north-eastern Guatemala. Sometime after painting the cards, Balin discovered that the word xultun also means “a storage place” where the Maya stored water or maize. The limestone of the Yucatan peninsula is so porous that no water collects on the surface. The only sources of water are a few cenotes—deep, steep-walled sinkholes with water at the bottom. So the Maya had to dig bottle-shaped cisterns or xultun beneath the ground. These had broad, sloping surrounds, plastered with limestone, to funnel rainwater into the cistern. The bodies of human sacrifices were thrown into abandoned xultun and in shamanic healing ceremonies the conjured evil spirit was cast into a xultun. So the Xultun Tarot is a storage place, a container for the light and the dark, and a repository for seeds of knowledge.

Another other use for the xultun was as a star-tube. The Maya created a sophisticated astronomical calendar for marking the progression of time. For them, time was alive and events were conducted on dates that were most charged with ch’ulel or life force. To make their calendrical calculations they observed the movement of the stars during the day as well as at night. The Maya priest sat at the bottom of a xultun looking up at the sky through its narrow neck. [xultun] Here, even at midday, he could see the stars quite clearly overhead. In the early 1600s the Italian astronomer Galileo used a similar method for observing stars during daylight by sitting at the bottom of a deep well. So when we open the Xultun Tarot we are looking through the star-tube of the tarot, in the daylight of consciousness, at our stars—the patterns of our soul’s movement in time.

Balin had lived for some months in a small Maya village with many ruins close by. He spent the summer of 1972 sketching images at Tikal. The first six figures in the cards (Fool, Sorcerer, Priestess, Consort, Ruler and Priest) are all drawn from wooden lintels in Temple III at Tikal as are the glyphs running across the base of the platform that the last three figures stand on. The glyphs between the second and third rows come from Stela 26 at Tikal. Additional designs are taken from Stelae 1 and 31. A stela (Latin for standing stone) was an upright stone slab or pillar often carved with glyphs. Maya called them tetun, or “tree-stones.”

Balin said he did find a way of signing the cards. He was born on a farm on the slopes of Mount Taranaki in the North Island of New Zealand. At the bottom left hand side of the Sorcerer card we see the same mountain.

Twisted Hairs

Beginning in the early 1970s, with the publication of Carlos Castaneda’s books, a loosely-connected body and lineage of teachings which had previously been an oral tradition became accessible to the public. Since the mid-1970s they have been taught by Harley SwiftDeer Reagan and written about by various authors such as Teisha Abelar, Lynn Andrews, David Carson, Florinda Donner, Jamie Sams and Hyemeyohsts Storm.

The source of knowledge was a teacher or teachers to whom the author apprenticed or a tradition or lineage from which the teachings came. For Andrews it was Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Morning Star from Saskatchewan, for Castaneda it was Don Juan and Don Genaro, for Storm it was Estchimah and the Zero Chiefs, and for Reagan, who studied with Storm, it was Navajo medicine man Tom Two Bears Wilson and the Twisted Hairs Medicine Council of Elders.

Traditionally, Twisted Hairs were medicine people, shamans and storytellers who travelled throughout the Americas (Turtle Island). What differentiates a Twisted Hair from a traditional medicine person is their ability and desire to seek knowledge from outside their tradition. These men and women gather knowledge from every direction of the wheel of life in order to find their own centre and come into alignment with the Creator. Hair symbolises knowledge and a Twisted Hair is one who braids knowledge from all traditions and ways into his or her Path with Heart and makes it their own knowledge. Their purpose, their dream, is to preserve the beauty and integrity of the web of life that has been dreamed by the consciousness of this planet. They hold the breath and blood of this first dream, so that we can feed it, remember it and dream their dream onwards.

The name Xultun has Twisted Hairs associations. At its height Tikal was the largest Maya city with a population of 90,000 people but was abandoned around 900 CE. Tikal was the name used by the local Itzá Maya people and means “Place of Voices” or “City of Echoes.” But this is not the original name of the city. The name glyph of Tikal was recently deciphered by epigrapher David Stuart as Mutul. The glyph appears in the Sorcerer card. A name glyph was like a national flag or coat of arms for a Maya city-state. The central part of Tikal was called Yax Mutul which means “Great Green Bundle.” The surrounding area over which Tikal ruled, which likely included Xultun, was referred to as Mutul which means “knot of hair,” “hair bundle,” or “hair twisted or coiled and tied into a bun.” The Temperate Man, the number 14 card, is one of the most important cards in the Xultun Tarot and he is a Twisted Hair.

Some Twisted Hairs carried a medicine item similar to the Xultun Tarot in their medicine bundles. These “cards” were made of sandpaintings on thin wood and covered with animal glue and contained something from each of the Mineral, Plant, Animal and Human Worlds. It was known as the Book of Life or the Children’s Fire. The Xultun Tarot is the Holder, Keeper and Teacher of many of the Twisted Hairs teachings (or Shields of Knowledge) in symbolic form.

[Michael Owen is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Tauranga, New Zealand]

Cover image: The White Bird by Michail Grobman, 1987
Painting and gouache on paper

Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic

by Inna Semetsky

This book originated as an action-research project conducted between 1992 and 1994 under the auspices of the Californian Behavioral Board Science Examiners when I was a postgraduate student enrolled in the Masters of Arts degree program in the area of Marriage, Family and Child Counseling and Human Development at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena. Unbeknown to me at the time, my study was to be a type of research analogous to what Jungian scholar Robert Romanyshyn will have called more than a decade later “research with soul in mind” (Romanyshyn, 2007). Yet back then in 1992 I was not only ten years away from the subject matter of my future doctorate in the area of philosophy of education and cultural studies, but also quite undecided on the topic of my Masters thesis that was eventually to be called “Introduction of Tarot readings into clinical psychotherapy: a naturalistic inquiry”.

Interestingly enough, and once again in accordance with Romanyshyn’s imaginal approach, my topic was about to choose me rather than the other way around! Referring to the imaginal, Romanyshyn emphasizes the role of this “third” dimension between the senses and the intellect as enabling an embodied way of being in the world within the context of complex mind reaching into the whole of nature. It was Henry Corbin who coined the imaginal world – Mundus Imaginalis or mundus archetypus, the archetypal world – as a distinct order of reality corresponding to a distinct mode of perception in contrast to purely imaginary as the unreal or just utopian. Yet, it is our cognitive function enriched with imagination that provides access to the imaginal world with a rigor of knowledge specified as knowing by analogy.

The method of analogy that mystics around the world have practiced for centuries defies the privileged role allotted to the conscious subject that observes the surrounding world of objects – from which he is forever detached – with the cool “scientific” gaze of an independent spectator so as to obtain a certain and indubitable knowledge, or episteme.

Mystics and poets (from whom Plato used to withhold academic status) historically played a participatory, embodied role in the relational network that forms an interdependent holistic fabric with the world thus overcoming the separation between subject and object. This dualistic split has been haunting us since the time of Descartes, confining us to what Corbin calls the “banal dualism” of matter versus spirit. As for the “socialization” of consciousness, it pretends to resolve the dilemma by making, according to Corbin, a fatal choice: either myth or historical reality. Either facts or fiction! This book avoids the binary fatality of either/or choice: we will see in Chapter 3 that Tarot renders itself to explication in both mythical and real historic, cultural, terms.

The sociological dimension is significant: Philip Wexler (1996, 2000, 2008), pointing out the current importance of religion and spirituality for socio-cultural life, ascribed the status of symbolic movement to sociology of education that aims to bring spirituality to secular, long-disenchanted and alienated, contexts so as to satisfy their hunger for meaning.

Wexler emphasizes an approach from within long-standing religious tradition and focuses specifically on Jewish mysticism. He calls for the “broad-scale revitalization…of the culture of modernity, a re-articulation of ancient religious traditions, and…the anti-institutional, but religiously-oriented movements of everyday life that we often referred to as instances and heralds of a ‘new age’” (Wexler, 2008, p. 9).

I share with Wexler his conviction that our present postmodern age calls for revision of the pre-modern traditions of theory, interpretation and understanding and especially in terms of following “the new age…tendency [by means of] opening the reservoir of the cultural resources of traditional, religious understanding… [in] mystical, experiential and spiritual aspects: from Hinduism, Tantra; from Islam, Sufism; from Christianity, mysticism; from Judaism, Kabbalah and Hasidism” (Wexler, 2008, p. 10).

This book will not only have added Tarot as a spiritual, both metaphysical and practical, system to Wexler’s list of multicultural traditions but will focus specifically on Tarot hermeneutic or on the art of, using the term from popular culture, Tarot readings. Etymologically, the Greek words hermeneuein and hermeneia for interpreting and interpretation are related to the mythic god Hermes, a messenger and mediator between gods and mortals, who crosses the thresholds and traverses the boundaries because he can “speak” and understand both “languages”, the divine and the human, even if they appear totally alien to each other.

As a practical method, Tarot hermeneutic allows us to relate to something essentially other but nevertheless understandable, knowable and, ultimately, known. The relation thus established between the generic “Self ” and “Other” in our real practical life is significant and has both epistemological and ontological implications. The dimension of the foremost importance is however ethical, considering that we live in a time of the multiculturalism and globalization when different values appear incommensurable and continuously compete, conflict, and clash!

In our current global climate permeated by diverse beliefs, disparate values, and cultural conflicts, understanding ourselves and others and learning to share each other’s values is paramount for the survival of our species. This requires an expansion of our consciousness using all available means, including the knowledge of the symbolic language of Tarot pictures that are worth more, as the saying goes, than many thousands of words. Classical Russian author Ivan Turgenev pointed out that a picture shows at a glance what it can take dozens of pages of a book to expound. Without making grand metaphysical claims concerning Tarot, this book will focus on its practical side as comprising my empirical research data. Yet, important theoretical stepping stones will be laid down through chapter 1 to chapter 7 to ground the empirical data that will be presented in minute detail in chapter 8. Chapter 8 will comprise the fifteen actual Tarot readings that have been documented as constituting the core of my research and published with the written consent of all participants.

So, coming back to 1992, I remember the day when I took the November- December issue of The California Therapist out of my mailbox and my eyes fell on the letter to the editor. The author of the letter was interested in learning of other professionals who were encountering in their practice people who were more interested in learning about their past lives and going to psychics, as the author put it, rather than discussing their parents and more recent childhood. The author felt that she and other therapists working with quite a number of “new age” clients needed more publicity.

When I read the letter written by a qualified mental health professional and published in a respected professional periodical, my first feeling was that of belonging. Wow! I am not alone in my pursuits! At that stage, being a postgraduate student, I did not widely publicize the fact that I was a Tarot reader. Yet the very fact of being a reader is what originally motivated me to want to become a professional counselor and to invest my time, money, mind and soul into the intensive research culminating in the book you are now reading.

Many years ago, eager to listen to anyone who would have provided any guidance to me in my seemingly vicious circle of then current life-tasks, problems and issues, I turned to readers. Nothing seemed to help, and I found myself going from crisis to crisis and losing the thread of connection with not only the external world but myself as well. Moving from one counseling room to another, I did not feel understood, and more and more doubts about my own integrity started to occupy my mind, further contributing to the loss of that connection, that fragile link, which enables one to know oneself.

It was the ancient “Know Thyself ” maxim that was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi and, as philosopher of education Nel Noddings (2006) reminds us, still remains the necessary, even if often disregarded, goal of education. It was the quest for meanings and evaluation of life-experience – an examined versus unexamined life – that Socrates was calling for.

Noddings is adamant about the importance of self-knowledge as the very core of education: “when we claim to educate, we must take Socrates seriously. Unexamined lives may well be valuable and worth living, but an education that does not invite such examination may not be worthy of the label education” (Noddings, 2006, p. 10, italics in original). Still more often than not education is equated with formal schooling (for children) or perpetual training (for adults) thus a priori marginalizing the realm of lifelong human development and experiential learning situated amidst real-life situations.

For me, such an informal – or, rather, post-formal (Steinberg, Kincheloe, and Hinchey, 1999) – education grounded in an existing cultural practice began when, on the verge of despair, I found myself sitting opposite a man who was a genuine Tarot reader. It was his reading that precipitated a catharsis: something that subconsciously I did not want to know or accept, that was repressed and stored away in my unconscious mind and thus not dealt with, was brought to my awareness, then explored and discussed by my reader and me, becoming in this process a meaningful reality.

I left that reading session fully aware that I had to deal with the emergent information as this new knowledge was me, my selfhood that so far has been denied, displaced, or sublimated. This process of informal guidance by means of a Tarot reading, that transgressed the boundaries between education and therapy, facilitated a process of development and personal transformation. This developmental, at once healing and learning, process is still going on, and in this quest I was and still am accompanied by the wonderful world of Tarot: I became a reader, in the parlance of popular culture. Or, in terms of academic discourse, a “bilingual interpreter” who can translate the “language” of the unconscious, projected in the array of Tarot pictures (chapter 7), into verbal expressions; and I consider this one of the richest and most liberating experiences a person can have in life.

The word education derives from Latin educare that means to lead out as well as to bring out something that is within. The word therapy derives from the Greek therapeia in terms of human service to those who need it. Education and counseling alike involve either implicit or explicit inquiry into the nature of the self and selfother relations. Carol Witherell notices that, ideally, each professional activity “furthers another’s capacity to find meaning and integrity” (1991, p. 84) in lived experience. Importantly both practices are “designed to change or guide human lives” (Witherell, 1991, p. 84).

In the area of human development, which is the focus of this book, the rigid boundaries between those apparently separate, in the contemporary context, disciplines of education and therapy become blurred: both are oriented to creating meanings for our experience that includes the realm of the yet unknown and unconscious. The role of unconscious learning has been systematically addressed by the Australian higher educator Marian de Sousa (2008, 2009) especially as a means for focusing on emotional and spiritual intelligence grounded in “the processes of feeling and intuiting” (de Souza, 2009, p. 681) in the combined context of education and mental health.

Tarot hermeneutic provides an unorthodox epistemic access to the realm of the unconscious analogous to Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical or depth psychology, to be addressed in chapter 2, when the effects of the archetypal dynamics comprising the field of the collective unconscious – a theoretical construct posited by Jung – is analyzed in practice. Jung’s biographer Laurens van der Post, in his introduction to Sallie Nichols’ book Jung and Tarot: An archetypal journey notices her contribution to analytical psychology by virtue of the “profound investigation of Tarot, and her illuminated exegesis of its pattern as an authentic attempt at enlargement of possibilities of human perceptions” (in Nichols, 1980, p. xv).

Contemporary post-Jungian scholar Andrew Samuels mentions “systems such as that of the I Ching, Tarot and astrology” (Samuels, 1985, p. 123) as possible even if questionable resources in analytical psychology, and quotes Jung who wrote in 1945: “I found the I Ching very interesting…I have not used it for more than two years now, feeling that one must learn to walk in the dark, or try to discover (as when one is learning to swim) whether the water will carry one” (p. 123). Irene Gad connected Tarot pictures with the stages of human development in the context of Kabbalistic teachings and alongside the Jungian process of individuation towards becoming authentic selves. She considered their archetypal images “to be…trigger symbols, appearing and disappearing throughout history in times of transition and need” (1994, p. xxxiv). Such historical and socio-cultural value of Tarot hermeneutic in the context of collective – not solely individual, but social – consciousness will be addressed in Chapter 9.

This book will demonstrate that Tarot, as an existing, albeit marginal, cultural practice traditionally located at the “low” end of popular culture, plays a significant role in the process of self-formation or construction of human subjectivity, thus becoming a means for the re-symbolization of the Self. Philip Wexler introduced the concept “resymbolization” as focused on the “collective symbolic or cultural work” (1996, p. 115; italics in original) constituting a process of cultural, societal change due to the reinterpretation of human subjectivity as grounded in “the interactive dynamics of relationality” (Wexler, 1996, p. 115) especially as it pertains to Jewish mystical teachings, Kabbalah, which is literally translated as Tradition. It is a relation as ontologically basic (versus an isolated and self-centered moral agent) that is also central to Nel Noddings’ ethics of care in education.

Hasidic philosopher Martin Buber, whose concepts were instrumental for Noddings, referred to the “wordless depths [when we] experience an undivided unity” (1971, p. 24; brackets mine) between the two people at the soul-level in the form of the famous I-Thou relation. These depths are filled not with words but with images, and the task of this book is to elucidate the images, to articulate them, to appreciate their role in the re-symbolization of the relational Self at both individual and collective levels.

For Buber, it is the lived world that engenders the personality of a particular individual. It is the world comprising the whole environment, both natural and social, that “‘educates’ the human being: it draws out his powers and makes him grasp and penetrate its objections” (Buber, 1971, p. 89). Buber deliberately puts the word educate in quotation marks to distinguish his new mode of the relational, shared, erotic educational experience from the old one-sided model based on the will to power and authority that neglects “experiencing the other side” (p. 96). It is the integrative dynamics between self and other, between consciousness and the unconscious, between I and Thou that constitutes an element of inclusion comprising education in which educator “is set in the midst of the service” (p. 103).

A relational, integrative approach is also a formidable Zeitgest in the area of another human service profession, that of psychological counseling and therapy (Corey, 1991). In the early ‘90s, Corey has been already advocating an integrative perspective taking into consideration therapists’ willingness to look into the expansion of their own outlook and into possibility of widening the range of techniques to accommodate a diverse population. Including rapprochement, convergence, and integration in the psychotherapeutic Zeitgeist, Corey envisaged that the current “Zeitgeist…will continue with this trend toward convergence and integration and that there will also be an increased emphasis on a spiritual perspective” (p. 429).

Michael Murphy (1993) also called for the integral practices that encompass a wide variety of domains in human nature in a comprehensive way; including somatic, affective, cognitive, volitional and, importantly, transpersonal dimensions. Edward Whitmont (1985), in the context of post-Jungian practices of psychotherapy, pointed out that solely verbal or reflective methods may not be sufficient. Acknowledging the limitations of just “talking therapy”, he emphasized that the development of psychic awareness achieved a new quality in terms of a novel relation to spiritual meaning. Whitmont pointed out a new developmental phase in the evolution of consciousness that demands a broader scope of awareness encompassing but not reducible to intellect alone.

Understanding that human consciousness undergoes evolution, growth, and expansion is an important premise in the present approaches to education for spirituality, care and wellbeing (De Souza, M., Francis, L., O’Higgins-Norman, J., and D. Scott, 2009; Gidley, 2009). Jean Gebser, a French polymath, referred to the evolution of human consciousness in terms of its intensification by means of progressively going though the archaic, mythic, magic, and mental structures to be finally superseded by the integral consciousness, which will have incorporated a spiritual dimension. Gebser pointed out that mythical bards like Homer are represented as being blind because their task was not to observe the visible world with the organ of sight, the eye, but to use insight, “a sight turned inward to contemplate the inner images of the soul” (Gebser, 1991, p. 271). It is an insight into the meanings of Tarot images, as this book will demonstrate, that leads to intensification, expansion, and re-symbolization of consciousness.

Another memory comes to mind. It is summer of 1993. I am busy working in my clinical internship in West Hollywood. The client population in the area, and accordingly in the agency I am working for, consists of mostly gay men. I am having a counseling session with “John”, in his thirties, and HIV positive. We are discussing his outbursts of sudden anger in the relationship with his live-in boyfriend, when abruptly John switches the issue: “I saw my spiritual guru yesterday,” he says. “She said she didn’t see a speck of death in me.”

The impact of that phrase on me, and the timing of it, was like a turning point. It brought a paradigm shift in my professional relationship with John. The session became illuminated by what was of paramount importance, significance and value in John’s painful and uncertain internal world. It redistributed the weights of issues he was overwhelmed with. It indicated that John was reaching out to whoever could understand his hopes and fears, acknowledge them, reflect back and help him in working through his problems. It happened to be his spiritual guru who cared about him and was able to provide him with the necessary reassurance.

This emotional desire as “the longing to be cared for…is manifested as a need for love, physical care, respect or mere recognition – [and] is the fundamental starting point for the ethics of care” (Noddings, 1998, p. 188). Such was John’s internal subjective reality – and this reality was addressed and mirrored in his spiritual quest. I began to wonder about the ambiguity of my professional role in this situation: what response or intervention could I, in my capacity as a counselor, provide in agreement with the framework of the behavioral-cognitive approach advocated by the agency I was working for?

What could one do within the limitations of a solely cognitive orientation aiming to behavior modification for this particular person whose initial assessment, according to his intake form, indicated an early stage of dementia? Desperate and overwhelmed by the turn of events in his personal experience, he turned to somebody outside this formal counseling room, to somebody he perceived as a spiritual guru. My immediate feeling was: if only I could introduce into our counseling sessions a spiritual dimension – and specifically by means of Tarot readings – John may very well benefit! At the very least his world view, which obviously included spiritual aspects, would be validated; at the very best, the meanings of the events in his life and the value of his personal experience, however tragic, would become open to his awareness.

Slowly the idea emerged. Nothing should prevent an existing phenomenon from becoming the subject of inquiry. The phenomenon of Tarot readings does exist; the shelves in the bookstores are crowded with popular publications; there are more than two hundred and fifty various decks available. There is a variety of advertising in popular media. TV channels have their own “psychic networks”; yet all of this exists mainly at the level of popular culture.

As noticed by Emily Auger (2004) in her research on Tarot and other meditation decks in the context of aesthetics, Tarot decks represent a popular, or “low”, rather than “high” art forms such as painting, architecture, or sculpture. Yet, it is Tarot that was to become the subject matter of my postgraduate research in the area of behavioral sciences, thus transgressing the borders between popular and academic cultures. Similar to Robert Romanyshyn’s “wounded researcher” (Romanyshyn, 2007) I was ready to step into the untapped unconscious field and to explore the many “wounds” underlying our perceptions and judgments.

There was no aim to prove or disprove anything, to qualify or disqualify, to compare or contrast. This study grew out of a desire to bring light to the often misunderstood realm of Tarot which is so much richer and valuable than its reductive popular role as a fortune-telling device, yet which is more often than not considered as such. The main “objective” of my study was, is, and will remain, the wellbeing of those who are seeking Tarot counsel.

A Tarot deck consists of seventy-eight pictorial cards, or Arcana. The meaning of Arcana (or Arcanum, singular) is that creative, but often missing, element in our lives, which is necessary to know, to discover in experience so as to be fruitful and creative in our approach to multiple life-tasks situated in the midst of experiential situations, events and our complex relationships with others. If and when discovered – that is, made available to consciousness – it becomes a powerful motivational force to facilitate a change for the better at our emotional, cognitive or behavioral levels and thus to accomplish an important ethical objective.

What is called a Tarot layout or spread is a particular pattern of the picturesque cards with a variety of images that are full of rich symbolism. Each position in the sequence of pictures constituting a particular layout has some specific connotations that will be addressed in detail in chapters 7 and 8. Tarot pictorial symbolism embodies intellectual, moral, and spiritual “lessons” derived from collective human experiences across times, places and cultures.

As such, Tarot “speaks” in a mythic format of symbols, the metaphorical universal language full of deep, even if initially opaque, meanings. The interpretation of Tarot images and pictures indicates a specific “hermeneutic, composed from the juxtaposition of disparate elements, [or] what Freud called pictographic” (Grumet, 1991, p. 75). As a symbolic system of reading and interpretation, Tarot is oriented toward the discovery of meanings for the multiplicity of experiences that would have otherwise appeared to lack meaning and significance. Thus the readings necessarily “honor the spontaneity, complexity and ambiguity of human experience” (p. 67).

The educational function derives from the holistic dimension embedded in experience that transcends the dualistic mind-body split and the scope of which expands to also incorporate the spiritual, transpersonal, domain. We thus acquire a better ability for self-reflection, self-knowledge, and a sense of value, purpose and meaningfulness of our experiences. Importantly we achieve a better understanding of what may appear to be the otherwise irresolvable moral dilemmas and which subsequently leads to the choice of right action and developing a better-informed, intelligent, decision-making ability.

In their monumental study, Crawford and Rossiter (2006) equate young people’s search for meaning, identity and spirituality with their very reasons for living and point out that meaning and identity are the same psychological reality looked at from different perspectives. From the viewpoint of meaning, it is an explanation of individual intentionality. From the viewpoint of identity, it is the individual’s distinctive self-understanding and self-expression (p. 33).

Noticing the link between the search for meaning, personal identity and spirituality, Crawford and Rossiter suggest that teachers should help their students “to look on their experience of education with a greater sense of its value” (2006, p. 321). It is a noble task, indeed, but it should be performed by teachers equipped with at least an equal if not greater sense of value and meaning of their own professional practice and their own personal development in terms of what Jung called selfeducation (chapter 2). Nel Noddings (2002) keeps reminding us that the aim of moral, holistic, education is to contribute to the continuous education of both students and teachers, in the dynamics between selves and others embedded in the caring relation.

“The attitude of care” (Noddings, 1991, p. 161) is characterized by the presence of attention or engrossment and is especially significant in the context of Tarot. Noddings refers to the story of the Holy Grail as told by Simone Weil (1951): In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail…belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound, “What are you going through?”… It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us. … This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this. (p. 115).

Yet, John was not asked the question, “What are you going through?” within the agency’s behavior-modification approach. Nor that he would have been able to – consciously – answer this straightforward question anyway or wanted to engage in an explicit dialogue so as to intentionally share his pain and suffering with me. The counseling sessions under the adage of behavioral modification of the agency were supposed to “instruct” John to not get into arguments with his boyfriend. John’s referring to a conversation with his spiritual guru was an indication that he was looking for an alternative way to be cared for, to get attention especially because the probability of his early passing was his very reality.

To connect with the Other at the soul level means to connect via corpus subtile – the subtle, spiritual, “body” of emotions and feelings that are so often difficult to articulate precisely because they are buried deep in the unconscious, in the psyche. Their expressive language exceeds and spills over the limitations of our conscious discourse. It is the Tarot hermeneutic as the metaphorical, symbolic, quest for the Holy Grail that helps us in articulating what otherwise betrays words. This takes place because of the symbols’ functioning to bring the unconscious wounds and pains to the level of cognitive awareness, therefore engaging with the psyche and making it whole, healing it.

The psyche becomes filled with the new meanings of experiences and the acquired sense of not only interpersonal connection but, ultimately, spiritual communion. The plurality of evolving meanings express themselves indirectly, in symbolic form, and symbols act as transformers capable of raising the unconscious contents to the level of consciousness, therefore ultimately performing what Jung called the transcendent function when the implicit meanings become explicit by virtue of “becoming conscious and by being perceived” (Jung in Pauli, 1994, p. 159). The readings described in chapter 8 of this book were conducted in the spirit of what Jean Watson (1985) called, in the area of nurse education, the occasions of caring. Noddings explains that the occasions of caring constitute the moments when nurse and patient, or teacher and student, meet and must decide what to do with the moment, what to share, which needs to express, or whether to remain silent. This encounter “needs to be a guiding spirit of what we do in education” (Noddings, 1991, p. 168); such a guiding, relational and caring, spirit ontologically preeminent in Tarot hermeneutic.

Referring to “a hermeneutic lag [as] a poor reading of cultural tendencies” (Wexler, 1996, p. 5) that has become frozen in the dominant structures of the over-rationalization of knowledge, Wexler calls for the cultural, theoretical, and educational renaissance. His intent is to gather the holy sparks of the Kabbalistic creation myth told in the mystical Judaism as “the vital residue of an uncontainable supernal light [that] remain glowing in the dross of fragments of worldly vessels unable to contain them. So it is with…reinterpret[ing] ancient traditions in contemporary fields of thought. We have some glimmering, but only within the prevailing cover of opaque and limiting fragments. What I hope for…is an opening toward those premodern traditions, and their inspirational ‘sparks.’” (Wexler, 1996, p. 113) To reclaim the divine sparks at the level of human cultural practices is a challenge that this book intends to meet. The restored light as the central metaphor will have contributed not to the over-rational Enlightenment of modernity but to a postmodern spiritual Illumination that would defy pessimism and the frequent fatalistic resignation currently permeating individual and collective consciousness, locally and globally.

In the remarkable book Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, Nel Noddings (1993a) comments that some of the new age criticism appears superficial and “lacks the intelligence” (p. 39) which she encourages in her work. Noddings points out that this type of education will put “great emphasis on self-knowledge… that… must come to grips with the emotional and spiritual as well as the intellectual and psychological” (p. xiv). Analogously I encourage an intelligent and open attitude in the book you are going to read.

Furthermore, you will discover that Tarot hermeneutic paves a road toward such expanded self-knowledge and that using Tarot symbolic system as an educational and counseling “aid” enables us to learn from life-experiences hence becoming able to acquire intelligence and wisdom, indeed urged by Noddings. Philip Wexler suggested that many of the assumptions underlying the new age culture should be deeply deconstructed into the ancient core religious traditions from which they perform their bricolage. The next chapter 2 will focus on the notion of bricolage per se as constituting a theory-practice nexus in which the Tarot hermeneutic is embedded.

[> purchase copies of Re-Symbolization of the Self]

(the following forms part of chapter 5 of Suzan Lemont’s MA thesis submitted in 1997)

Once a comfortable level of familiarity in working with the Tarot has been achieved on one’s own, it can become a valuable resource for doing therapeutic work with others.  This chapter describes what occurred during a group Tarot workshop, using Tarot therapeutically.  Although these were not expressive therapy sessions, the descriptions of what emerged show how Tarot could act as a “jumping off point” into increased awareness and creativity; especially with the companionship of a trained expressive arts therapist.

The Group

We are gathered together in my living room, six women and me, each with Tarot decks of various design, and all hungry to learn something new.  The Tarot group had mushroomed out of a support group for foreign women living in Zürich.  They were looking for a way to connect with the voice inside; the one that said “You are a valuable person.  You know more than you think you do.”  They were all attracted to the possibilities the Tarot seemed to offer as a doorway to another dimension.  They had the time and the desire to knock on this door and find out what lay on the other side.

In each session I covered some of the Major Arcana cards, with regards to general meaning/feelings associated with the card, and pointed out certain symbols.  I tried to include, in each session, ways of working with the cards that were intuition-based, and to show how to do this with one person willing to share an issue or question through working with the cards.  The group would then give feedback to the person who had shared her issue, and if clarification was needed about some aspect of how to do the work, it was given after the “reading”.  I would also give suggestions for carrying the work further into some creative or artistic form such as writing or painting.  I had planned a second workshop in the Fall which would include working with paint, clay, writing and movement but unfortunately, I moved from Zürich before this could happen.  However, what did emerge from the issues presented shows the potential of Tarot to unlock hidden stores of intuition and insight.

I tried to stay with the phenomenological way of working, although I ocassionally offered clarification or assistance through a more analytical or intuitive approach.  In all cases presented here the names or other identifying features of anyone in the group has been altered to protect confidentiality and privacy.

Story #1:  Isabel, a highly educated woman in her forties, had purchased the Mythic Tarot deck on a recent trip to England.  We were exploring the Personality/Lifetime/Soul card technique of beginning to work with the cards, and she said “I don’t like my Personality card!”  Her Personality card was represented by number 4, The Emperor, and after looking at the cards from the decks of some of the other group members she said “Well, it’s better in some of the decks than others, but I just don’t like it.”  I asked her if she could say specifically what it was about the card that bothered her, but she couldn’t define it clearly.  I decided to try a dialoguing technique, to show the group how to work with a card that produces unpleasant associations or feelings.

Since this was the first time we had used dialoguing technique, I asked her to talk to the image in the card, while I would respond as “the emperor figure”.

I asked her first to just look at the card for a minute, without saying anything, and then when she was ready, to address the figure as “you”; for example “I don’t like you because…”. 

After a moment she said “I don’t like you because you sit there on your mighty throne, just giving orders and thinking so much of yourself!” 

I responded as The Emperor figure with “But that’s my job!  Someone has to run things, and that’s the job I’ve been given to do.”

Isabel:  Well, you don’t have to be so arrogant and unfeeling about it. No, I think you like having all the power and control.

Me:  No, no! It’s not that way at all. It’s not fair of you to attack me for just doing what I’m supposed to do.  You don’t know how much of a burden it is to sit up here and be so responsible for everything.

I:  You don’t have to be responsible for everything… you could give some of the responsibility to others, but you won’t.  You don’t care about others and you like being the boss.  You can’t let go of the control.

Me:  Well, no.  If I did that then everything would fall apart.  Who will make sure things get done the way they are supposed to if I don’t keep track of things?  You just don’t realize what a burden it is to have to keep on top of things all the time.  I get so tired.

I:  But you COULD give some responsibility to others.  You should do that if you feel overwhelmed.  You have a choice.

Me:  No, no.  I don’t have a choice!  I can’t let everyone down…

I:  You can’t let YOURSELF down.  Come on, you aren’t concerned about what others think, you don’t care at all about that.  You need to control, and manipulate, and tell everone else what they should do!  [She was getting quite agitated and forceful with her words now, so I intervened as the therapist with a question.]

Me:  What are you feeling towards this character right now?

I:  I’m just furious at him!

Me:  Tell him that.

I:  I’m furious with you! [she laughs a little].  This is what always happens when I get angry.  I feel choked here [she puts her hand on her throat and upper chest area] and I either laugh or can’t talk.

Me:  Does this remind you of any other time you were choked or angry?

I:  Yes!  I remember being two and sitting in a high chair and my grandmother was forcing me to eat.  She kept stuffing food into me, and I was suffocating.  I was terrified that I would suffocate to death and I couldn’t talk, and I was so angry that she could do that to me and I was so helpless and stuck in that chair!  But what good does it do to realize this now?  I can’t change anything or tell her how I feel because she’s dead.

Me:  Does the choking and the anger you feel affect any of your relationships now?

I:  Yes!  Whenever I get into an arguement with my husband I get this same choked feeling and I get mad because I can’t express myself and I feel enraged and helpless.  It’s very physical [she puts her hand back on her throat].

Me;  Can you take a deep breath and go back to the card?  I think you should try to tell this character how not being listened to makes you feel.  This is your chance to say whatever you want to him.  It’s true that he isn’t your grandmother, but you can still use this time as “practice” getting through that choked feeling.

I:  [to the card] Well you know, maybe you do have a lot of responsibilities and pressure, and I feel some compassion for you but don’t try to manipulate me into pitying you!  You have a choice about that, and I don’t want to feel guilty for my feelings.  I would help you if you asked, but if you can’t accept my help then I am not going to feel sorry for you.  I have my own problems to worry about.

Me:  How did that feel?

I: That was great.  I’m going to try and remember this the next time I get into that place where anger chokes off my expression… I had forgotten about the feeding thing.

Isabel told me later that the next time she had experienced anger in her relationship, she had been able to breathe more easily and to get past the stuck, helpless feelings, and to say what she needed to say.  She said that just remembering the incident in the high chair had helped her to move past the affect it was having on her adult life.

Story # 2:  Melinda was an animated, energetic woman in her forties who had a question she really wanted to tackle through the Tarot.  We laid out the cards in a spiral mandala pattern (one of my own designs which continues to lay out cards in a spiral until the question has been sufficiently addressed).  The significant card came when she turned over the 9 of Swords from the Universal Waite deck.  The dilemma had to do with a working relationship between Melinda and two other people who were friends.  They were trying to set up a business together, but Melinda felt things weren’t going well.  She needed to confront them about her feelings, but had been hesitating.

When she turned the card over Melinda exclaimed “Oh! That’s just how I feel in this situation!”  The image of swords hanging over a distraught figure’s head really hit home for her.  We talked about the feeling of “waiting for the axe to fall” and how it was making her a “nervous wreck”.  She also identified with the image of hiding one’s head in one’s hands, and hoping the problem would go away.  She said that was exactly what she had been doing; feeling paralyzed and afraid of hurting other people’s feelings,  but she knew she would have to take some action soon; the situation and her nerves were deteriorating rapidly, and she didn’t think she could avoid the confrontation much longer.  At the heart of the problem was the issue of “cutting off friendships”.  She didn’t want to lose the respect and frienship of the two women she was having the problem with; but she really felt like she was splitting herself in half by trying to continue to make the arrangement work.  The group offered support for her decision to face the problem, and talked about ways the confrontation could be handled so that no one got “cut to ribbons”.  Melinda told me later that drawing this card and looking at it from different angles had given her the final push she needed to confront the situation, which had relieved a lot of the stress she had been feeling.

In both of the instances above, it was not neccessary at all for me to offer an interpretation of the cards, and the meanings did not need to be looked up to provide the information neccessary for insight and transformation.  This is why I prefer to work within the phenomenological framework; it frees everyone to experience his/her own perceptions and intuitions about what s/he wants or needs to know.  And it places the responsibility for making decisions with the client, instead of vesting all the power with some outside agent, such as the therapist or reader.

It is also interesting to observe synchronicity at work again in these two cases; both women had an attraction or repulsion to a card which spoke exactly to their needs of the moment.  The more I work with the Tarot, the more I find this to be true; whether the drawing of the card is from a face-down spread, and therefore not visually influenced, or from a deliberate searching through the pack for the “right” image.  Somehow the unconscious makes a connection to another point in the web, through the card images, and another leg of the journey gets completed.

Although the two previous examples focused on an individual’s dilemma, they show how the group can participate and benefit from seeing how one person engages in the Tarot and therapeutic processes.  Each person in the group was given room to provide feedback to the Querent, and I demonstrated how to give feeling feedback rather than interpretative feedback or advice (“I could really feel the choking sensation,” rather than “I think you should try to talk to your husband about this”).

Other possibilities for group work include a group Tarot collage or mural; sharing journal entries made from Tarot meditations and then getting artistic feedback from the group members; theater and drama therapy, or a sort of bringing to life of the Tarot characters; making masks based on one of the cards and then sharing what came up during that work; and finding a musical note or melody for different cards and then trying to construct a group song or phrase from the different notes.

[Mary Greer will be the Keynote speaker at the ATS 2010 Tarot Convention to be held at over the first weekend in July in Brisbane, Australia. The following contribution first appeared on her weblog: Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog]

An issue came up on one of the forums about which is the best book from which to learn about the Crowley-Harris Thoth deck. The answer for almost everyone is, without question, Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth. This, despite the fact that, for most beginners in esoteric studies, it seems impenetrable. Books by Duquette and Banzhaf are proposed as intermediaries and I agree they are excellent choices, but a problem occurs when Angeles Arrien’s name comes up. Her Tarot Handbook: practical applications of ancient visual symbols takes a completely different approach to the deck, which is often characterized as the “make up anything you want” variety—though it isn’t that at all. I should mention I took several classes with Angie on the Thoth deck starting in 1977, and so I’m not at all objective in my views.

Angie’s approach is based on Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and the meaningful repetition of archetypal images and themes across world-wide human cultures. The statement by Arrien that probably infuriates people the most is: “I read Crowley’s book that went with this deck and decided that its esotericism in meaning hindered, rather than enhanced, the use of the visual portraitures that Lady Frieda Harris had executed.” Of key importance was that Arrien experienced a powerful response to the deck that did not arise from an esoteric OTO or Golden Dawn background. It was not specifically a rejection of Crowley, though it is easy to take it as such.

Instead, Arrien recognized most of the symbols from her study of anthropology and mythology. As a result she felt that “a humanistic and universal explanation of these symbols was needed so that the value of Tarot could be used in modern times as a reflective mirror of internal guidance which could be externally applied.” She believed that the Thoth deck symbols could be read in an other-than-esoteric way—specifically, as cross-cultural psychological symbols (archetypes from the collective unconscious). Her book offers this alternate perspective, based on the work of Carl Jung, Marie Louise von Franz, Joseph Campbell, Ralph Metzner, Mircea Eliade and Robert Bly.

In essence, Arrien asked: What do these symbols tell us if we strip away the esotericism and look at them purely as symbols and archetypes from the collective unconscious reflecting myths and images that have appeared across many cultures?

I see this simply as an alternate reading of the deck—not as a demand that we discount Crowley—but, rather, asking what can be seen if we do ignore Crowley? Is there anything else to this deck? Do real ‘true’ symbols transcend fixed definitions? Can they transcend any and all dogma?

We might also ask: If Crowley’s book were lost (along with all other esoteric texts), would future generations be able to reconstitute and find anything meaningful in these 78 images? Would this deck still offer something capable of informing our thoughts and actions?

It turns out that this is a valid question, for at least one person involved in the online discussion (and perhaps many others) felt that the Thoth deck is based on a specific language of symbols, defined by Crowley, such that, without his text the symbolism and the deck become meaningless. To remove Crowley, then, is to kill the Thoth deck—to make it worthless. In fact, as explained to me, symbols contain no meaning outside of the stated definitions of an individual. Strip symbols of definition and they either convey no information or they mean anything one likes.

This is absolutely contrary to the understanding of symbols held by such people as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, the French magician, Eliphas Lévi, and countless others who have written extensively on symbolism and who believe that the meaning of the symbol is inherent in its nature. “Symbols can thus be understood as metaphors for archetypal needs and intentions or expressions of basic archetypal patterns . . . which are ultimately inherent in the human mind-brain” (Anthony Stevens, Ariadne’s Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind).

Furthermore, symbolism is a sacred, living language that reflects divinity through like vibrations. From this principle arose the occult ‘doctrine of correspondences,’ which says that something that is red, for instance, shares some kind of energy and meaning with other things that are red. Thorns that pierce are the protective weapons and barriers to the alluring rose whose scent also draws the bees. Even an esoteric interpretation takes such elements into account.

Many spiritual teachers do not fear the subjective, for they see each person as partaking of the Divine. The esotericist Manly Palmer Hall wrote in The Secret Teaching of All Ages: “Like all other forms of symbolism, the Tarot unfailingly reflects the viewpoint of the interpreter himself. This does not detract from its value, however, for symbolism is one of the most useful instruments of instruction in the spiritual arts, because it continually draws from the subjective resources of the seeker the substance of his own erudition.”

Certainly Crowley’s erudition is great, and we benefit from the knowledge that he put into the Thoth book and deck (his book is magnificient!). But, if we stop there, we have not done our own work. There may be other interpreters of the Thoth deck who can also point us down what has been called “the royal road” of Tarot. Still, eventually we must make the path our own—there’s no getting around that.

The Egyptologist, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz in Symbol and the Symbolic tells us that symbols are different than an abstract alphabet in that we can reconstitute their meanings: “Any manner of writing formed by means of a conventional alphabetical, arbitrary system can, over time, be lost and become incomprehensible. On the other hand, the use of images as signs for the expression of thought [hieroglyphics] leaves the meaning of this writing, five or six thousand years old, as clear and accessible as it was the day it was carved in the stone.” In The Temple in Man, Schwaller de Lubicz talks about the living quality of the symbol that can not survive too rigid of a definition: “To explain a symbol is to kill it; it is to take it only for its appearance; it is to avoid listening to it. By definition, the symbol is magic, it evokes the form bound in the spell of matter. To evoke is not to imagine. It is to live, live the form.” (See Schwaller’s Egyptianized Tarot Trumps here.)

Most of all I appeal to Oswald Wirth who created the first truly esoteric Tarot deck (1889; revised in 1926) that is a significant influence behind all that have followed. Wirth, in Le Symbolisme Hermétique (translated by P. D. Ouspensky), wrote that symbols are meant to awaken us to our own freedom:

Each thinker has the right to discover in the symbol a new meaning corresponding to the logic of his own conceptions. As a matter of fact, symbols are precisely intended to awaken ideas sleeping in our consciousness. They arouse a thought by means of suggestion and thus cause the truth which lies hidden in the depths of our spirit to reveal itself. . . . They especially elude minds which . . . base their reasoning only on inert scientific and dogmatic formulae. The practical utility of these formulae cannot be contested, but from the philosophical point of view they represent only frozen thought, artifically limited, made immovable to such an extent, that it seems dead in comparison with the living thought, indefinite, complex and mobile, which is reflected in symbols. . . . By their very nature the symbols must remain elastic, vague and ambiguous, like the sayings of an oracle. Their role is to unveil mysteries, leaving the mind all its freedom.

“. . . Leaving the mind all its freedom.” It saddens me that the fears and anger provoked by Angeles Arrien’s book indicate a deep mistrust that the Thoth deck can survive the common touch of the “masses,” or that it has any worth whatsoever outside of Crowley’s text. It is felt that the mistakes and misconceptions in Arrien’s book (of which there admittedly are many) could create a devastating sense of betrayal in those who eventually find out that Crowley intended something different. This supposedly-fearful juxtaposition, however, led me to a much deeper appreciation of Crowley, while Angie encouraged independence and freedom in how I work with the deck and its symbols (not a good thing to those who see Crowley as the absolute and only fundament).

Although Crowley professed love for “the scarlet woman,” yet he feared the prostituting of his work, insisting that the deck and book always be sold together (it isn’t) and describing the deck’s potential use in fortune-telling as being a base and dishonest purpose (here – see text at the end). In fact, it seems that Crowley feared even the thought that anyone might claim independent insight into his deck for, despite her working diligently for five years with him to produce the deck, Crowley made clear that his student and artist, Frieda Harris, at no time contributed “a single idea of any kind to any card, and she is in fact almost as ignorant of the Tarot and its true meaning and use as when she began.” What hope is there, then, for the rest of us?

But, hope does exists, for the ever-contradictory Aleister Crowley (using the pseudonym “Soror I.W.E.”) wrote in the introductory biographical note to the Book of Thoth, that “the accompanying booklet [this book] was dashed off by Aleister Crowley, without help from parents. Its perusal may be omitted with advantage.” And Frieda Harris’ innovative use of Steinerian ‘Synthetic Projective Geometry,’ described here, certainly deepens the effect of its imagery on the psyche.

I can only hope that, if you care about the Thoth deck, that each of you are brave enough to make up your own minds and feel free to “do as you will.” I leave you with this thought from old Aleister:

Know Naught!

All ways are lawful to innocence.

Pure folly is the key to initiation.

As a santero, Yoruba priest, who practices divination with both diloggun and tarot, I am frequently asked to compare the two and will attempt to do so in this brief essay.

Historically, Tarot began as a card game in Medieval Europe. It gained popularity as a means of predicting the future. In the right hands of a skilled interpreter, it reveals specific situations, psychological states and likely outcomes. While many tarot readers have deep religious beliefs, tarot is not part of the methodology of any particular religion. This differs from Diloggun, which originated with the Yoruba People of Southwest Nigeria. Only Yoruba priests practice diloggun divination for others. In Santeria¹ (the religion developed in Cuba from Yoruba) a priest must undergo an elaborate initiation and adhere to a novitiate of one year and a week before she can divine for others. The goal of diloggun is to reveal the will of effective demi-gods, called orisha, as well as ancestors both genetic and spiritual. A reading marks appropriate offerings to either secure good fortune or alleviate negative energy. The system is governed by a religious conviction that powerful unseen forces influence our lives and can be encouraged to act on our behalves.

Diloggun readings adhere to a ritual structure. Readers employ sixteen consecrated cowry shells, as well as a few other objects, to participate in oracular discourse. A reader begins by praying over these tools. The prayers are typically said in Lucumi (creolized Yoruba.) She always invokes God Almighty, deceased and living members of the priest’s spiritual family, and orisha. (It is useful for a client to note this because omission of this step likely indicates the reader is a fraud.) Often offerings of cigar smoke, water and alcohol to the spiritual owner of the shells accompany prayer. Usually the client is asked to make a statement that she wishes to participate in a dialogue with the orisha of her own free will and is invited to hold the shells in her own hands briefly while meditating on concerns. Then the priest casts the shells to indicate the first part of a composite odu. (Odu may be translated as “container of knowledge.” Odu are the fundaments of meaning in a reading.) Specific odu are indicated by the number of shells that fall with open mouths facing upward. Each number one to sixteen corresponds to a particular odu. The reader may begin to offer interpretation at this time, but a second casting determines a precise composite odu. They incorporate proverbs, mythological stories, divination verses, predictions, and recommended offerings. At this point in a consultation, most readers hand the client two small objects such as stones – one light and one dark – to shuffle between her hands. When one rests in each the client’s hands, the reader casts of the shells one or two times to determine which hand to choose. A light colored object indicates good fortune and a dark one negative energy. Some readers make more precise determinations as to the type of energy by repeating this step with different pairs of objects until an exact cause is identified. The procedure is repeated to indicate what spiritual entities (either the dead or orisha) preside over a reading and what offerings are necessary. The order of these steps varies according to the individual priest’s lineage teachings and subjective judgement. Additional odu may be cast in the course of the consultation, and the shuffling procedure is always repeated one more time in order to guarantee that the necessary dialogue is complete.

Cuban Santeria teaches that the orisha Yemaya acquired from her husband the secrets of diloggun divination as means for other orisha and mankind to understand divine will. In Africa, the act is sometimes attributed to the orisha Oshun.

Now that the reader has been informed of the basic procedure of a diloggun consultation, we can examine how it compares to tarot. Three key differences emerge immediately.

• Diloggun relies on fixed narratives similar to Greek myths of Gods, heroes and everymen. Tarot readings generate a narrative through successive cards unique to the client.

• Diloggun typically does not invite the client to immediately respond to the oracle. Most clients lack the education to grasp correspondences between the number of open-mouthed shells and their meanings. Hence, a trained interpreter must guide them every step of the way. Tarot cards have immediate visual signification. They provoke client response. While not all tarot decks’ minor arcana feature rich illustration, all major arcana and court cards do. It is hard to imagine that a client can behold images such as a Priestess, Lightning Struck Tower or actor of a court card and not form some subjective response about its meaning.

• Diloggun reminds us of a bygone epoch when divination was solely the domain of an educated priesthood. It is not a tool to be used without intensive training. A tarot deck may be acquired by anyone who wishes to interpret it whether or not she educates herself about it.

Also, comparison of diloggun and tarot portray difference between African and Western cultures. Most African cultures have no historic written language. Sacred knowledge was orally transmitted to a select few. Westerners have had access to published references since medieval times. Also, Africans have little tradition of narrative iconography. Traditional African art is largely limited to sculpture and patterned cloth weaving and batik. With the exception of Eshu (called Eleggua in Santeria) fetishes, one does not encounter visual representations of the orisha until the Mid-Twentieth Century. (Most often shrine sculptures represented worshippers and not deities among the Yoruba.) One theory regarding the origins of major arcana in tarot is that they promulgated allegorical teachings. Such imagery intended to educate was already familiar to commoners through Church art. In short, Western culture has long used the printed word and illustration as learning tools. Africans have not. So tarot meanings are largely derived from printed and illuminated sources. Diloggun develops its discourse from orally transmitted knowledge.

This distinction between African and Western civilizations makes developing a tarot based on diloggun or the methodology of orisha worship troublesome. Diloggun operates from a base number of four (The most common system of divination in Santeria is Obi that uses four pieces of coconut to indicate yes or no answers. Diloggun builds from this core.) Tarots are composed of either 22 Major Arcana or a total 78 major and minor cards. Most western cultures operate from a base number of ten. It is beyond the scope of this essay to precisely work out what the base number in Tarot is. (Four definitely does not work. I might argue the case for three.) Logically, it is near impossible to make the two divination systems synchronize in a coherent manor.

This has been a major downfall of tarot decks that try to use Santeria mythology as a theme. I have collected tarots for years and advocate that tarot is a valid visual narrative form of artistic expression. However, to be successful, a deck should reflect organizing principles behind tarot. Most of the Santeria or Yoruba inspired decks I have examined betray little comprehension of tarot structure and Santeria theology. In them the assignations between Santeria mythology and Diloggun and tarot meanings are ad hoc at best. I am frequently left to wonder how well the decks’ creators have thought through their subject matter.

However, odu may suggest meanings of certain tarot cards. For instance, certain well-known stories of the orisha Shango that appear in both odu and folktales bare striking resemblance to the meaning of the Tower arcana. (Shango precipitates his downfall by bringing down lightning on his own palace. Further elaboration on this can be found in Scarlet Press’ upcoming book Sixteen.) Human beings across all cultures share basic concerns and feelings. These inform the oracles they employ and meanings portrayed therein, but it does not make their systems equal one another.

Baring that in mind, I perceive certain advantages in choosing either diloggun or tarot. Diloggun serves as a remedy. It marks offerings to propitiate spiritual entities I know to be effective intercessors. Hence, if a client comes to me with a clearly identified grave challenge I think that it is a remarkably powerful tool for helping a client overcome it. In such an instance, tarot might be more effective in helping the client understand why she faces what it is at hand. However, as a bottom line, I feel that if you see someone trapped in a burning car that you should pull him out before asking what led to him be there.

This raises the issue of helping a client understand his situation. For most people who are not Santeria practitioners, I lean toward employing tarot. It offers an immediate advantage of inviting the client to participate in the reading through its use of imagery. I believe it is an effective reading technique to point to a card and ask a client what that suggests to her. Part of the rationale for doing so is to make her take ownership of the reading and her situation. In a diloggun reading, I must relate a narrative associated with the revealed odu, and then ask the client how that relates to her to achieve a similar response. There is a pause in the response, and a lot more of its value depends on my skill as a story-teller.

In summary, both divination systems have distinctive merits and reflect the cultures from which they emerged. Hopefully, this essay can serve as a basis for exploration of the relationship between both and help clients choose which reading technique best suits their needs. I am happy to answer e-mails to further clarify issues herein raised, and may be contacted at eric_k_lerner@hotmail.com

“The thing itself is unreachable, but its phenomenon can be apprehended through the structures of thought.”

–Immanuel Kant

“To have a new vision of the future, it has always been necessary to have a new vision of the past.”

–Historian Theodore Zeldin

When I recently wrote and created The Counterculture Tarot I finished a journey: one taken nearly 50 years ago but left forgotten in a box of old news photographs. Among the images were this journey’s beacons, waiting to form a map to the experience of an influential and controversial time, very roughly a decade of the last century referred to simply as The Sixties. Opening this box released a flood of human and historical experiences, revived in photographs not widely seen and, therefore, free of accumulated iconography. Like the Tarot, these photographs told many stories. Some framed experiences of life and death, some of revolution and retribution. Some expressed the triumphs of personal freedom or revealed incipient hints of a dramatic cultural shift yet to come.

I was stunned to discover that many of my photographs fell naturally into the order of the Tarot that for centuries has served to display and interpret through its rich symbolic structure a limitless range of human consequences. The 500-year-old Tarot apalogue, reproduced through the centuries in remarkable card variations, awakened for me a new view of the Sixties and its most significant and original development: the Counterculture.

A few years ago I found a slender pamphlet by Theodore Roszak, entitled Fool’s Cycle/Full Cycle: Reflections on the Great Trumps of the Tarot. Those who recall the Sixties may remember Roszak as the author of The Making of A Counterculture (1969), a book that offered, more than any other of the time, an original cultural analysis of the period’s signature generational revolt and linked its promptings to other Romantic movements of the West. Roszak notes in Fool’s Cycle that the Tarot has been surrounded “with congested systems of astrological, numerological, alchemical, and mythological correspondences.” Yet he confesses to an irresistible fascination. “In spite of the occult clutter that I found surrounding the Tarot,” he writes, “the twenty-two great trumps continued to haunt me. The Fool, the Magus, the Hanged Man, the Tower…there clings to such images the peculiar attraction of all great symbol systems.” Roszak, too, links the Tarot with astronomy, alchemy, the I Ching, and the iconography of major religions. “All have acquired over the generations a compelling glamour, a vast rhapsodic resonance, along with a tantalizing elusiveness.” Great symbols, says Roszak, are uniquely commanding presences that seem to say, “Yes, you make our meaning as you go along. But that is because we are the themes on which your life plays its variations.” And he concludes that “in a much deeper sense we are their projections–each of us becoming one of an infinite number of possible readings that give these universal motifs a particular historical enactment.”

Roszak offers his interpretation of the Tarot as a cycle, a vision that he confesses came to him in a dream. “There at the beginning of the cycle was the Fool, giving his non-number–the zero–to the equilibrium line. There, at the center was the card of the Wheel of Fortune acting as pivot point. There, at the bottom of the downward curve was the card of the Devil. There, at the end of the journey was the card of the World. And with this striking configuration came the strong impression that, yes, this was the Fool’s journey, this was the course that consciousness must run in its evolution.” The striking feature of Roszak’s Tarot “cycle” is its movement along the path of a moving point; a concept that Roszak notes appears “uniquely in modern Western mathematics.” It results in the plotting of oscillations against time, “of blending the circular with the linear.” And he notes, “only a culture uniquely gifted (or burdened) with a deep historical sense could recognize that what repeats may also develop.” The cycle, for Roszak, is a circle that “gets somewhere” and therefore has drama, a narrative, a beginning, a middle, and end.

As I sorted through my photographs to plot the historical trajectory of the Counterculture, I recognized that countless oscillations had contributed to its narrative; that all these oscillations had each begun at a particular point and returned to a different one; that they comprised a much larger cycle of nearly imponderable diversities that rumbled into existence with a collective rush and then scattered out again in the wake of ever more oscillating cycles. And in the Tarot I saw symbolic touchstones for these oscillations that converged on events, personalities, ideals, intentions, and conflicts, and that shaped the contours of an era. Moreover, I found in my photographs symbolic points of departure for many of these experiences, points that—like the Tarot—responded to the plotting of a path and to the aggregate qualities and events that describe it. In response, I used some of these photographs to create a Tarot deck. And as I weighed the qualities and experiences represented by each new “card,” as I researched and wrote about each image and what it came to represent, I became a pilgrim on a new Fool’s Journey. The journey seemed to follow old trails, but the Tarot’s compelling map illuminated them with new understandings.

To address an apparent contradiction—a narrative journey spread across the otherwise mapless oscillations of so many experiences—is to wrestle with a view of history. The attempt here is to explore the Counterculture as a non-fiction narrative by using the symbolic structure of the Tarot. As people live their lives they seem, at any number of points, to bring these lives together in waves, or—to use Roszak’s term—oscillating cycles—of commonly created momentum. And the mechanism, especially where ideas and experience intersect, may be entirely idiosyncratic. If this is so, one can think of the Sixties, or any other era, as countless people in their own oscillating cycles, their own fool’s journeys, cycling together and apart, swinging in and out of each other’s orbits and, to a degree not commonly acknowledged in most histories, engaged in a quantum expression of experience across time and space. Despite our confidence in history to express the flows and trends of human progress, it is really no easier to deconstruct these many moments of experience, these infinite, symbolically described journeys, than it is to measure the speed or location of a subatomic particle. Even as the shadow of zeitgeist gives human history an apparent, if approximate, time and place, history itself—as much literature as social science—is not fully measurable. But this does not mean a story cannot be told.

In describing this work as narrative, I draw on ideas developed by historiographer and critic Hayden White. In 1973 White published Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, a book that called into question claims of fact and objectivity in historical works. The demands of narrative presentation, not the least of which is the use of language, introduced for White a bundle of postmodern challenges to the idea that historic truth is anything but an unattainable teleological vagary. Good histories, in fact, are studied for a glimpse of the times in which they are written at least as much as they are for the subjects they are written about. And while White goes very far to claim that historical narratives are comparable to literary fiction, it is fair to say that, at best, historical fact is provisional. White’s caveat about historical narratives has constructive value. White wrote that, with a need to appear scientific and objective, history “had repressed and denied to itself its greatest source of strength and renewal.” This “greatest source” is the creative process that constantly reframes human experience to both explicate and to understand it. Indeed, White wrote that historical explanation “can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation.” Tropes and poetic structures are welcome. Good history, if it mirrors human experience, can’t elude ambiguity or contradiction or the broad range of impacts that batter successive generations, however inchoate or submerged these may be. In fact, compelling historical narrative should make every effort to include them.

White’s metahistory is manifest in many modern historic narratives. Poetry and documentary appear together in a variety of recent historic works. One of my favorites is Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity (1994). Zeldin structures his unique work as a series of conversations with French women about what seem at first mundane subjects: work, marriage, children, family, friends, money, aging, etc. But these women, who have taken Zeldin into their trust, share deeply personal feelings that Zeldin then frames as historical problems. This approach produces chapters titled “How humans have repeatedly lost hope” and “Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex,” which may seem whimsical until one digs in to find that Zeldin has used his dialogues to explore a vast range of historical influences on interpersonal human relationships. Zeldin quickly makes it clear that it is the emergence of women, the rise of feminism (which he values as a profound historical change) that has provoked a new consideration of how humans feel about each other. It is a subject that Zeldin addresses with an encyclopedic and panoramic explication of history that rests entirely on the investigation of difficult modern emotions. “You will not find history laid out in these pages as it is in museums, with each empire and each period carefully separated,” writes Zeldin in his introduction. “I am writing about what will not lie still, about the past which is alive in people’s minds today…”

The issue of probability is a popular refuge for the divinatory impulse, whether that impulse belongs to an historian or a fortune-teller. Both are tempted to explore the ways that synchronous experience, combined with probable momenta, might offer a map to the future. It is undeniable that trends and inclinations emerge from broad samplings of human cultures and that science has made enormous contributions to the intentional inventories initiated and maintained by the social sciences. And while the existence of a cycle seems to be the first measurable human reality (as described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return) and one with enormous practical applications (the birth control pill, for instance), it cannot with any certainty predict the future. For all their thoughtful preparation, social scientists know no better than physicists what they really measure. History, while in the words of George Santayana may be something we are doomed to repeat, is also, as Stephen Daedalus describes in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” The ponderous burden of history lies in the challenge of fleshing out crucial moments of a period’s vibrant self-creation, even while conforming to a shared, skeletal, reality. But rather than being chronicled in static frames of reference, historical events discussed in The Counterculture Tarot, whether iconic or idiosyncratic, coalesce around nodes of human experience.

And what are these nodes of experience? In The Counterculture Tarot they are the 78 cards of the Tarot, first reframed with photographs I made during the era and then interpreted through real events aligned with each card’s traditional and reflective symbolism. Thus, we revisit the Counterculture, not as a chronicle of incidents but as an expedition of adventures, or a “trip” in the era’s popular sense of an all-embracing journey with deeper psychological meanings. And our signposts along the way are not the turnings of the years but the full range of Tarot markers of experience that includes The Magician, The Empress, The Lovers, The Hanged Man, The Devil, The Sun, Judgment, and The World. These iconic touchstones play out the Sixties without regard to time. The Lovers card dwells on emerging changes—and choices—in the nature of human relationships. The Hanged Man brings forward experiences of personal suspension derived from drugs or incarceration. The journey begins with a Fool (Neal Cassady perhaps, or is it Abbie Hoffman?). Death arrives in the middle and not at the end, its sacrifice of Vietnam soldiers and civil rights workers a bitter but necessary step toward renewal.

Beyond the 22 most familiar cards of the major arcana (the “Fool’s Cycle” that so intrigues Roszak) there are 56 more cards divided into four suits. These of the minor arcana are as rich as the major cards in offering nodes of experience and I have addressed each of them with much detail (at least as much as that given the major cards and sometimes more). Below four arching umbrellas of experience (that parallel in their ancient and elemental structures the continuums evident in many approaches to inquiry) these cards represent fire, earth, air and water. The four suits also have been interpreted as Jung’s four sensing functions (sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling), or as the four fundamental forces of nature, or as other quaternary structures in philosophy, religion, and science. In The Counterculture Tarot these suits become inspiration (Wands), attachment (Cups), conflict (Swords), and tenacity (Pentacles). The suits address the responsive details of experience: deceit, despair, happiness, security, discontent, ruin, etc. and the actors (pages, knights, queens, and kings) who project them. Through the Wands suit we experience the clash of ideas that inspired the Counterculture. In the Cups suit we examine the attachments and lifestyles that formed new ways of having feelings and relationships. The Swords suit wrestles with the era’s conflicts, the cultural backlash to the Counterculture and its wars in the streets. And the Pentacles describe what remains, the material and spiritual remnants of the era, what was lost and what was kept.

The intricate and ancient structure of the Tarot presents a continuum of existence in which no experience ever ends. At points of crucial reflection we interpret the apparent facts of our lives through poetry and metaphor, in the reprise of a popular song, for instance, or a regarded homily, or the characterizations of fantasy and fiction. These points of reflection are animated by the memories of experience that return again and again, in which death comes well before the end and in which everything, including doom, oscillates without permanence. We are in constant search of the thousand joys that are unavailable without the consequent experience of a thousand deaths. As Tarot historian Cynthia Giles states, Tarot cards are “snapshots taken in the imaginal realm” or as depth psychologist Mary Watkins says in Waking Dreams, her study of the phenomenon of the active imagination, “Images inhabit each thought and occupation.” The Tarot is famously a way of looking at the future, as cards are spread and interpretations symbolically posture possible outcomes. Here the Tarot becomes another way of recalling the past, of recognizing how oscillations of recent human history cluster at the nodes of eternal human experience. If these placements seem arbitrary, it is important to remember that the Tarot has accumulated a rich and nearly limitless literature of interpretation at these nodes and that living life with poetic imagination was a regarded Counterculture objective. The Counterculture Tarot is not entirely a history, even as it is laden with facts and primary material drawn from historical and journalistic resources. Rather, it is a kind of “reverse inquiry,” a selective—if still broad—inventory of events that views the Counterculture’s primary, oscillating experiences through the lens of a reactivated psyche. It is a return trip and the cards of the Tarot, reformed anew from recovered photographic fragments of the era, are its signposts.

THE SUN – LE SOLEIL

The preceding Arcanum—"The Moon"—confronted us with the task of human intelligence to liberate itself from the magical enchantment which separates it from spontaneous wisdom, and to unite itself with the latter, i.e. to arrive at intuition. The nineteenth Arcanum—"The Sun"— is that of the accomplished union of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom: the Arcanum of intuition.

Intuition is what results from the intimate and profound alliance of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom. Now, the Card of the nineteenth Arcanum represents two children placed under the sun, where the one puts his right hand on the neck of the other as if he wanted to draw his head near to himself, whilst the other touches with his left hand the place on the body of the first where his heart is to be found. [...] One could hardly better represent the relationship of intelligence and spontaneous wisdom brought into play in intuition than as it is in the Card of the Arcanum "The Sun". For this relationship presupposes such purity of intention as is found only with a child, and it postulates such reciprocal confidence, without a shadow of doubt or suspicion, which belongs naturally to children. Lastly, this relationship excludes tendencies to domination and authority — to pose as a pontiff and to pride oneself on the eminence of the guru or master whose favours one enjoys[...].

"The children who are fraternising under the sun correspond all the better to Gemini because this zodiacal constellation brings in the longest days to us"—says Oswald Wirth (Le Tarot des imagiers du moyen age, Paris, 1927. p. 208), thus locating the nineteenth Arcanum in the zodiacal circle of twelve cosmic mysteries [...].

Now, the teaching-impulse called "Gemini" can be expressed by paraphrasing a little the first statement of the Emerald Table of Hermes:

May that which is below be as that which is above, and
may that which is above be as that which is below
to accomplish the miracles of one thing.

This is the principle of analogy put into practice, taking its point of departure from the principle of cooperation. It is the opposite of that of the struggle for existence advanced by Charles Darwin as the principle of evolution called "Sagittarius". Nature furnishes us at the same time with a great number of proofs of the principle of cooperation in the process of evolution —perhaps as many proofs as there are of the struggle for existence. The proofs are of a kind such that one could uphold the principle of cooperation to be worthy as the directing principle of natural evolution with the same justification as the principle of struggle may be upheld.[...]

Bees and flowering plants cooperate. Air, light and plants cooperate in photosynthesis, where the miracle of the transformation of inorganic matter into organic matter takes place—where "stones" are transformed into "bread". And, lastly, if mankind had not cooperated more than it had struggled, it would not only not have achieved the international civilisation of our time but it would probably have been annihilated.

There is therefore no doubt that the principle of cooperation has at least the same rights to be considered as the directing principle of evolution as that of the struggle for existence advanced by Darwinism. In other words, the diurnal principle of Gemini plays a role at least equal to the nocturnal principle of Sagittarius in natural evolution.

One of the highest aspects of the principle of Gemini, the principle of cooperation, is that which is present in intuition: that of the cooperation between spontaneous wisdom and intelligence. Here it is a matter of a state of consciousness where intelligence advances from formal knowledge to material knowledge, i.e. from knowledge of the relationships of things to knowledge of the things themselves. Now, the "knowledge of things themselves" entails two functions: on the one hand what Henri Bergson happily designates as "sympathy", and on the other hand a sustained and profound deepening in that with which the sympathetic relationship is established. [...] Here is a concrete example:

You venerate (i.e. you love and respect) a non-incarnated being —a departed person, a saint, or a hierarchical being—in a disinterested manner. Your veneration —which includes love, respect, gratitude, the desire to conform, etc.—cannot fail to create an invisible link of sympathy with its object.[...]

The meeting is thus the realisation of the relationship when it is borne to the limit of the intensity of clarity. According to the case, it can take either the character of a "conversation through forces" or that of a "conversation through words". In the former case it is not precise and articulated thoughts or images which are communicated to you, but rather "forces" or impulses —spiritual and psychic seeds impregnated germinally with moral ideas and judgements. In the case of the "conversation through words" a revelation of articulated thoughts and representations takes place. [...]

Now, the meeting whose character is "conversation through forces" always resembles the experience of the "star" of the mages from the East, and that whose character is "conversation through words" always resembles the experience of the shepherds of Bethlehem. The "star" does not speak, it moves; and it leaves to the subject of its revelation the work of research in the domain of intelligence and facts. The meeting whose character is "conversation through words", in contrast, moves and teaches — it bears also on the domain of intelligence and facts. It guides. [...]

With respect to the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot, we find it again in the work of Jung in the guise of the active cooperation of intelligence and transcendental revelatory being, which cooperation is not only the mature fruit of the work of his long life, but also it is the principal thesis of his method of work in the domain of depth psychology, which he openly advanced and maintained. The intuition postulated by Henri Bergson as necessary in order to be able to understand life and the world was practised by Jung in order to understand and to heal the life of the human soul. He did not commit the error of the mages of the Orient. He did not consult Herod and his people. [...]

In writing of the force of soul resulting from faithfulness to the "star"— the force which manifests itself in the power to resist the weakness of revolt (for revolt is a weakness where one lets oneself be carried away by the current of emotional impatience — the fundamental weakness of all rebels, including religious reformers as well as political revolutionaries and the most celebrated social reformers) and in the power to procure peace between two aspirations which are, or are believed to be, opposed to one another —it is difficult for me not to pay homage to two Hermeticists of our century, notably Francis Warrain and Dr. Paul Carton, both avowed Hermeticists.[...]

Intuition is therefore the cooperation of human intelligence with superhuman wisdom. It is what creates the link—or the "intermediary gnosis" and "intermediary magic"— between the absolute and the relative, between the supernatural and the natural, between faith and reason. Now, intuition can be developed only by people who have faith and who have reason. It is reserved for believing thinkers. Whosoever believes and does not think will never attain it. Whosoever thinks and does not believe will never have the certainty of transcendental things that intuition alone can give.

Intuition combines two certainties: essential certainty (that of essence), and consistent certainty (that of consistency). The former is of a moral order; its force of conviction resides in the good and the beautiful. The latter is of a cognitive order; its force of conviction resides in consistency in the vision of the relationships of things. Intuitive certainty is therefore "faith at first hand" combined with "intelligence at first hand".[...]

Now, it is postulative faith become faith at first hand (mysticism) which arrives at the perfect certainty of intuition as a consequence of the help of intelligence. John the Baptist still had need of this latter in order to have complete certainty. For this reason he —who had seen the Spirit descend upon Jesus —sent two disciples to Jesus to ask him, "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (Matthew xi, 3). And Jesus had to reply in the framework of intelligence alone: "Go and tell John what you hear and see" [...]

This is the briefest and most complete characteristic of intelligence and its role. Its role is immense, if one considers that intelligence is called to constitute an integral part of intuition [...].

This role was understood in the Middle Ages in the ecclesiastical milieu of the West. [...W]hat is at the root of scholasticism is the desire for the fullness of intuition, i.e. that of "baptising" intelligence and winning its cooperation with faith. [...]

Dear Unknown Friend, do not scorn mediaeval scholasticism. It is, in truth, as beautiful, as venerable and as inspiring as the great cathedrals that we have inherited from the Middle Ages. To it we owe a number of masterpieces of thought—thought in the light of faith. And, like all true masterpieces, those of mediaeval scholasticism are beneficial. They heal the disorientated, feverous and confused soul. [... I]t is this elevation above psychological complexes which is the salutary effect —even the healing action —of occupation with scholasticism, when one reads in the style of scholastic meditation.

[...] Why not mathematics? Doesn’t mathematics have the same effect of detachment and elevation above personal psychological limitations?

Without doubt mathematics also has a salutary effect. But it does not so engage the whole human being as does the totality of scholastic problems, and consequently its salutary effect does not have the same significance. What is at stake with scholasticism is God, the soul, freedom, immortality, salvation, good and evil. The triumph over psychological factors here is something quite different than triumph over the same psychological factors through occupying oneself with quantities and their functions alone.[...]

No more is it true that the mystical impulse from the end of the thirteenth and into the seventeenth century was purely and simply a reaction against the "dry intellectualism" of scholasticism. No, the flowering of mysticism during this epoch was the fruit and the result of scholasticism, prefigured in the spiritual biography of St. Thomas Aquinas himself. Notably, St. Thomas towards the end of his life arrived at mystical contemplation of God and the spiritual world and said, on returning from this ecstasy, that his written works now appeared ro him "like straw". Indeed, he wrote nothing after this.

The believing thinker thus became a seeing mystic. And this transformation did not take place in spite of his work of scholastic thought, but rather thanks to it —as its fruit and its crowning glory.

[...] Now, it is the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot which invites us to occupy ourselves quite especially with the "star" of Hermeticism in the heaven of intuition. What is this "star"? The Zohar says:

And God made the two great lights. . .originally, when the moon and sun were in intimate union, they shone with equal luminosity. The names JEHOVAH and ELOHIM were then associated as equals.. .and the two lights were dignified with the same name: MAZPAZ MAZPAZ. . .The two lights rose simultaneously and were of the same dignity. But. . . the moon humbled herself by diminishing her light, and renounced her place of higher rank. From that time she has had no light of her own, but derives her light from the sun. [...I]t was only after diminishing herself that she took the name ELOHIM. But her power is manifest in all directions. . .EL being "the dominion of the day", IM being "the dominion of the night" and HE in the middle being the remainder of the forces ("the stars"), participating in both dominions. (Zohar Bereshith 20a)

It is left to us only to cite another passage from an ancient source —from the eleventh book of Apuleius’ Metamorphosis —in order to have all the elements necessary to grapple, sufficiently equipped, with the problem of the "star" of Hermeticism and "The Sun" of the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot. Apuleius summarised his great vigil at the temple of Isis — the "arcana of the sacred night" (noctis sacratae arcana) —in the following way:

I approached the very gates of death and set one foot on Proserpine’s threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining in its brilliant radiance; I entered the presence of the gods of the under-world and the gods of the upper-world, stood near and worshipped them. (Apuleius, Transformations: The Golden Ass)

Let us now seek for the reality, having in view the above-cited passage from the Zohar and the statement made by Apuleius. The Zohar tells us that the moon "renounced her place of higher rank"—that of equality with the sun —and that "from that time she has had no light of her own, but derives her light from the sun; nevertheless, her real light is greater than that which she radiates here below". Here below, therefore, the moon reflects the light of the sun, whilst above — where her name is ELOHIM —"her power is manifest in all directions… EL being ‘the dominion of the day’, IM being ‘the dominion of the night’ and HE in the middle being the remainder of the forces (‘the stars’), participating in both dominions."

Now, the moon, in so far as she is the nocturnal luminary here below, reflects the sun, but in so far as she is the nocturnal luminary above, she shines with her own light, and it is the sun which reflects her. In other words, the moon is "solar" above and "lunar" here below, whilst the sun is "solar" here below and "lunar" above. It is in this sense that EL, the radiant part of the moon’s name above, has "the dominion of the day",i.e. it is the visible sun — reflecting the invisible moon during the day. Similarly, the visible moon reflects the sun (become invisible) during the night. The spiritual moon is therefore the sun which shines at midnight. And it is the spiritual moon — or Isis-Sophia — that Apuleius "saw shining at midnight in its brilliant radiance". For the long vigil in the Isis temple resulted in a vision of the cosmic principle of Isis, i.e. the spiritual moon or the "sun at midnight".

All these things, although presented to us in mythological clothing, relate to the profound reality of the relationship of intelligence and wisdom, and their union —intuition. For intelligence corresponds to the moon, wisdom to the sun, and intuition to the restoration of the "intimate union" of the two luminaries. [...] "The Sun" of the nineteenth Arcanum is the "sun at midnight", i.e. the "sun" that Apuleius "saw shining at midnight in its brilliant radiance", and it is this "sun" which is the "star" of Hermeticism across the ages. It is the principle of intuition, or the intimate union of transcendental intelligence and wisdom.

The Arcanum of intuition is therefore that of knowing how to raise to creative intelligence the intelligence which reflects, and how to effect its union with wisdom, i.e. that of the work of re-establishing, firstly, the union of intelligence of diminished light here below with the intelligence of complete light above, and then the union of intelligence-thus-reunited with divine wisdom (see figure).[...]

Just as the impulse of scholasticism, on the historical ladder of western civilisation, did not lead to a perfect system of scholastic philosophy, but rather to mysticism, so does individual intelligence, on the ladder of individual development, lead to intuition and not to a state where it knows all and explains all. Intelligence is not the absolute aim; in developing, it is transformed into intuition. It is called to effect the passage from argumentative reasoning to comprehensive intuition. [...]

The Zohar and Apuleius speak of the moon and the sun joined —the sign which is the sign of Isis. We find this sign again in the apocalyptic vision of the woman enveloped by the sun and with the moon under her feet. But the apocalyptic vision adds here a third element: the twelve stars.

In other words, intelligence united to wisdom in intuition still does not signify the achievement of the work of the reintegration of consciousness, if it is not crowned by a third element, which corresponds to the "stars" just as intelligence corresponds to the "moon" and wisdom to the "sun". What, therefore, is this third element?

In order to understand its role and nature it is still necessary for us to look at — and this time more closely — the experience of spirits who turned from intellectualism to intuitionism. [...It is] the German philosopher [...] Schopenhauer [...] author of the celebrated book The World as Will and Representation, who made the decisive step from Kant’s thesis (that phenomena hide the essence of things, and that the essence remains inaccessible to intelligence as such) to the intuitive introspection of the essence of one thing —the Self—a thing that represents and contains the other things of the world.

This intuitive introspection allowed him to arrive at the conclusion that it is the will which is the essence of things, and that things are only representations of the will. Therefore the world is, according to Schopenhauer, a unique will which represents or "imagines" the multiplicity of things. And as Schopenhauer found that the same experience gave rise to almost the same conclusion in Indian mystical philosophy—above all in the Vedanta, based on the Upanishads of the Vedas — he said: "The Upanishads were my consolation in life, and they will also be so in death".

Thus, the mystical philosophy of India is the original and prototype of intuitionist philosophies of the West —such as that of Schopenhauer, Deussen and Eduard von Hartmann [...]. Let us therefore examine the fundamental experience and principal conclusion to be drawn from the mystical philosophy of India, as represented by the Vedanta of the Advaita ("non-dualist") school.

This philosophy is founded on intuitive-introspection -as method. This is based on the one hand on experience of the will as the element underlying all intellectual, psychological, biological and mechanical movement, and on the other hand on the experience of the "inner eye" or detached transcendental Self, which observes the movements produced by the will. The will creates the multiplicity of mental, psychic, biological and mechanical phenomena, in contrast to the unity of "the Seer in seeing" (the transcendental Self). The transcendental Self does not move, therefore it does not change, therefore it is immortal, therefore it is not an entity separated from the real essence of the world, and thus it is one with it. The true Self of man and the essence of the real world— or God— are identical. Aham Brahma asmi ("I am Brahma") —this is the formula which gives a summary of the experience and conclusions drawn by the Vedanta.

Now, it suffices on the one hand not to identify with the will and its movements and on the other hand to identify with the transcendental Self—"the Seer in seeing"— in order to attain to the real being and essence of the world in the intuitive experience of Vedanta adherents and German intuitionist philosophers. But one could ask: Is the intuitive experience of the transcendental Self truly final and complete, so that nothing follows it or surpasses it? Is the experience of the transcendental Self truly the nec plus ultra ("the ultimate") of knowledge?

Indeed, it lacks something important: the whole spiritual world, i.e. the Holy Trinity and the nine spiritual hierarchies. The "great portent" of which the Apocalypse speaks indicates beyond the sun and moon a crown of twelve stars on the head of the woman.

The intuitive experience of the transcendental Self—sublime and stimulating as it may be —does not suffice, alone, to let us perceive, and to render us conscious of, the spiritual world. The union of the "moon" and the "sun" alone, in the human spiritual microcosm, still does not signify the experience of the spiritual macrocosm. It is not sufficient to elevate oneself to the transcendental Self; it is necessary, still further, that this transcendental Self perceives and becomes conscious of other "transcendental Selves"—many of which are higher than it. The transcendental Self of man, as eternal and immutable as it is, is not the ultimate summit in world evolution.

[..] Judaeo-Christian Hermeticism, which ranges itself on the side of Sankya with respect to the negation of the identification of the "transcendental Self with God, is intensely occupied with the third "luminary"—the "stars"—in the three aspects of astrology, angelology and trinitarian theology, which aspects correspond to the body, soul and spirit of the third "luminary". Judaeo-Christian Hermeticism is thus the sustained effort across the centuries to know and understand the three luminaries in their unity, i.e. to know and understand the "great portent which appeared in heaven — a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (Revelation xii, 1). It is the woman in this apocalyptic vision who unites the three "luminaries"— the moon, the sun and the stars, i.e. the luminaries of night, day and eternity.

It is she —the "Virgin of light" of the Pistis Sophia, the Wisdom sung of by Solomon, the Shekinah of the Cabbala, the Mother, the Virgin, the pure celestial Mary—who is the soul of the light of the three luminaries, and who is both the source and aim of Hermeticism. For Hermeticism is, as a whole, the aspiration to participation in knowledge of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul. It is not a matter of seeing the Holy Trinity with human eyes, but rather of seeing with the eyes —and in the light —of Mary-Sophia.[...]

The Athenians, also, had an analogous feminine triad, which played the principal role in the mysteries of Eleusis: Demeter—the Mother, Persephone —the Daughter, and "Athena the bringer of salvation" (cf. Olympiodorus, In Platonis Phaedonem commentaria = "Commentary on the Phaedo of Plato"; ed. W. Norvin, Leipzig, 1913, p. Ill)—where Athena was at the same time the "community of Athens" or the "soul of Athens" as it were, analogous to the "Virgin of Israel".

Historical analogies and metaphysical parallels alone, however, do not suffice to attain the complete certainty of intuition: it is for the heart to say the last decisive word. Thus the following "argument of the heart" proved to be decisive, twenty-five years ago, to the one who writes these lines.

There is nothing which is more necessary and more precious in the experience of human childhood than parental love; nothing more necessary, because the human child, alone, is not viable if it is not taken from the first moments of its life into the circle of care of parental love or, lacking parental love, its substitute-charity; nothing more precious, because the parental love experienced in childhood is moral capital for the whole of life. In childhood we receive two dowries for life, two assets from which we can draw during the whole of life: the vital biological asset which is the treasure of our health and vital energy, and the moral asset which is the treasure of health of soul and its vital energy—its capacity to love, to hope and to believe. The moral asset is the experience of parental love that we have had in childhood. It is so precious, this experience, that it renders us capable of elevating ourselves to more sublime things —even to divine things.[...] For it is the experience of parental love —and it is above all this —which renders us capable of loving the "Architect" or "First Cause" of the world as our Father who is in heaven. Parental love bears in itself true senses of the soul for the Divine —which are, by analogy, eyes and ears of the soul.

Now, the experience of parental love consists of two elements: the experience of maternal love and that of paternal love. The one and the other are equally necessary and equally precious. The one and the other render us capable of raising ourselves to the Divine. The one and the other signify to us the means of entering into a living relationship with God, which means to love God, who is the prototype of all paternity and all maternity. [...]

Similarly, it is so with the rosary prayer, where appeal to the two aspects of divine paternal love in the prayer addressed to the Father and the Mother is made during meditation on the mysteries of the Joy, Suffering and Glory of the Blessed Virgin. The rosary prayer is — in any case for the Hermeticist — again a masterpiece of simplicity, containing and revealing things of inexhaustible profundity. . a masterpiece of the Holy Spirit!

Dear Unknown Friend, the Arcanum "The Sun" with which we are occupied is an Arcanum of children bathing in the light of the sun. Here it is not a matter of finding occult things, but rather of seeing ordinary and simple things in the light of day of the sun —and with the look of a child.

The nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot, the Arcanum of intuition, is that of revelatory naivety in the act of knowledge, which renders the spirit capable of an intensity of look not troubled by doubt and by the scruples engendered by doubt, i.e. it is the vision of things such as they are under the eternally new day of the sun. It teaches the art of undergoing the pure and simple impression which reveals through itself—without intellectual hypotheses and superstructures —what things are. To render impressions noumenous— this is what it is a matter of in the Arcanum "The Sun", the Arcanum of intuition.

You will understand therefore, dear Unknown Friend, that in speaking of parental love and of its two aspects, in speaking of the practice of the novena and the rosary prayer, etc., we are in no way estranging ourselves from the theme of the nineteenth Arcanum of the Tarot; rather, on the contrary, we are penetrating to its very heart. For we are endeavouring to advance from an understanding of what intuition is to its exercise, i.e. from meditation on the Arcanum of intuition to the use of this Arcanum.

I am a tarot reader. (Yes, I know. When I tell people I am a tarot reader I get the same reaction I would get by claiming to be a stripper, minus the erections). The thing is, I approach the cards from my background as a visual communicator who understands that the job of an ‘image maker’ is to affect people through images. You probably know that the term ‘empathy’ was used by a psychologist, Theodor Lipps, to describe a certain relationship between a person and a work of art. For me, the tarot is at once a tool and a research field to understand that particular kind of empathy.

When you tell people you like tarot cards they tell you these images are associated with insanity and chicanery. You look around, you visit a few new age shops, read a few books, treat yourself to a few readings and end up confirming what you already thought: the tarot’s public image has been modeled by con-men and madmen. Trying to reconcile a love of the imagery of the cards with that harsh fact is difficult. It helps to know that the tarot’s official history is a fraud concocted in the 18th Century and that all the attitudes and superstitions around the cards evolved from that fraud. It also helps to know that in the last 20 years, a few serious researchers and historians have come forward with important and solid historical data that show how the tarot is a product of Christian medieval Europe and that it was initially conceived as a game of chance. Now, here is where things start to get interesting. First you learn that a long time before the tarot was used for divination it was used for poetic purposes. That is, the cards would be dealt out to a group of ladies and then the poet would improvise a few verses of poetry, comparing each lady with the image she was holding. The tarot was first, then, a game of analogies! When you dig a little deeper still on the use of analogies in the Middle Ages, you end up uncovering the notion of symmetry. In a work of art, each detail mirrors another detail either at a visual or at a conceptual level.  All these details together mirror the larger work, giving the viewers a visual thread that would map endless conceptual connections and suggest to the mind a certain learning pathway. Most medieval visual documents were crafted with this notion. At this point, the visual nature of the tarot starts coming forward, and with it, the beauty of its design.

The medieval notion of symmetry made use of images to facilitate analogical thinking. Cognitive scientists today see analogies as a suggestive way to foster creative problem-solving. Many of the experiments suggest that when we use a graphic, or an image, to illustrate an analogy people understand the analogy more easily because it is easier for us to map visual sameness than relational sameness. All these ideas make it possible for us to start thinking about the tarot in different terms. The depth of the tarot’s original didactic intention is hard to establish. It was, after all, a game of chance which is still practiced in many countries of Europe just as we would play bridge or poker. But thanks to people like Michael Dummet, Gertrude Moakley, Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, Robert O’Neil, Ross Caldwell and Michael Hurst we can trace its whole narrative sequence back to a ‘summa of salvation’, a morality tale that is a reflection of the time in which the tarot was created. That is the reason why you have never heard this story. The ideological agenda of the ‘new-age world’, which has claimed the tarot as a counter-cultural space for those who reject any official, male-modeled spirituality won’t have it. The market wants what the market wants.

Even so, if we want to understand the tarot as a visual document, we will do well to acknowledge the notion of symmetry – and its correlation with the tarot’s use in playing with analogies – as a viable starting point. The current understanding of the tarot, rooted in a fraudulent history, has it as a repository of symbolic knowledge. In practice this reduces the tarot to a set of mnemonic keys whose alleged meanings are parroted without taking into account the actual images. Very influential in this view has been the adherence by many tarot enthusiasts to the Jungian notion of archetypes and synchronicity as a way to explain the tarot. Disregarding the inherent value of such models, they constitute an a-historical view of the tarot that contributes nothing to our iconographic understanding of the trump series, and reduces the experience of the images to a mere intellectual exercise.

As an alternative, I propose a phenomenological approach to the tarot that doesn’t focus on symbolism as an intellectual construct but rather on the way we experience images. By contrasting the the medieval notion of symmetry with our current understanding of the brain through up-to-date cognitive and neurological research we will be able to apprehend the tarot’s language of shape. That way we will learn that in order for us to experience these images we must see them as actions, always keeping in mind that shape is a manifestation of movement. We must understand each card as a snapshot from a movement in a sequence. It is not that The Magician is ‘Snapshot One’ and La Papesse is ‘Snapshot Two’, but that The Magician includes the actual, visually verifiable act of standing up straight we see depicted in the card and it includes both the moment before and after that action. In other words, every image suggests a sense of flow. How do we experience that flow? We do so by mirroring the image. In its purest state, each image gives us a very clear directive: “Do as I do. Be as I Am.”

Mirroring is implicit in the idea of symmetry. Both are rooted on detecting sameness, a notion that is brought forward by analogical thinking.

Linguists suspect that we understand the world in terms of metaphors and that an important part of how we think about the world corresponds to our physical orientation in space. A very intriguing example of this is our understanding of time. Most of the metaphors we use to think about time are mapped from our relationship with space. In the tarot this becomes obvious as Left becomes ‘the past’ and Right becomes ‘the future’, so we can read the passage of time as a narrative and literally ‘travel’ through it. As we use our spatial orientation to orient ourselves though time each one of the the character’s postures on a card contains information about where we are, where we came from and where are we going. Here the idea of flow is again implicit. Using our body to orient ourselves both in chronological and experiential time implies mirroring with our body the flow we see in the cards. Current research on mirror neurons suggests that perception and action are linked and that the very act of contemplating an image engages the motor areas of the brain related with the performance of that action.  More important, even contemplating an action engages us emotionally because those areas of the brain connected to mirror neurons are linked to the areas of the brain concerned with emotions. The implication this may have for our understanding of body movement is profound. Researchers who study emotions have found that mimicking facial gestures elicits the same emotions we normally associate with these gestures. Pantomiming sadness, for example, would eventually erode our sense of being content. Just as mood can affect our body posture, our body posture seem to be able to affect our mood. Mirroring a tarot card means embodying the features it represents, so each one of us could access our own experience of that body posture.  In the tarot, “do as I do” becomes “feel as you have felt”. This mirroring serves as an opening for all the memories, beliefs, thoughts and sensations we have learned to associate with the specific action we see depicted in the card. Experiencing a body posture is a way of bringing forward our experience of the world. Given that this a subjective experience it opens the door for all our personal background and biases to fill-in the gaps, giving that body experience a unique and personal quality. In this way the tarot’s images can facilitate creative thinking by means of analogy. A card elicits our experience of our own body, and with it, our vast store of knowledge.

From a cognitive point of view, the tarot’s images are useful in narrowing down the field from which we can map the analogies between our current situation and our past experiences. From the perspective of the body, mirroring the tarot’s images imparts in us a sense of orientation, it gives us a key to access these past experiences and a way of grounding our circumstances in our physical sense of self.

In my Lecture Notes I alluded to the medieval quadriga exegesis as a feasible coordinates that may facilitate our lecture of tarot. This schema proposes four levels of lecture for a document: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. A phenomenological approach to the tarot would link the first and fourth layers of meaning and focus on them, leaving purposefully aside both allegorical and moral levels. It is my contention that the allegorical and moral level of the tarot are intrinsically linked, since we need to understand an allegory in order to read its moral implication. I do believe these levels to be useful in a reading, but understanding them supposes a familiarity with the history and iconography of the images that I don’t feel entitled to impart here. There is still much debate on the actual iconographic origin of the cards. Even so, I urge the serious student of the tarot to seek the work of those authors I have already cited. Besides, my practical experience suggest that a a non-symbolic approach to the tarot is more likely to generate practical information for the client. To underline the way in which our anagogical reading of the tarot is based on the literal one, in my Lecture Notes I proposed the formula: objective observation prompts intuitive insight. This essay could be seen as an expansion of that idea. ‘Objective observation’ will be inspired here by the theory of embodied semantics as way to help us understand the notion of shape-as-meaning, an idea that gives root to the tarot’s visual language and suggests that there is enough information in the posture of the characters featured in the cards for us to detect meaning without having to refer to any symbolism. In my work with the tarot I understand embodiment at two different levels. First there is the automatic physical response a person may experience by looking at an image. That response can be strengthened by describing the image in the card as an action instead of seeing it as a symbol. This is a sort of automatic mirroring in which the person’s experiences of that action – plus all the abstract concepts they have learned to relate to it – are elicited. At a second level we have the conscious action of mirroring the image, expressed when we suggest to a person that acting like the character in a card could be a positive course of action. In the conversations in this book I will suggest that we can build up the second kind of mirroring on top of the first one, in a pacing and leading schema. For now let’s just say that the physical description of an image serves both to activate a memory search in the person (sometimes this will be defined as a transderivational search or ‘TDS’) that occurs as an automatic response, and to point out a specific attitude the person may purposefully enact.

It is for this reason that the description of the image must focus on the human character we see in there. That human character, which very often is the main figure in the card, is the easiest element to map to the person who looks at the cards. It may be possible that at some point someone would feel they identified with one of the horses in The Chariot or with the black bird in The Star, but it is more likely that the person will mirror the charioteer or the blonde woman pouring water. In order to help us focus on these human characters I have devised a ‘grammar’ that will help us articulate the different parts of a character’s body and detect a coherent meaning. The basic elements of this grammar can be found in “An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development”, experimental psychologists Eleanor Gibson and Anne Pick state that the successful development of a baby depends on three key elements: Communication, Object Perception and Manipulation, and Bodily Motion. In order to thrive an infant must be able to engage in meaningful communication with others. At a very early stage this communication is of a non-verbal nature, consisting of gaze, gesture, and vocalizations. After this initial stage the child starts interacting with objects and understanding their meaning by experiencing their effect. Eventually the child’s legs and spine will be strong enough for him to become an ‘object among objects’, interacting with others from a more movable perspective. I confess that I read these findings with great curiosity and excitement, because they closely match my interpretation of the observable features of a character in a tarot card. When I was trying to synthesize a methodology to observing the images, I noticed that, with the exception of The Moon card, every single one of the trumps had a main character, and therefore, each single card could be mirrored from the perspective of our body experiences. (Even The Moon has a physical component, as it may be argued that an absence of human figures in the card suggests the possibility of our physical absence. Advise doesn’t get much more direct than that!). I also noticed that there were three constants in all the cards: all the characters have a head, a body, and two hands. I noticed that the character’s head could be categorized in three ways: facing left, facing right or facing straight forward. There were also three postures for most of the bodies: sitting, standing, or walking. Finally, while the hands of all the characters can be seen in several activities, they were always engaged in some action. Such action gives meaning to the objects these characters are holding, and by extension, they define the meaning of the four elements illustrated in the four suits, since they are all elements we handle with our hands, and therefore their meaning is the use we make of them. It was clear to me that by describing each one of these features in one card we could get a sense of what each specific posture means to us at an experiential level. More importantly, by looking at a few cards in a row we can see a movement sequence that can be described as a story. I want to make very clear that I am not claiming any historical validity of such meanings. I have devised a way to look at the cards that is founded in the tarot’s medieval origin. That is, I propose we read the tarot using the same coordinates that we would use to read any other medieval document: by acknowledging the four-layered reading proposed by quadriga exegesis and by following visual symmetries to prompt analogical thinking.  But I am not using these coordinates to explain the tarot, only to activate it as a visual language. I have condensed all these keys into a poem:

Presence is meaning.
To the left, remembrance, to the right, l’Avenir.
Those who look straight at you are seeing the present.
Fill your head with attention.
Do what the images do, not what they say.
Sit passively, stand receptively and walk actively.
Embody your destination.
Duel with the sword, build with the wand,
offer a cup, plant a coin.
Let the hands show your intention.
Forget what red is and notice what is red,
stand on a number as you would on a hill,
strip down to your armor;
for what turns gold into lead also turns salt into sugar,
what one step fulfills another could encumber
and what you wear wears you down.
Know an image by its friends:
the deepest truths hide in the obvious.

 
Let’s look at it section by section:

Presence is meaning

stands for the very idea of embodiment. Each one of the tarot’s images features a main character and that main character has a body we can mirror with our own body. The very act of a character being there, illustrated in the card, is a message, a piece of direct advice: “Be like me! Stand up straight on your own two feet, remember where you came from, practice your craft and honor your talent”. Such words spoken by the reader will elicit a metaphorical mapping from ‘doing’ to ‘being’ in the client’s brain. Remember, one of the main findings of current cognitive science is that thought is mostly unconscious. We go through memories, connections, inferences, and sensorimotor responses without being consciously aware of it. We simply cannot help doing it. That is why the reader only has to describe the action depicted in the cards to get the process going in the client’s brain. The main assumption here is that, given the context in which these images are being described in a reading about that person, the client’s brain will naturally map anything the character is doing into an orientation about how to behave. More precisely, the literal attitude described from a card will be mapped by the client’s brain into a metaphorical way of being. There is no ‘technique’ and no magic words. And there is no right or wrong description of an image. What we really want is for our words, our ‘interpretations’ to get out of the way so the client can experience the image at a pre-verbal level, with our words simply building on top of that experience. But of course, our brain won’t simply process that information at a literal level. Metaphorical thinking emerges from our literal experience of the world. At a basic level our literal language accounts for our direct, embodied experience of objects and events, upon which we then we build more abstract models of communication by giving all those literal experiences a metaphorical value. In this way we use our direct experience to describe events that aren’t directly linked to our ‘here and now’. Since all metaphors imply a transfer of properties from the source domain to the target domain, we can use what we physically know in order to understand or describe what cannot be experienced physically. I have already described the way in which we use space to map our understanding of time. By looking at a few cards in a sequence we can see the passage of time in the way we have experienced it. But it’s not only a spatial orientation which defines our understanding of time. Each one of the tarot’s images depicts a motion that carries implicit a sense of timing. Compare for example the steady pace of The Fool with the abrupt momentum of The Tower. There is a speed in Judgement that we don’t see in The Hermit, and a steadiness of pace in Justice what we may intuit in The Emperor but feels very slow compared with The Magician. This sense of timing comes again from our personal and direct experience of the actions depicted and suggest narrative elements that can be used in a reading.

Here I would like to point out something so obvious that it may even be perceived as absurd: the identity of each one of the tarot’s characters is defined by its posture. The Fool is walking with a bag over his shoulder and a walking stick in the other hand, while being chased by a dog. If we decide to represent The Fool sitting on a throne and holding a scepter, he won’t be a fool anymore. Those are the attributes that give visual identity to The Emperor. Shape is meaning and, therefore, each character’s posture is meaningful because it can be mirrored by us and it can be experienced from a multi-sensory perspective. We can remember how it feels to walk in a landscape – here, again, we see time being illustrated – and we can remember the smell of the countryside, recall the warm feeling of the sun on our back or recall the scary thought of being chased by a dog. More importantly, mirroring the image it would suggest to us that we should ignore that dog and walk at a steady pace. At either a literal or metaphorical level that is all we need to be told by the image because that is all of what that action can afford us.

To the left, remembrance, to the right, l’Avenir
Those who look straight at you are seeing the present

is alluding at our space-time coordinates: we learn to understand time by moving through space. In their book ‘Philosophy in the Flesh’ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson provide us with a very clear model for this metaphor:

The Moving Observer Metaphor

These simple coordinates: Left (Space Behind The Observer), Center (Location of the Observer), Right (Space in Front of The Observer) are giving us something to see, something to mirror, and therefore, something to understand: a sense of flow, a storyline, a narrative continuum that we can define as ‘what is happening’ or ‘where we are going’.

Current research on embodied meaning tells us that we build our more abstract thoughts on top of our bodily experience of the world, from the very basic directions, like up, down, straight, curved, diagonal, horizontal and vertical, backwards and forward, to the most complex mental operations we are capable of, like mathematical or philosophical inquiry. That is why, when we refer to a man in terms of him being ‘straight’, we don’t assume he has an iron rod instead of spine, when we refer of a certain person as ‘twisted’ nobody suspects scoliosis, or when we talk about a woman being ’cold‘ no one would consider using her to storage fish. We are able to automatically transfer these attributes from our original experience to the new context that is presented to us. Back to the tarot, even if from an iconographic point of view The Hermit could be seen as representing either the reversals of fortune in the form of old age, Time or ascetic renunciation, we must first and foremost see it as man walking with the help of a cane and a lantern. A person may not know anything about asceticism, but we have all used a lantern at some time or another along our lives. Knowing what the card means from an iconographic -moral/allegorical- point of view is important to us, but that is not what would be more pervasive when talking to a client. That is all theoretical information that the client cannot necessarily link to her personal experience. But we all have used a lantern to see, and therefore, we could use that experience to understand other events, different from using an actual lantern. So, we can be confident that when we are describing to a person how The Hermit is “using his light to gain clarity” this person won’t be just hearing us talk about changing the front porsche’s light bulbs, but potentially about an issue that needs to be understood. Joseph Grady speak of primary metaphors as those first level abstractions we map from our bodily experience of the world. Among these primary metaphors we have “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING”:

Understanding is Seeing Metaphor

Notice how all of these mappings apply to The Hermit, and how the literal description of The Hermit’s attitude or posture can be understood metaphorically in virtue of the ‘Understanding is Seeing’ metaphor. The crucial point here is that we naturally map these sources to these targets in our daily lives without paying too much attention to it. That seems to be how abstract thought arises. So, when I talk about reading a card literally as the most direct way of eliciting experiential meaning in a person I am not inviting you to cross your fingers, trust your ‘gift’ and guess, or try to get it right by any cunning device, but to understand and utilize the way our brains make meaning. Below I have copied a list of primary metaphors compiled by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I have paired some tarot images with them. Try to think of sentences in which the literal description of the images can elicit these primary metaphors:

You may notice how the same images have been paired with several different primary metaphors. If we talk about The Hermit in terms of “using his lantern to see” the ‘Understanding Is Seeing’ metaphor seems pretty apt, but if we were to add “The Hermit is using his lantern to see where he came from” then we will need the ‘Time Is Motion’ metaphor to map the left of the card to ‘the past’, the right of the card to the future and the whole left-right motion to the coordinates of The Hermit’s lifetime. While at a literal level The Hermit may be visually tracing back his steps, the sentence invite our brain to take its metaphorical meaning as in “looking at the past”. If we extended our reading further by saying “The Hermit is using his lantern to see where he came from and get a sense of where he is going” we will need the ‘Purposes Are Destinations’ metaphor to reframe The Hermit’s actions as mental activity conductive to orientation as a goal. Just as a simple concept can be mapped into a single body experience, we also put all we know about several body experiences -seeing, walking, sorting physical obstacles- at the service of one more complex notion. Combining the ‘Understanding Is Seeing’ metaphor with the ‘Time Is Motion’ metaphor and the ‘Purposes Are Destinations’ metaphor is what will allow us to see a man who walks with a cane and points a lantern to the left as letting our experience inform our actions.

Fill your head with attention.

This key corresponds to the head of the characters, or more precisely with their glances. By looking the character’s head we will know if the figure is suggesting us to pay attention to the past (Left), the present (Straight Forward) or the future (Right). depending on the direction of the main character’s head one single card will be saying to us “look back”, “Look ahead”, “focus on here and now”; but when we see more than one card in a sequence we can observe a ‘head movement’ that describes a change of focus, a redirection or even a persistence of attention.

Do what the images do, not what they say

is a direct allusion to observe the character’s action without getting derailed by its alleged symbolic meaning. In The Moon card, for example, I have suggested that an absence of human figures suggests our physical absence. This will be a lot more useful than seeing The Moon as ‘the mother archetype’. From a phenomenological perspective, night-time is dark and we have a set of experiential learnings that associate darkness with danger. But we also have an experience of the moon that gives us a sense of timing: we know that the darkness will only last a fortnight, and this is reinforced by the fact that after The Moon card we have The Sun card: daylight trumps night-time. Still, within itself, we can see the moon as full and regard all of our experiences about how this event occurs once a month. Here, a phenomenological observation of the image in itself is suggesting a different sense of time that we can, by transferring our literal experience into a metaphor, map into a feminine cycle if this is analogically sound. The moon is not a disembodied, abstract symbol, but an event we all have experienced. We don’t need to read Clarissa Pinkola-Este’s books to understand what The Moon means, we only need a window.

Sit passively, stand receptively and walk actively.
Embody your destination.

In his extraordinary book ‘From Molecule to Metaphor’, Jerome Feldman points: “… the process of understanding through embodied simulation inherently involves a choice of perspective. The three basic alternatives are: agent (pushing), experiencer (being pushed) and observer (seeing third party)”. A big part of what ‘mirroring the tarot’ means has to do with finding ourselves in the cards. We find three main body postures in the tarot: sitting, standing and walking. We possess experiential information for these three states. Sitting is our most passive state after lying down (which is not depicted in the tarot). Just as the child that learns to stand, in our upright position we become ‘an object among objects’. We are engaged with our surroundings but we aren’t yet active. That is why I describe that state as ‘receptive’. We gather information, we emit signals, but there is no definite sense of movement. Such movement will be the next step, defined as the actual action of walking. (There are other body postures defined in the tarot, like falling down in The Tower and kneeling down in The Star. Both of them imply one step beyond being standing still, and therefore they will be considered as active). Any of these three actions defines the ‘destination’ of our mind, our attitude expressed by our body. Mirroring the card would then imply mirroring that physical attitude, either at a literal or at a metaphorical level. For example, we have seen how The Fool walks forward, with his eyes fixed on the future. At a literal level this body posture could be mirrored by taking a walk, while at a metaphorical level we could talk about ‘moving on’ as a way to suggest we are forgetting an ex-lover. The important thing to reinforce here, that every single action in a character’s posture can be seen as direct advice, with application that could be literal or metaphorical. Comparing the different body postures of the characters we see in a row of cards gives us a sense of sequential motion describing an evolution or change of action: going from a card that shows a character sitting down to a card that shows a character walking gives a clear indication of taking action, while the opposite would suggest we wait. At each level: head, body and hands, the characters are giving us direct pointers as to be, or how to act.

Duel with the sword, build with the wand, offer a cup, plant a coin.

Four elements conform the tarot’s suits: swords, wands, cups and coins. We manipulate all of these elements with our hands. Both the use we have for them and the context in which we use them defines what they mean. Think for a moment about what would happen if a knight challenges another knight to a duel, and at the very last minute each warrior draws a cup instead of a sword. The whole event would get re-contextualized and the ‘crossing’ of cups will evoke in us a different set of multi-sensory references than those evoked by the crossing of swords. The sound of two cups clinking together, and all the memories it brings in all different sensory levels would be the meaning of the suit of Cups, just as the sound of two swords clashing, and all the scenes that sound brings up would be the meaning of the suit of swords. From this we can infer what is behind the phrase Let the hands show your intention. Someone who offers us a cup intends something very different from someone who points a sword at us or who gives us a coin. The hands of a character in a card show us what the character is doing, and since our experience of any object has an emotional component implicit in our reading of the goal such an object will suggest we accomplish whatever a character is doing with his hands and tells us what it is the character is hoping to achieve.

Let the hands show your intention

Looking at a single card, the hands of a character give us specific ideas about the kind of action that it makes sense to imitate. Looking at several cards in a row, each action of the hands can be seen as steps in a movement sequence, revealing a more complex and complete intention. The transformation of an object held by a character into a different object would suggest a corresponding evolution or reinterpretation in our goals. A passive scepter that becomes a cane suggests action, just as a cup being poured, symmetrically transfixed into a person tied up, suggest stagnation.

Forget what red is and notice what is red,

is another reference to privileging experience over disembodied symbolism. It is our experience of red, as in blood rushing through our veins, what gives red its meaning. Since this verse, and the following five, are symmetrical, this line will mirror this other line in the poem: For what turns gold into lead also turns salt into sugar. Meaning, defined by our relationship with the world, is what differences a nugget if one metal god only to cast little soldiers from a nugget of another metal we treasure. We experience a certain kind of white dust as salty and another one as sweet. We know what ‘salt’ means because our taste buds remember that particular experience and can distinguish it from the experience associated with the word ‘sugar’.

Stand on a number as you would on a hill

has symmetry with what one step fulfills another could encumber and both refer to using numbers sequentially and not symbolically. We learn to experience numbers through our fingers and we use that embodied knowledge to count. Counting can be both a quantitative act and a qualitative act. Two is more than one, which could imply that two defines a higher quantity than one, but also, that two is better than one if we are planning to venture into an unexplored cave, or one can be better than two if we got a last piece of cake and we are alone at home. Numbers define progressions that expand or contract. ‘Standing’ on a sequence of numbers suggest that, by orienting ourselves in space, numbers will point to us if we are advancing or retreating, moving ‘up’ or ‘down’.

Strip down to your armor

has symmetry with what you wear wears you down. Both sentences invite us to read the progressive nakedness of the tarot characters as empowerment through transcendence of the material world. In the trump’s sequence the characters start heavily dressed and start loosing clothing as soon as the heavenly realm becomes more present. The message seems to be simple: the more we need to wear, the less powerful we are. We are limited by our status, social perceptions, roles and insecurities. A naked character becomes pure movement.  At a secular level I would reframe that by saying that transcendence lies beyond our menial needs for status symbols, and flow is only achieved if we drop our vertical defenses. The flesh that cannot be pierced cannot be loved. A raised bridge cannot be crossed.

Know an image by its friends:

is an allusion to the very notion of symmetry. Any image has a ‘friend’ on anther image that shares some of its visual or conceptual attributes. Some of these visual pairings are quite obvious, like The Lover and Judgement, or Temperance and The Star, some of them are conceptual in nature, like The Pope and The Devil, and therefore harder to grasp. Beyond that, the above set of keys suggest that all heads have symmetry with the other heads, all bodies have symmetry with other bodies, and all of the hands, and the object they hold, have symmetry with other hands and objects. Comparing and contrasting these symmetries is what gives us a narrative. But there are of course many other things that are symmetrical, like La Papesse’s body and the building in The Tower. (By comparing the evolution of the crown from one image to the other, we get a message). The pillars in the Chariot’s canopy are symmetrical to the trees in The Hanged Man, and the celestial body in The Sun has symmetry with The Hermit’s lantern. In fact, if you fan the cards so you can see at once only half of all of them, you will discover countless symmetries. They aren’t for me to point out but for you to discover.

All these keys suggest that we can draw a lot of information by approaching individual cards as actions and also by comparing how these actions evolve in a sequence of cards. In his book ‘The Meaning of The Body’ Mark Johnson tells us that “life and movement are intrinsically linked”. Cognitive scientists talk about ‘schemas’ as conceptual structures we have for understanding experiences. All of the movement schemas we have learned through our life-experience and have been encoded in our brains are activated in response to our environment. Since our brain is, in a way, an self-regulating best-match seeker mechanism, this often happens below our conscious awareness. But the power these schemas have to bring forward memories, feelings, and physiological sensations is the very act of meaning-making. We don’t need to be told what things mean because we know, we have experienced them, not as abstract constructs but in real life. Mark Johnson also points out how, curiously, our interface gets erased in the act of perception: we don’t feel our own body but these things our body is in contact with. That makes it very easy for us to overlook our own physicality as the foundation of meaning-making. That is why we can say: the deepest truths hide in the obvious.

The theory of embodied semantics proposes that “concepts are represented in the brain within the same sensory-motor circuitry in which the enactment of that concept relies”. My contention is that, since the objective of perception is to inform our actions, and since the human brain seems to respond to still images implying motion as if these images were actually moving, describing images as actions is a shorter path to suggest an idea to the brain. This all sounds very complex when in truth it is very simple: while looking at the tarot we must work with what is there, in the image, because that is a symmetrical – or analogical – way of tapping into what is ‘there’ within the other person’s experience. Describing a card automatically becomes a description of the person who is looking at the card. As I have already hinted when I mentioned mirror neurons, this model of thought argues that mental connections are in fact active neural connections. Of uttermost importance for my model is the idea, promoted by many cognitive experts, that the brain doesn’t separate shape from meaning, and therefore, we must look at each card knowing that the action depicted in it shows in itself its own conceptual intention.

On the other hand ‘intuitive insight’ can be further understood to be analogical thinking, and as such, stripped of any vagueness or mysticism. Considered by many as our brain’s best talent, analogical thinking is currently used by any student trying to solve new problems based on old lessons he read in a book, by lawyers who look for the right precedent for their cases, by researchers on artificial intelligence building computer models of neural connections, by scientists open to a ‘Eureka! moment’ or designers who seek inspiration in nature, by poets trying to say the same old things in new ways, and by anybody who uses their previous experience to face new challenges. Analogical thinking can also be seen as the root of magical thinking, as the sorcerer who aims to control nature by handling little bits of it. In that regard I would like to clarify that I am not proposing a causal relationship between a few random cards and a person’s life as a magician would. Seeing something happening in the cards won’t automatically make anything happen in real life. What I propose is that whatever can be pointed out in the card and taken as analogous to the person’s life can inspire an action if we build up on the empathy that is established between the image and the person, so that the image becomes a suggestion. This concept lies at the heart of the model I am proposing.

Analogical thinking can be very useful in fostering creativity and proposing unexpected insights, but is not magic. Although our ability to map an analogy doesn’t guarantee that the analogy is right, analogical thinking is our most effective tool when it comes to breaking away from ‘here and now’ to help us find alternative solutions to our problems. In working with the tarot, analogies have proved to be exceptionally useful at suggesting ideas. As Milton Erickson put it beautifully when speaking/writing about analogies in hypnosis:

“Because they can’t reject the analogy; they can recognize the parallel. If you just talk about the problem they can refuse to recognize that. The analogy they have to recognize; they have to recognize the parallel. In doing so, they partially recognize the problem.”

By understanding shape as meaning we can elicit an analogical response in a person. This form of advice taps into the person’s experience without imposing an external frame of reference. We are using that person’s experiential knowledge to define her coordinates and any possible course of action. Using the tarot’s images to help a person remember those learnings – either explicit or implicit – that they already have, can help them cope with reality in their own terms. The main idea I want to propose here is that in a tarot reading we use images to talk to the brain in a suggestive way. To clarify our objective, we must strive to do this by the most direct means, and along the way getting rid of any superstitious procedure whose effect within the reading cannot be causally established.

In conclusion, a descriptive approach to the tarot, both historically sound and in tune with today’s cognitive research should accomplish two things: first, by using medieval keys -quadriga exgesis and symmetry- to read the tarot as a medieval document we could reframe all the current notions about ‘secret codes’ and ‘hidden mysteries’ people associates to the tarot into a more sober understanding of what these images actually are. (As far as I know, acknowledging the quadriga exegesis as an useful reading schema for the tarot is something most serious historians do, but I have never seen the notion of medieval symmetry applied to the tarot before). Second, this approach should produce a more elegant model to think about the tarot, better suited to our contemporary understanding of how images affect us and what use we may have for that kind of aesthetic experience. This should help us dispense with the “How do you know the client’s question?”, “Do you look at their fingernails?” and all that nonsense which sadly defines the way in which most wannabe readers approach, or think about, tarot readings.

We now know enough about the brain to keep from using the psychic/paranormal understanding of the tarot. The supernatural is increasingly becoming an out-dated notion. If from a historical point of view the tarot was an amusing game, we can update that view to see tarot readings as cognitive play based on our brain’s ability to engage in analogical thinking to recall its own embodied knowledge. That’s how images work us.

Enrique Enriquez
New York, 2009

Most Tarot readers would agree that Tarot speaks a symbolic language. Language is tricky, though. Meanings can be subtle and hidden, or they can turn around as circumstances change. The word "blue" can represent the sky on a sunny day, or it can indicate depression. A sunny day is cheerful in most contexts, while in a severe drought it’s not. In the same way that words change meaning with context, a Tarot card does as well.

It can take years to build one’s Tarot vocabulary. But just as toddlers begin to chatter as soon as they learn a few words, and manage to say quite a lot, it’s possible to start reading Tarot as soon as one begins to apply meaning to the cards. One way is by looking for how the cards in a spread interrelate.

According to Gail Fairfield, in Everyday Tarot: A Choice Centered Book, a good way to understand first the three numbers of the Minor Arcana is to view them geometrically. One is a point, Two is two connected points forming a line, and Three is three connected points forming a triangular plane (Figure 1). When we move from the one-dimensional, or linear, Two to the two-dimensional plane of the Three, something recognizable begins to take shape. Ideas, feelings, urges, or seeds of effort begin to develop into definite plans that seek a multi-dimensional form. In much the same way, when we work with more than one card in a spread, the interrelationships form a shape for interpretation.

Suit and element are important to consider. Sometimes Cups are empty, or dry. Earth requires moisture to be fertile, but a flood is a problem. Sometimes Swords are watery, as the air can be humid at times; and most people know about the triad that makes fire: oxygen (air), heat, and fuel (Figure 2). Fire produces smoke (air) and ash (earth). Water can put out a fire, but in doing so produces steam, releasing potent energy. When hydrogen is burned, the resulting byproduct is water. Seldom in nature do we see the elements in their pure forms, but it’s sometimes useful to try to separate them in order to understand a situation, especially in a Tarot reading.

Tarot numbers may be even more interdependent and overlapping in meaning, if that’s possible. Taking Threes as an example, we need to first look back at the Twos. Two can be seen as balanced polarities. That balance is frequently wrought with tension, conflict, struggles for dominance, or a stalemate between unresolved concerns. When we come to Three, that prior tension is released. The energies that built up in the Twos move forward in a more stable or cohesive way at Three, or they may fall apart, to merge or dissolve back into One.

The Threes in Tarot are mostly perceived as positive, and perhaps that has to do with their relationship to the Empress of the Major Arcana, which bears the number III and is usually seen as benevolent, loving, prosperous, creative, nurturing. But even she can have her bad days, and the negative side of the Great Mother archetype can be very bad indeed. It’s important to keep a balanced frame of reference when considering the minor Threes as well. No card is entirely positive or negative. Each represents a spectrum of meanings that come into play depending on the situation and point of view.

Threes relate to The Empress, which in turn relates to all four Queens, as well as numerologically to The Hanged Man and The World. One can think of The Hermit, as well as each of the four Nines of the Minor Arcana, as equivalent to 3 x 3. The Empress represents gestation and birth. In turn the Death card, with its digit ending in Three, completes a cycle. Six, which numbers the Lovers card as well as all four Sixes of the Minor Arcana, is the sum of 3 + 3. This can be considered when reading all the Three, Six, and Nine cards, and considering how they might represent a situation as it develops.

The same card can have multi-layered meanings within the same reading. Some of the best Tarot spreads show us the development of a situation from one stage to another. One example is the Dynamic Hexagramme offered at FourHares.com. When using that spread, a card read as a clarification of the opening card can carry one meaning, while the same card can take on another meaning altogether when viewed as part of another trigram (Figure 3).

A significator in another spread can work in a similar way, since every other card in the spread relates back to it, but each in its own way. Reversals, when used, provide yet another dynamic.

This means we need to be adaptable when assigning meanings to cards in a reading, and we need to keep in mind that their meanings can shift and flex, sometimes dramatically, from one reading to the next, or even one part of a spread to the next.

Does all this make Tarot overly complex? Yes and no. It is at times a good reason to limit a reading to a spread of just enough cards to answer the question or concern at hand.

Here I have copied and commented some selected quotes from a paper titled: "Indirect Forms of Suggestion", by Milton H. Erickson (www.erickson-foundation.org) and Ernest L. Rossi (www.ernestrossi.com/ernestrossi). Some of the techniques used by Erickson may be of interest in regard of the use of metaphor in readings, and specifically, to the usefulness of describing a card to a client, this is, the convenience of using a tarot card as an object of fixation, as understood in hypnotherapy, so it can elicit the relevant imagery that would lead a client towards important insights. This places the use of tarot within the idea of "magic as the intentional use of symbols to engage the mind in a process of transformation."

For starters, let’s see how Erickson (and Rossi) describe the stages of what constitutes an indirect suggestion:

(1) the fixation of attention, (2) depotentiating conscious sets and habitual frameworks, (3) unconscious search, (4) unconscious processes, and (5) hypnotic response. In essence, an indirect suggestion is regarded as one that initiates an unconscious search and facilitates unconscious processes within subjects so that they are usually somewhat surprised by their own response when they recognize it. More often than not, however, subjects do not even recognize the indirect suggestion as such and how their behavior was initiated and partially structured by it.

Now, let see at how that process can be applied to the experience of looking at a tarot card:

(1) Fixation of attention

The client is invited, either by gesture or by words, to focus on a given tarot card. The context in which the even occurs: a tarot session, and the fact that the card has been selected, either randomly or by conscious choice, gives personal relevance to this act of attention. The historical weight and long tradition tarot has ads credibility to the entire process.

(2) Depotentiating conscious sets and habitual frameworks

The tarot reader describes the card. He doesn’t interprets the card, but he simply describes what is evident: situation, position of the character, general attitude, the events taking place… The card becomes a therapeutic metaphor, a story by itself, without direct reference to the client.

(3) Unconscious search

The client search for meaning, looking for analogical connections between the image that is being described and her own personal situation. This process is helped by the reader by means of indirect associations, truism, questions, the use of time, and a set of tools we will soon describe.

(4) Unconscious processes

Realizations, insights, feelings and emotions than in other context, or following a direct comment, question, or request, wouldn’t have been accessed so easily, are elicited. The process occurs naturally and without resistance from the client’s part. Most of this process won’t be ever known by the tarot reader, It doesn’t has to be. The client must be granted the choice of withholding information. Part of this process won’t be even acknowledged by the client at a conscious level. At least, not at the precise moment of the reading.

(5) Hypnotic response.

A living metaphor evolves and expands itself with time, and takes special relevance when an specific event triggers it. In this way, each tarot card becomes a ‘cognitive talisman’ whose effect provides hints to the subconscious mind about how to respond to certain situations.

Discussion

Now, allow me to expand in some of the specific strategies that help suggestions being given indirectly by quoting from Erickson and Rossi’s paper:

1. Indirect Associative Focusing. The simplest indirect form of suggestion is to raise a relevant topic without directing it in any obvious manner at the subject. Erickson likes to point out that the easiest way to help patients talk about their mothers is to talk about your own mother. A natural indirect associative process is thereby set in motion within the patients that brings up apparently spontaneous associations about their mother.

This is exactly what takes place when one describes the situation depicted on any given card. We are opening a space for the client to do a transderivational search and find "herself in the card" by means of associations. I am not talking here about describing the meaning of the card, but describe the image in the card, as if one is showing it to the client.

Since Erickson does not directly ask about the patient’s mother, the usual conscious sets and mental framewords (e.g., psychological defenses) that such a direct question might evoke are bypassed. In a similar manner, when Erickson is working in a group, he will talk to one person about the hypnotic phenomena he wants another target person to experience. As he talks about hand levitation, hallucinatory sensations, or whatever, there is a natural process of ideomotor or ideosensory response that takes place within the target subject on an autonomous or unconscious level. Erickson utilizes these spontaneous and usually unrecognized internal responses to "prime" a target subject for hypnotic experience before the subject’s resistance or limited beliefs about his or her own capacities can interfere.

An additional kind of description is the one that includes kinesthetic stimuli, as in describing the client the sensations that the character featured in the card seems to be experiencing: "having a cat scratching you ‘there’ certainly hurts, it has to make your skin sore… yet the man seems to be enjoying the breeze he feels on his face". This is, again, an indirect way of addressing sensations and emotions that may be relevant to the client at a metaphorical level.

Similarly, in therapy Erickson uses a process of indirectly focusing associations to help patients recognize a problem. He will make remarks, or tell stories about a network of topics S1, S2, S3, Sk, all of which have a common "focus" association, S 1, which Erickson hypothesizes to be a relevant aspect of the patient’s problem.

In the context of our work with tarot, every storyline and metaphor we use gets automatically contextualized as being "about the client" by means of context and expectations.

The patient sometimes wonders why Erickson is making such interesting but apparently irrelevant conversation during the therapy hour. If S 1 is in fact a relevant aspect of the patient’s problem, however, the patient will frequently find himself talking about it in a surprisingly revelatory manner. If Erickson guessed wrong and S 1 is not a relevant aspect, nothing is lost; the patient’s associative matrix simply will not add enough significant contributions to raise S 1 to a conscious and verbal level. In this case Erickson allows himself to be corrected and goes on to explore another associative matrix. This indirect associative focusing approach is the basic process in what Erickson calls the "Interspersal approach." (NOTE FROM EE: Obviously, there is nothing wrong about being wrong; but still, one can narrow down the topics into the most relevant one by asking the client to look at the cards and consciously pick one that feels relevant).”

2. Truisms Utilizing Ideodynamic Processes and Time. The basic unit of ideodynamic focusing is the truism, which is a simple statement of fact about behavior that the patient has experienced so often that it cannot be denied. In most of our case illustrations it will be found that the senior author frequently talks about certain psychophysiological processes or mental mechanisms as if he were simply describing objective facts to the patient (NOTE FROM EE: Change "psychophysiological processes" for the actions and attitudes depicted in the cards). Actually these verbal descriptions can function as indirect suggestions when they trip off ideodynamic responses from associations and learned patterns which already exist within patients as a repository of their life experience. The "generalized reality orientation" (Shor, 1959) usually maintains these subjective responses in appropriate check when we are engaged in ordinary conversation. When attention is fixed and focused in trance so that some of the limitations of the patient’s habitual mental sets are depotentiated, however, the following truisms may actually trip off a literal and concrete experience of the suggested behavior.

You already know how to experience pleasant sensations like the warmth of the sun on your skin.

Everyone has had the experience of nodding their head yes or shaking it no even without quite realizing it.

It could be said that each Tarot card illustrates some sort of truism: "You know how one can be at the top and suddenly, find oneself at the very bottom" La Rove De Fortune; "You know how much more pleasant feels to travel light" in Le Mat. Or that the situation depicted in the card can be turned into a truism: "You know how it feels to loose your ground" in La Maison Diev.

Another important form is the truism that incorporates time. Erickson would rarely make a direct suggestion for a definite behavioral response without tempering it with a time variable that the patient’s own system can define.

Sooner or later your hand is going to lift (eyes close, etc.).

Your headache (or whatever) will disappear as soon as your system is ready for it to leave.

Building on Erickson’s examples, one could ask: "I wonder how long is going to take for that water to cool down", in Temperance; or "the pain of cutting all these limbs will recede with time" in XIII.

3. Questions that Focus, Suggest, and Reinforce. Recent research (Sternberg, 1975) indicates that when questioned the human brain continues an exhaustive search throughout its entire memory system on an unconscious level even after it has found an answer that is apparently satisfactory on a conscious level. The mind scans 30 items per second even when the person is unaware that the search is continuing. This unconscious search and activation of mental processes on an unconscious or autonomous level is the essence of Erickson’s indirect approach, wherein he seeks to utilize a patient’s unrecognized potentials to evoke hypnotic phenomena and therapeutic responses.

Think here on raising the question of why a character in a card is doing what he or she is doing, on wondering aloud about what kind of feelings the character may be entertaining in that situation/position: "One wonders how may feel that woman by letting go all that water" Lestoille.

Questions are of particular value as indirect forms of suggestion when they cannot be answered by the conscious mind. Such questions tend to activate unconscious processes and initiate the autonomous responses which are the essence of trance behavior. The following are illustrations of how a series of questions can focus attention to initiate trance, reinforce comfort, and lead to hypnotic responsiveness.

Would you like to find a spot you can look at comfortably?

As you continue looking at that spot, do your eyes get tired and have a tendency to blink?

Will they close all at once or flutter a bit first as some parts of your body begin to experience the comfort so characteristic of trance?

Does that comfort deepen as those eyes remain closed so you would rather not even try to open them?

And how soon will you forget about your eyes and begin nodding your head very slowly as you dream a pleasant dream?

This series begins with a question that requires conscious choice and volition on the part of the patient and ends with a question that can only be carried out by unconscious processes. An important feature of this approach is that it is failsafe in the sense that any failure to respond can be accepted as a valid and meaningful response to a question.

Following Erickson’s example, one could describe a card like L’Empereur, by saying: "When one finds the right place, one can sit proud and relaxed… the spine feels like pulled from above, erect but relieved, so one can look at the rest of the world with gentleness, understanding and piety, since every face and every problem present to us as an epiphany." Here, we are anchoring the unconscious capacity to experience insight in the face of trouble, with the physical, tangible, sensation of sitting down with a straight back, just like L’Empereur suggests.

4. Implication. An understanding of how Erickson uses psychological implication can provide us with the clearest model of his indirect approach. Consider the following example of the multiple implications in a single sentence that seemingly states the obvious.

The very complexity of mental functioning, (A truism about psychology that initiates a "yes" or acceptance set for what follows.) you go into trance to find out (With a slight vocal emphasis on "to find out," this phrase implies the patient will go into trance and will go into trance to find something important). a whole lot of things you can do, (Implies that it is not what the therapist does but what the patient does that is important.) and they are so many more than you dreamed of. (Pause.) (The pause implies that the patient’s unconscious may now make a search to explore potentials previously undreamed of. This sets up an important expectancy for experiencing unusual or hypnotic phenomena.)

Again, if we look at La Papesse, we could say: "Your memory guards only the events that truly matters (A truism) and whatever comes to mind when you look at the past (suggest to make an act of remembrance and find something) can be transformed by you into knowledge (the person’s own capacity to learn is what counts) and used in the present. (Pause, to allow the entire suggestion to sink-in).

It is important in formulating implications to realize that the therapist only provides a stimulus; the hypnotic aspect of psychological implications is created on an unconscious level by the listener. The most effective aspect of any suggestion is that which stirs the listener’s own associations and mental processes into automatic action; it is this autonomous activity of the listener’s own mental processes that creates hypnotic experience.

Although “Indirect Forms of Suggestion”* is a longer essay, these quotes and my respective comments should give you a detailed idea of the kind of work I am suggesting. The underlying idea here is that such patterns for indirect suggestion are present in all tarot readings, independently of the reader’s awareness to them. What we commonly call a ‘prediction’ may very well be just the client’s enactment of a post-session suggestion the reader implanted with or without knowing so. All readings share a common pace-and-leading structure in which the expression of a fact that is recognizable by the client automatically validates those who the client may not recognize yet but are projected into the future. While functioning in a pace-and-leading structure, the tarot becomes a tool for modeling behavior, even if we assume that we are just there to give our clients ‘hope’. A conscious understanding of these techniques should reassess our responsibility as readers when delivering information to clients. By understanding the role that suggestion plays in our work with the tarot we can help the psychological processes that are an integral part of a reading to take place in a way that can be more controlled by the reader and therefore more useful to the client.

Enrique Enriquez
New York 2007-2009
www.enriqueenriquez.net

Photo credit: Tim Bowen

* For further study read ‘Hypnotic Realities: The Induction of Clinical Hypnosis and Forms of Indirect Suggestion’, by Milton H Erickson, M.D., Sheila I Rossi, Ernest L Rossi

Other suggested resources:

Milton Erickson’s Contribution To Therapy, by Stephen Lankton (http://lankton.com/epist.htm)

My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson, M.D, by Sidney Rosen

Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D., by Jay Haley