In 2006 I published a short entry titled “Tarot” in the Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development that I want to reproduce here with minor changes:

A Tarot deck consists of 78 pictorial cards. The pictures on the cards resemble illustrations to a fairy tale, or an adventure story. This is the story of an individual journey through life, with its many events and experiences. Each card represents a moral lesson that a human soul must learn in order to be fruitful and creative in experiential endeavours. In order to go ahead, each one of us has to often leave behind some illusions and dependencies that are counterproductive to human growth and spiritual development. These situations are also symbolically represented in Tarot cards. Nearly every one of the cards has an image of a living being, a human figure situated in different contexts. This figure is not just a physical body but the mind, soul and spirit as well. And while a body goes through life and accomplishes different tasks, the human psyche too goes through transformations, as life itself calls for the constant renewal and enlargement of our consciousness. The journey through the cards’ imagery is therapeutic as each new life experience contributes to self-understanding and, ultimately, spiritual rebirth. In the Tarot deck, rebirth is signified by the Sun card, with its image of a small child warming in the sunshine, the psychic energy of a child enriched by the solar energy of the whole universe.

There is no proven origin of Tarot cards. Different sources mention different geographical and historical roots. The only factual information about Tarot genesis is a set of seventeen elaborately painted cards now located in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and documented as dating back to 1392. The collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York contains thirty- five cards from a full deck whose origins go back to around the middle of the 15th century. Tarot has been traditionally used as a divinatory tool, although Michael Dummett presents Tarot as belonging to a family of card games, integral to specific cultures. Psychologically, each card in the deck carries a strong humanistic aspect in terms of the dominating personality drive being an instinct to grow, develop, differentiate, and nurture our spiritual feelings. Tarot readings, despite being traditionally considered irrational, nonetheless help to achieve a wider scope of awareness than rational thinking alone can provide. Tarot brings to awareness many initially unperceived meanings thereby contributing to human learning based on both actual and potential experiences that encompass past, present, and future aspects. The cards may be considered to project subconscious human desires, wishes, beliefs, and hopes, and the power of Tarot symbolism is such that the images may transcend existing blocks and defenses. The Tarot images cannot be reduced to merely arbitrary symbols; according to the Hermetic tradition they constitute, in a coded format, an ordered system of esoteric knowledge hiding in the Memoria. The Tarot symbols can be considered to represent the universal language that is structured in accord with a certain syntax and semantics. A Tarot reader translates the non-verbal, pictorial language of symbols and signs into spoken word. Many typical life experiences are represented in the patterns that appear when the cards are being spread in this or that layout. As themes emerge in the course of a reading, therapeutic material is being gathered. This material contributes to the healing of one’s psyche as it provides the necessary guidance toward solving a variety of problems or clarifying an ambiguous situation. The four suits in the Tarot are connected to four ancient elements: pentacles to earth, wands to fire, swords to air, and cups to water. One of the most popular spreads is called the Celtic Cross: it comprises ten positions combined together to provide information illuminating a particular question or query. Some positions in a spread signify the dimension of time; that’s why there can be a peculiar feeling of gazing into the future and revisiting the past during readings. Philosophically, a spread reflects a four-dimensional view on time, in which past, present and future events coexist. David Bohm, a physicist, has posited all events as enfolded in the timeless implicate order. In the physical world they unfold into explicate order thereby creating time in our customary three-dimensional reality. Perhaps Tarot readings enable us to access the implicate order in its past and future aspects. Moving along the levels of order human consciousness undergoes evolution: it grows and expands as it reaches the spiritual realm. The spiritual quest becomes quite literally associated with personal growth as an individual acquires greater knowledge and awareness along his/her developmental path.

This is only a very brief and general introduction to the Tarot story, but its focus is the important problematic of human development, that is, our intellectual and moral growth as a function of learning from the information “encoded” in the Tarot images. In my 2011 book Re-Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic I have substantially expanded this theme, while staying faithful to the idea of experiential learning and informal education provided by Tarot readings and the interpretation of images.

I am less concerned with Tarot “history and mystery” (using Sir Michael Dummett’s words) than with the practical effects of Tarot having far-reaching implications at the level of individual and social consciousness. A talk show on 2 June 2011 with Erik Davis, host of Progressive Radio Network, on the topic “Tarot, bricolage, and the language of images: talking about reading and cards with Inna Semetsky” clarifies this point.

In Richard Roberts’ account of Tarot readings, including a reading for, and a dialogue with, Joseph Campbell, he suggested that it is rather pointless to construct hypotheses “about Tarot origins… because the ultimate importance of Tarot is that it is a symbolic system of cosmic, moral, and natural laws, each of which has the same underlying principle, operating in all areas relevant to human endeavor, and which ties together all three systems” (1987, p. 7). The very fact that Tarot is alive and well today confirms its resilience. For the purpose of my continuous research into, and practice with, Tarot it matters little who, where and when gave birth to Tarot because the “essence of their importance for us is that a very real and transforming human emotion must have brought them to birth. It seems apparent that these old cards were conceived deep in the guts of human experience, at the most profound level of the human psyche. It is to this level in ourselves that they will speak” (Nichols, 1980, p. 5).

Tarot “speaks” in the language of signs, symbols and images that becomes “decoded” by a genuine reader. This language differs from the verbal expressions of the conscious mind. The common language of expression used by the objective psyche or soul (Anima Mundi) should, if properly understood, allow us to see beyond the veil of individual and cultural differences and barriers. The world’s quintessential soul, Anima Mundi, holds together the four physical, material, elements, namely air, earth, fire and water; itself being a fifth, invisible, “element”. Through Tarot, the invisible becomes visible and we can access the deep meanings of our experiences. It is the hermeneutics of Tarot, described in detail in my book that provides us with the opportunity of understanding this common, even if hypothetical, symbolic language. The Bible refers to a time when the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech, and all people were one. Medieval symbolism considered the World as a book of God written in a codex vivus, which is to be deciphered. The philosopher Bacon contrasted the apparent unreliability of human communication with the language based on real character, the use of which would have helped people to understand each other by means of shared meanings. This understanding can expand the realm of our choices and possibilities, of which we may remain unaware if not for the Tarot guidance. Valentin Tomberg presented Tarot Arcana as authentic symbols that can render us capable of making discoveries and engendering new ideas.

As recently noted by philosopher and abbot Mark Patrick Hederman in his book Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as Symbol, Tarot provides us with the system to fill the gaps produced by the area “where education and trained sensibility are in short supply” (2003, p. 86). As an educator, I agree with Hederman that “each of us should be given at least the rudiments of one of the most elusive and important symbolic systems if we are even to begin to understand human relationships. This would require tapping into a wavelength and a communication system other than the cerebral, reaching what has been called the ‘sympathetic system’ as opposed to the cerebro-spinal one” (Hederman, 2003, p. 87). At times when for various reasons it is difficult to understand the whole of the personal situation or attain an overview of seemingly disparate bits and pieces that do not make sense, a Tarot layout that symbolically represents the complicated and mixed aspects of one’s life, further confused by the unique way the individual psyche perceives them, connects the dots and provides a chance to recognize how they all are interrelated.

Thoughts, emotions, hopes, fears, problematic interpersonal relationships, intra-psychic conflicts, the immediate environment, significant others, desires and wishes – in short, the whole phenomenology of a person’s life-world, of which however s/he might not yet be aware at a conscious level – is symbolically represented in Major and Minor Arcana. As a lesson to be learned, it is our stopovers along the experiential journey through life experiences that contribute to our learning and self-understanding. Tarot not only speaks in a different, silent, voice, but also enables a process of critical self-reflection analogous to the ancient Socratic “Know thyself” principle in the heart of an examined life. This examination is achieved via many lessons “embodied” in the images that together lay down an unorthodox “foundation” for the existing, both actual and potential, moral knowledge in the form of the collective memory gained by humankind over the course of its history. Such a foundation, when properly constructed, should help us in repairing what Karl Marx called the crooked timber of humanity.

In the Tarot deck, the potential of/for self-knowledge is signified by the image of The High Priestess, Major Arcanum number II.

She is as a symbol for Sophia, or Shekhinah, or Ennoia; all the feminine principles of Wisdom across religions and cultures, yet all representing the return of the Goddess for the purpose of unfolding the scroll she holds in order to reveal to humankind the secrets of hidden, Gnostic, knowledge. The High Priestess sits on the throne as on a seat of transformation, ready to reveal to humankind the words of wisdom “written” in the scroll she holds. Her knowledge is of the long-lost speech that describes the true nature of things in the symbolic language similar to the one, according to myth, used by Adam before the Fall (or before the confusion of tongues in Babel). The High Priestess is a symbol of spirituality and female intuition as a special sensitivity and sensibility. She signifies the invisible and secret knowledge versus the sensible and empirical; yet she can potentially express herself, thus making the invisible present. This lost or forgotten speech may manifest itself in the unconscious contents such as a slip of the tongue in Freudian psychoanalysis, in dreams, in Jungian active imagination, and in Tarot symbolism. The unconscious contents enfolded in the scroll that the Priestess holds are not arbitrary but accord with specific grammar or code that provides them with structure, making them potentially available to consciousness. The Priestess’ number in the deck is 2, which in Jewish mythology, for example, signifies “Beth”, the second letter in Hebrew alphabet meaning the house (home). The Priestess’ house of wisdom would have been opened with the two keys (and the keys are often portrayed on this card in some other decks). The gold key is Logos and reason; the silver key is intuition and imagination; thus The Priestess symbolizes the holistic wisdom in which the feminine mode of knowing is complementary to essentially male rationality. According to a Jewish myth Shekhinah dwells here – in this world – while desperately wanting to reconnect with her beloved: she is the bride, the feminine counterpart, of God. Contrary to God’s transcendence, Shekhinah represents divine immanence in this world. While in rabbinic literature the term Shekhinah is used primarily as a synonym for God’s presence in this world, some Kabbalistic sources suggest a kind of mythic separation from God: the divine as present in, but yet hidden from, the human.

Sophia is God’s (that is, celestial) self-reflection (in the terrestrial) because it is wisdom indeed which is necessary for self-reflection. Yet, being separated from her beloved (in exile, according to myth) Shekhinah/Sophia is often sad and depressed, and sometimes appears to us at this plane of manifestation in the guise of the Holy Ghost, as symbolically portrayed in the Minor Arcanum Nine of Swords representing the twilight zone between night and morning. She needs to be recognized and spoken to, but we cannot perceive her message and wake up. Her voice is silent (Semetsky, 2010) therefore we are forced to let her go. In Egyptian tradition her name is Isis, the goddess of the rainbow and bridge between heaven and earth, who was also depicted as a wisdom figure in mythology. The symbolic meaning of The High Priestess is the very essence of hidden wisdom, the search for which was the task undertaken by Socrates in his effort to prepare educators as philosophers, literally: lovers of wisdom.

Shekhinah’s presence, while only potential in the symbolism of The High Priestess is being actualized in The Star, the imagery of which conveys the brightness of divine sparks as symbolic of the forthcoming transformation towards new understanding, new society, new culture, New Age.

Robert Place (2005) reminds us of the 12th century monk Joachim of Flora (also known as Gioacchino da Fiore) who had an epiphany in which he saw all history ascending through several levels, each associated with one aspect of the Christian Trinity. In the Age of the Father, the world was created and the Old Testament written. In the Age of the Son, Christ was born and has died on the Cross, the New Testament was written and the Church began. The New Age, envisaged by Joachim, would be ruled by the Holy Spirit. This promised Golden age of reconciliation will be infused with love and, according to Joachim’s vision, humankind will be able to communicate with the divine directly, not via an official Church, which would thus be dissolved. The divine will be found within and not without. The passing of the Golden Age is characterized by modern over-rationalization following the mythical death of the god Pan, or rational Apollo taking over nature bound Dionysus. The resurrection of the harmonious, peaceful and prosperous Golden Age (that was presided over by the virgin goddess Astraea – The High Priestess) and the infusion of the symbolic language of images into culture will bring back Justice as its guiding archetype at the social level.

Anonymous (2002). Meditations on the Tarot. Tarcher

Hederman, M. P. (2003). Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as symbol. Dublin: Currach Press.

Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot, an archetypal journey. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Place, R. (2005). The Tarot: History, symbolism, and divination. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.

Roberts. R. (1987). The original Tarot and you. San Anselino, CA: Vernon Equinox Press

Semetsky, I, (2010) . “Silent Discourse: the language of signs and “becoming-woman”’. SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 87-102.

What follows is a very minor modification of my opening presentation at the 2010 ATS Convention, held in July in Brisbane, Australia. The original was accompanied, or rather, itself accompanied, over a hundred different images to which I talked ‘to’. Having been asked to include it as part of a Newsletter, I finally do so, rather belatedly.

It is a presentation I had also long wanted to do – though the form it took was of course also in the context of the weekend we were about to have. The full title, ‘Two Uses of Tarot: the vatical and the sacral’ considered tarot as both a vehicle for the sacred as well as manteaic art.

These two forms seem in so many ways obvious: we do readings with tarot – in other words, we use it as a manteaicly or vatically; and we can see in many of the imagery what reflects the sacred.

Yet I’d like to take this a little more deeply – or at least somewhat differently to what we may be accustomed to.

Allow me to first paint a historical picture of the world in which were immersed those who brought to us these images as we now have them. It is a world that for many amongst us is no more. It is a world that has been at times described as porous: a world that the shaman still inhabits; a world that some amongst us, engaged within communities that may still accept such, we may also perhaps still in part inhabit. Yet it is a world that is rather difficult to explain to those who, conversely, live a buffered existence: our modern world is not one in which the spiritual and sacred permeates the everyday. It is not one in which, as we walk down the street, we engage with elementals of with fairies… and I don’t mean by these terms our friends who may refer to as ‘elemental’ or ‘fairy’.

Our world is not one with which we generally take for granted the co-habitation of angelic and devilish beings. It’s one in which rather the opposite is taken for granted.

If we take these images not so much as allegorical, nor as metaphors, nor symbolic, but rather as implicitly representational of the world permeating our very everyday existence, as well as, of course, representing an eschatological view, then the card images not only take on quite different characteristics, but also reflects a worldview that simply is no more for most people.

Our world is one that appears to be denuded of sylphs, salamanders, gnomes and undines, denuded of what Dionysius the Aeropogyte described as the spiritual hierarchies. For us, air becomes the movement of physical particles in motion; flames the ignition of a fuel; the earth mere compounds. Where each tree stands without its spirit; where we can walk the desert, deserted of spiritual beings – whether these be as companions or as combatants.

This is the modern world, the buffered environment, in which we tend to reside, where even our thoughts and feelings are deemed our own and sheltered from view from others – unless we happen to either consciously or unconsciously reveal these, purposefully or accidentally.

By contrast, imagine – and I say imagine if you’re not living in it – a world in which each thought and feeling becomes something to which the inhabitants of the invisible world react to and respond, pick up and deliver…

In such a world, there is what has sometimes been called a great chain of Being – with a hierarchy of beings. A hierarchy in terms of not only power, but also (or instead) development, awareness, care, responsibility, and virtue – in that each of these terms applies to the state of each being in this great chain or hierarchy.

In many ways, tarot’s trumps can be seen to reflect this ‘great chain’ – with earthly stations, followed by allegories, followed by the trans-earthly realm… and all embedded within a world that is essentially spiritual.

The sacral – or sacred – can thus be seen to be nothing other than, in the first place, depicting the world permeating us, or in which we are ourselves embedded, as essentially sacred.

By contrast, in our modern and buffered world, the sacred, like everything else, is partitioned and allocated its peculiar enclosure: a pointed to there (wherever ‘there’ happens to be in both space and time, and oft some structural form such as synagogue, temple or church) is where the sacred is.

I mention time… and here is another concept that has vastly altered since time became standardised to, in the first place, allow for train timetables across the USA. It’s simply not the case that an hour’s drive west of here will be a local hour’s difference away: noon reflects the Sun at its meridian, and this changes as we move east-west. In the fast-paced world of telephones, of course, we don’t want time to be porous to either the influence of the Sun’s location, nor to the state of conscious awareness we happen to be in at the time! (yet, we cannot totally remove the Sun’s apparent location, so we ‘standardise’ and digitalise time into zones, and then additionally force Summer-time clock shifts).

Time is also now principally linear: what was two thousand years ago is past. In the porous universe, however, the event of two thousand years past recurs: it is circular… not just by correlated calendrical reference, but rather as a spiritual reality: the event of the past lives and breathes anew each Easter, each Solstice, each Yom Kippur.

To call this the ‘circularity’ of time is perhaps not such a useful term, as what is at play is rather that the repetition unveils the spiritual influx at especial play at those times.

We may get an inkling of this when experiencing the depths of feeling: for example, when falling in love, or when experiencing trauma, or when suddenly awake within a meditative space. Time gains a different dimension to the clock’s mechanical measure.

These are all at play in the depiction of each and every card, and during the course of this coming sessions, some of these aspects will, in various ways, become ever more apparent.

Let me, however, give two brief kinds of examples as to how both sacral and vatical intermix – and then I’ll separate these terms again before finishing.

Let’s first have a very brief look at first, Death, and then, Love – not-withstanding the connection made between these in the French language both in terms of its sexual climax as well as by what is called the ‘language of birds’ – ie, homophony.

Death…

Let’s first observe one amongst hundreds of sets of the Dance of Death – the dance macabre.

But also, as we look through it, let’s reflect on how this shows us its face – for again we tend to live in a buffered universe, with, for us, two pillars marking the beginning and the ending of life.

Not sure about you, but seeing these shows those pillars to be but door posts..

Also observe how the social stations of all and sundry were shown – again the chain of being, this time showing its well-structured microcosmic reflection here on Earth.

I suggest looking through this [partial] set again.

Let’s reflect on how the death of someone can variously be felt.

In the earlier, porous, instance, it’s our common death. When you die, something in our community passes away and dies. It is not simply that ‘you’ die, but rather that the current ‘we’ dies and has to establish itself anew. ‘The King is dead, long live the king’ gains, in this way of thinking, an entirely different sense to focussing on the individuality of the person: the community shifts and allows the social chain of being to become complete again. WE are dead, and we are coming to a new life… again, a very porous self is reflected in this understanding. The Shaman ‘feels’ the death of the community with a single person passing through the gates of life and death. And that community’s re-emerging – with the person dead now ‘simply’ accupying a new position within the connected porous chain.

In a different, a little more modern, way of viewing it, but still not quite contemporary, the individual, the me, dies… thus ‘me’ has a need for the community to support me in my journey yonder: the world has become semi-porous, in that the reality of spiritual beings is ever present, but at arm’s length.

In the buffered world, in our world it is simply the you that seems to die – the ‘you’ upon which so much was invested. You are no more. The relationships cease, and only remain in memory. Hence the need to celebrate the life that was. Of course, as I said earlier, many of us do not solely live in a totally buffered world – yet the norm and social view is that this is what the world is, and the sub-text is that we need to ‘grow up and come to grips with it!’

In the sacred engagement with death, there appears, at least for myself, a greater or more encompassing sense than just the relational ‘you’: it is each ‘me’, each ‘we’, that also sheds its life and transforms.

And you know, in all this, I have only hinted at the differences as to spiritual views, for what I have said thus far could easily be understood within a Buddhist or a Christian or neo-Pagan or Hermetic way.

Let’s look at l’Amoureux…

By the way, the reason I mentioned the close rapport between the two is that ‘l’Amour’ and ‘La Mort’ sound awfully close… and when uttered by some ‘paysan’ or country folk, would have been undifferentiable to outside ears.

Let’s consider this card – ostensibly of marriage.

Here I’ll begin by reflecting on some English friends of ours whose son recently married a Chinese woman. The cultures could have been other, it’s just an actual example.

At the wedding reception, each family group was somewhat horrified at the ‘insulting’ manner in which the other appeared to lack respect and honour the situation: the English spoke of THEIR – ie, the couple’s, new and independent fruitful and life-engaging existence; the Chinese spoke of the enriched and broadened unified family (or we would still say ‘familieS’) that now spanned across two continents.

Effectively, to the hearing of the Chinese, the English were sending them off on their own implying that they are not welcome as part and parcel of integrated family-community; and to the hearing of the English, the Chinese were now using the wedding of their respective children as a means by which to insinuate themselves into the buffered and private personal lives of others.

Certainly, of course, the arrow of cupid and the new marriage may be experienced rather as a lightning bolt to the existing home.

But there’s much more to the point I want to make.

It’s not so much that the new couple enter a new relationship with each other and with their community, but rather the inverse ways in which this can take place.

In the porous world, the community finds within its being a new space for the couple, and, indeed, love may even come after the development of the relationship. In the buffered world, the couple creates new communities as it establishes itself. To give an analogy from Kabalah – though this is using a porous-world description to account for the buffered one – the plenitude to the community undergoes tzimtzum: it withdraws and creates space for the establishment of the new couple.

This is, at least in part, also what the two families were faced with: the Chinese family spokesman was speaking on behalf of the community and asserting that they are welcome in the now expanded world of the co-joined community and that due space will be provided; in contrast, the English family spokesman was speaking in recognition that henceforth they (the couple) will forge their own new and enriching inter-linked micro-communities.

Each was, in its own way, welcoming the couple as couple.

So what does this have to do with vatical and sacral uses of the tarot?

I’ll finish by answering this in three ways.

Firstly,

the ways in which the world is held as sacred will impact on the very meaning the imagery presented in the context of a reading. A sense of the differences between the social reality of various communities, heightened by a sense of the historical with regards to the way in which the imagery is presented, allows for both a reflection of its sacred content as well as to the ‘message’ it presents.

Secondly,

meditative or contemplative work on any of the cards requires that, again, not only its historical context be delved into, but also how such imagery may have instructed in a world that was held in a far more porous way than is our own.

Finally,

there is both the combined manner in which manteic or vatical use, ie, readings, becomes itself sacred act – sacred with regards to those with whom one has a sacred engagement; as well as the flipside of the same coin, the union between the way that reflection upon the card’s meanings becomes, as sacred act, a mantaeic art towards the transformation of the heart – metanoia – towards theosis.

Roam through the 600 years of tarot history with the Fool, raiding the treasure houses of art, history, poetry, literature, theatre, film, folklore, fairy-tale, myth and mathematics with Fern Mercier. We won’t pin her/him down but we can widen and deepen our appreciation of The Fools’ irrepressible wisdom and wit.

Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free

Skipping apart from the ordered procession of the other Major Arcana, the tarot Fool has no number.

Is s/he first or last in the Arcana sequence? It is irrelevant, for the Fool is a nothing – it is neither below one nor less than one – it is no- one! The zero of the Fool suggests s/he moves before or after, above or below, in and out of the other personages in the cards. Metaphysically and psychologically s/he is a wild card.

The fool is a holy nothing – a whole, a zero. The zero is as contrary as the tarot’s Fool for it is a universal symbol of absence or negation, but also a symbol of completion. Nothing is null and void, insignificant, empty, absent, insubstantial, worthless. It is the ether, the immensity of space, a point, a hole, yet also conversely, the whole.

For every culture uses the circle as a representation of unity, perfection and cyclical movement.

The circle symbolises spirit and a circle describes the cosmos – everything unified in the vast realm of the uni-verse, the one song of life. A circle is alpha and omega where there is no beginning or end. The ancients said God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. So the circle is a vision of limitless possibilities, just like the Fool in perpetual motion, ever restlessly roaming the world.

The Fool is embryo in the womb of the World

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here.

Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through.

Where did you get that little tear?
I found it waiting when I got here.
(George MacDonald 1871)

The circle with the dot inside shows us the idea that new life arises spontaneously, unique and fresh, – separate yet inseparable – from the heart of the chaos of everything. The circle is the cosmic egg as well as the womb where the embyro is birthed. The original Mother Goose was the Egyptian goddess Hathor. She laid the golden egg that was her son, the sun god Ra. The ancient creatrix produced the universe in the primordial World egg.

So in the tarot’s circle, the Fool is the embryo’s thrust to begin life’s journey that completes within the World card’s circle/mandorla/egg/womb. The World card holds and reveals the eternal beginning and ending cycle of life, the circle out of which The Fool pops.

Thus the miracle of birth and death is bounded in the idea of nothing – a circle that is a zero: a cosmic wholeness with comic loopholes.

The Fool reminds us that the center of the universe is here where we are now and there wherever the Fool might show up next.

In the great game of life, Tarocchi was the most popular card game for over 300 years throughout Europe. Games played with the tarot used the Fool as an expendable card, playable at any moment, yet incapable of taking any tricks or of being taken, valuable in points only if held unplayed.

The modern Joker in playing cards, invented by the New York Poker Club as a ‘wild card’ to make the game more interesting, is apparently not related to the tarot deck’s Fool – so the authorities say. But it does serve a similar function to the tarot Fool and to the Court Jester – it’s wild, powerless and free. Paradox rules its being.

Playing ROUND with Number Nothing

Nothing comes from nothing.
Everything comes from nothing.

Zero contains a wealth of concepts and yet it is nothing. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity – the void and the infinite. Zero has been rejected and exiled and yet it has always defeated those who opposed it.

Nothing is a profound problem. It has the potential to unsettle the very foundations of thinking in physics and philosophy – it forces us to ask the ultimate questions of the meaning of life.

Zero provides us a glimpse of the ineffable and the infinite – it is in fact infinity’s twin both equal and opposite, paradoxical and troublesome.

The Tarot assigns infinity to The Magician and Strength cards who both employ the symbol of infinity in their headgear. In a deeper reading we might assign The World card to infinity, whilst The Fool is given zero.

Nothing really matters
(Freddie Mercury)

We moderns know that Nothing – no-thing – is really something because it occupies space and contains power. Our computer keyboard affirms this reality.

Yet in the West, during the late Middle Ages when tarot emerged, zero was a dangerous idea to be feared and outlawed. For nearly two millennia the West could not accept zero. It had had no place within the Pythagorean framework.

What shape could zero be? Its irrationality made non-sense of the Greeks neat and ordered universe, so Pythagoras and Aristotle rejected and ignored it.

The Medieval Christian scholars, who imported their ideas from the Greeks and Romans, included this fear of the infinite and horror of the void.

Satan was considered literally Nothing. The circulus – little circle – was the brand burned into the forehead or the cheeks of criminals in the Middle Ages.

You ain’t seen nothing yet
(Al Jolson)

In other parts of the world however, zero was embraced very early on. The Indian Hindus readily accommodated a wide variety of concepts about nothingness. Unlike Christianity and Judaism who sought to flee from the void as it was considered a state of poverty and anathema – the Indian religious traditions accepted non-being on an equal footing with that of being. Zero formed a coherent whole. Nothing was a state, from which one might have come and to which one might return. Furthermore, these transitions might occur many times – without beginning and without end. In Buddhist teachings, one sought to achieve Nirvana – the being at oneness with the cosmos.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”
(Hamlet by W. Shakespeare.)

Nevertheless, zero wormed its way into European society, firstly through its use by traders and merchants. The Muslim world had long accepted the wonderful zero and convinced the Jews that the Arabic counting system was far superior to Roman numerals. Throughout the 13th century, Italian merchants began to put commercial pressure on their governments to eventually accept zero in the business world.

Then artists took up zero’s cause. At exactly the time tarot appeared in Northern Italy, an Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the power of the infinite zero by painting a vanishing point. In 1452 he placed a zero point in the centre of his drawing of a Florentine building and thereby magically transformed Western art, turning two dimensional work into 3 dimensions.
Eventually the church and its scholars were forced into the realization that the earth is not the centre of the universe. Nicholas of Cusa and Nicolaus Copernicus cracked open the nutshell universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

Among the great things which are found among us, the existence of Nothing is the greatest
(Leonardo da Vinci)

In this millennium, the 2000s – the age of the ‘naughtys’ – the zero has become commonplace. There are many more zeros around today than when Tarot emerged into being and in fact, than anytime in history. Because of binary arithmetic, computer calculations and codes, astronomy’s billions of stars within the known universe, not to mention national debts – we are accustomed to the ubiquitous zero.

In our mathematics, we announce each decade with zero as that circular no-thing recycles and ushers in the next cycle ie from 9 to 10 or 19 to 20 and so on.

By adding a few zeros we increase our source of income. Add a few more zeros and the banks and speculators move us into hyper-inflation. We assume that zero moves us into infinity, as we take for granted that zero increases a number 10-fold, a hundred fold and on and on ad infinitum….

Much ado about nothing
(Shakespeare)

Is it first or last in a sequence ? Where does The Fool fit?

Zero is neither below nor less than one. If we count forwards we generally start with number 1. Except for the Mayans, nobody had a year zero or started a month with day zero. To Europeans, that seems unnatural. Yet if we count backwards, it is second nature. – 9,8,7 … …O – we have liftoff! The bomb goes off at ground zero. An important event happens at zero hour not at one hour.
Zero has become a commonplace – we name Year Zero as the time when the unspeakable began in Cambodia and Ground Zero in New York City marks an historical spot.

A baby turns one after a year’s life which surely means the baby was zero years old before that first birthday?

It is a silly, childish discussion and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated
The Times (London) December 26th 1799

We Westerners left the Fool out when our calendar was devised – there is no year zero. Hence the wonderful joke of the third millennium with its spectacular world-wide opening ceremonies taking place a year early on December 31st 1999, when really it began in the year 2001.

The Fool’s Title

The Divine Bum
(Paul Huson)

The word fool comes from the Old French fol from the Latin follis meaning a “pair of bellows” or “a windbag”. The tarot Fool indeed often carries an inflated bladder. Today’s clowns sometimes carry a pair of bellows maintaining that ancient connection with the windy folly of their origins.

Buffoon from the Latin buffo means toad and the Italian buffare means “to puff” also suggesting a windbag.

The Fool’s French name Fou means madman and is cognate with the word fire, echoing the connection with light and energy. Folle means madwoman and Folie means folly. In the Swiss deck, the Fool is called Le Mat meaning “the dull one”. In Italian Il Matto – the Mad One.

Often court fools were mentally retarded and therefore considered to have a special relationship to the spirit. Affectionately called “God’s folk” the village idiots were cared for by the community as they were considered under protection – touched by God.
Silly once meant blessed. To be “silly” in a Medieval sense meant to be holy and sensitive to religious impulse.
Frequently the image of The Fool is shown in medieval and Renaissance engravings as a child of the Moon (La Luna ); the Fool as a luna-tic. The 17th century Fool in the Mitelli deck from Bologna may be a lunatic.

Jester is a word that comes from the French and originally meant “someone who recites gestes or heroic tales”. This suggests an earlier role of fools being all-round Minstrels and troubadours. Many centuries later, the 20th century “song and dance men” of Vaudeville, Burlesque, Music Hall, both pre-and post-television and moving pictures have entertained the masses royally.

The Fool was also at home in the Medieval Morality plays, free to move on and off the stage, improvising both with the other actors as well as with the audience. Harlequin and his mates Pantaloon, Scaramouche and Pulchinello of the Italian Commedia Del’ Arte complete with their hectic slapstick craziness, derive from this foolish, time-honoured, theatrical tradition.

Clown is a native English word probably from the Celtic meaning “ a boorish rustic” and cognate with the word “clod” meaning “country bumpkin” and used interchangeably with Fool” in Elizabethan times. Circus clowns are known for their droll buffoonery.
There have been many names for the Fool as there are colours in his crazy clothing. Buffoon, Harlequin, Joker, Droll, Zany, Punch, Vice, Puck, Jack Pudding and Merry Andrew are a few of his names in English.

Folly, Sister to Wisdom

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
(Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn)

Images of the Fool were common in the Renaissance at the time the Tarot appeared in Europe. Literature, theatre and people’s daily life abounded with Fools.

The Fool was celebrated in folk Festivals. Our modern April Fool’s Day is a pale left-over from the outrageous anarchic carnivals and Mardi Gras of Medieval times when the Lord Of Misrule overturned the strict hierarchies of the times at the Winter Solstice and on Holy Innocents’ Day. Foolery, drunkenness and cross-dressing ruled the day. Every small town and large city held a rowdy parade that a crowned Fool headed in triumph. Topsy-turvey ruled, gender-bending expected when even wives had license to beat their husbands.

In the literature of the time, the Fool’s mother was called Folly and it is she who is sister to Wisdom. Shakespeare’s motto that a wise man knows he is a fool, recalls the famous assertion of Socrates, wisest of the Greeks, who said he knew only that he knew nothing.

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.
(Aeschylus)

Tarot artist Brian Williams re-launched 15th century Sebastian Brandt’s wonderful Das Narrenschiff – The Ship of Fools – (1494) with his Tarot of Fools deck in 2002. The allegory of foolish humanity all in the same boat sailing oblivious through the world, seems especially poignant in this environmentally fragile era of our global village.

Erasmus the great Dutch humanist portrayed Folly as Goddess in his masterpiece “In Praise of Folly” published in 1511. To Erasmus, Folly encompassed all forms of Unreason and defended the “creative vital instincts of humanity against the encroachment of the analytical reason.” For although Folly “may have no altars or temples, she is nevertheless the most universally worshipped and beloved and obeyed of all the deities who bear sway over human affairs.” Folly “fosters the pleasing allusions which make life possible”.

Erasmus asks “What would work without Folly? What would sex be? Folly is the very giver of life for is not the very act that brings humans into existence filled with folly?”

The Court Jester

The revelation of laughter

T’were better Charity
To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb –
Merry and Nought, and gay and numb –
Than this smart Misery.
(Emily Dickinson)

Fools played a large part in medieval life and were an integral part of every feudal court. Sometimes they could even attain certain renown. Mattello was one such famous fool. His name is derived from the Italian matto and he was the court fool to Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua.

Great Lords and Popes found a place for a Fool in their households and there s/he was kept in an honored position. The Fool’s job was to entertain their master and mistress and to remind him that like Caesar, he was only human and open to error. Theoretically at court, the poor Fool was the one person immune from retribution for quips at the master’s expense. However all too often s/he became the butt for cruel jokes, for s/he was also a scapegoat.

Fools came in all shapes and sizes, often absurd, grotesque physical specimens, which emphasized their role as an outsider. There were giant fools and dwarf fools. Jimmie Camber who lived in the early 1500s and was the pet dwarf of King James 5 of Scotland was said to be “just over a yard high and two yards in girth” (round the waist).

Both male and female could play the Fool. In the 1600 Mathurine was the favorite fool of three French Kings.

There were learned fools who specialized in clever wordplay. Some university professors took part-time jobs as buffoons to supplement their meager teaching salaries. Buffoonery could pay so well, that many could give up teaching entirely. Some dwarf fools were prominent in other professions and many were lawyers. Our modern-day equivalents – of which there are many – are easy to spot! Each country and time period has ‘em. Our modern media is full of Fools.

Fools Kings and Popes

The Emperor, The Hierophant and The World in Cap and Bells

The Fool and the Priest have a special relationship as evidenced by the Fool’s headgear, which seems to have hidden a shaved head, a parodying imitation of the monk’s tonsure. The hood itself is a grotesque illusion to the religious cowl. Nevertheless, Fools were often welcome among the clergy. Pope Leo X loved his jokers so much they could enter his chambers unannounced anytime they wished. Visiting officials were not so privileged. They usually faced long delays before they could see the Pope. It was jested throughout Rome that an official who wanted to see the Pope quickly should dress up in fool’s motley.

The dwarf- fool Querno was a poet, musician and wit. He lived in Naples and had an amazing ability to make up rhymes. Leo, patron of buffoonery heard about Querno and wanted to add him to his collection of fools. He summonsed Querno to Rome – a great honor for the tiny fool. To create a sensation, Querno made his entrance into Rome riding an elephant and wearing as a joke a crown of vines, cabbage leaves and grapes. From the top of the huge beast, Querno shouted funny Latin verses that he had composed with the Pope in an earlier meeting on the outskirts of the city.

The relationship between Fool and King is best illustrated with Shakespeare’s play, King Lear. In this great and absorbing tragedy, we are exposed to the ultimate exposure and defeat of the King who is degraded to the status of the meanest of his servants. We watch the royal sufferer being progressively stripped, first of extraordinary power, then of ordinary human dignity, then of the necessities of life, to physical nakedness, helpless and abject as any animal. Then as the king’s very sanity dissolves, the great reversal occurs. On the heath the poor mad king is turned into fool and beggar, guided by his half-witted court jester. Shakespeare crowns the Fool and invests the king with motley. Throughout, the Fool remains the mouthpiece of truth, of real sanity, an impartial critic.

In his dotage the tragic hero Lear cries “When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools”.

So the Fool/Jester plays at the court of the king as well as pope. In tarot talk the Emperor and the Fool as well as the Hierophant and Fool are partners. Sometimes the Fool speaks in riddles, which encode a truth the king accepts even when he can’t accept any honest declaration. The Fool’s wit or buffoonery reverses the edicts of authority and officialdom, so that the highest dignitaries of State or Church appear as fools themselves and the State, the Church and even the World herself, is revealed in cap and bells.

Bottom or Simpleton

Taboo is the Fool’s terrain

The Fool, slippery as s/he is, can be divided roughly into two types, although s/he has the capacity to be in both camps.

The Buffoon, like the clown is Shakespeare’s John Falstaff or Sir Tony Belch. They make lots of noise, and they’re spiteful, rapacious, lying, deceitful, greedy and drunken. We laugh at poor Bottom wearing ass’s ears in Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. He reminds us of our own worst fears – being laughed at for our ignorance.

We are familiar with the buffoon in drag in Pantomime or at university Capping concerts and transvestite and Queer festivals. All Fools love to cross-dress and confound sexual stereotypes. Australia’s own Dame Edna is a marvelous modern Buffoon/ Fool.
Buffoons thumb their noses and show their bottoms at convention and authority. Their tomfoolery includes iconoclasm, disrespect and subversion.

Jennifer Saunders and Pamela Stephenson in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous are two buffoons spilling venom at the fashion industry and all other aspects of the filthy rich’s lifestyle. The two Fools laughter directs derision toward society and society’s derision is flung like stones back at them.

Then there is the Holy Innocent, often a simpleton or saint-like Forrest Gump character. The Idiot in Dosteovesky’s book by the same name is a beautiful example. Prince Mishkin is an epileptic who “sees” things with a heightened awareness and personifies the redemptive power of simplicity plus faith. Mentally and physically abnormal, a Fool is always an outsider who is set apart and therefore views the world in a different way.

Without guild and malice, naïve, usually celibate the holy Fool is often used as a foil to show up a corrupt society, the only person to speak but with no power to change the world. Parsifal from the Arthurian legends was a great Fool, relying on his naive intuition. He was fool enough NOT to ask and eventually then to ask the one simple question that was needed to redeem the Wasteland.
Like the foolhardy youngest brother or sister in fairy tales who rushes in where angels fear to tread and by doing so, wins the hand of the prince/ss and the kingdom, the Fool’s approach to life combines wisdom AND folly, which can result in miracles.

The Fool shows us how the sublime and the ridiculous are one and the same. Either or neither, idiot or jester, s/he unites Shakespeare’s Caliban who is lurking, willful and dark – with Ariel who is quixotic, brilliant and light. Both are servants and both desire freedom.

The Fool, like zero, employs and embodies paradox, the exception that does not deny the rule, but manages to escape or break it. S/he blurs distinctions, especially in the area of sexuality and spirituality. An ambiguous figure of fun, s/he can be both grossly obscene and (w)holy innocent. The Fool criticises the ego while celebrating the self. The Fool scatters certainty about sexual identity.
The Fool often represents the marginalized and the dispossessed. Taboo is the Fool’s terrain. Nothing is sacred and comedy is his/her map and journey.

The Fool is our guide who does not know where or what s/he is. A medieval text tells of the Fool Philip, who was given a new shirt by his master. Philip put on the shirt and ran all through the house asking everyone who he was, for he did not recognize himself in his new clothing.

And then there’s the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes” – who speaks like the jester without punishment or censure… to the whole community trapped in illusion…. “But the Emperor is wearing no clothes!”

The Fool is the revelation of laughter and the embodiment of mirth. Laughter happens when we are totally involved, absorbed in the moment and/or looking on as an observer, standing quite apart from the moment. Laughter breaks us out of ourselves and may restore proportion, whilst reflecting skepticism and credulousness. Often though, a fit of the giggles does NOT restore order, but increases the silliness of the moment. The Fool scorns our orthodoxies, and substitutes absurdities, encouraging us to believe them because s/he does.

The Fool’s Clothing

‘Motley: – an assortment and variety of types, the costume of a jester.’

In early tarot decks, the Fool was sometimes portrayed as ragged and unkempt, sometimes simply a beggar, sometimes in complete jester’s panoply with bells, cap and bladder. A Fool sports a medley of colours, baubles and bells.

In medieval drama, the fool’s costume traditionally consisted of a tight-fitting hood with long ass’s ears at the sides and sometimes a cockscomb trimmed with hawk bells on the top. Sometimes he sports horns from his cap. The flaps of her coat frequently ended in bells and the trousers were often of variegated colours, the favourite tints being light green and yellow.

Sometimes the Fool has feathers on his head as in the Visconti-Sforza deck (1450) where Il Matto is a beggar in penitential white. Feathers can be found in other Renaissance paintings such as Giotto’s Folly in the Arena Chapel in Padua. Cesare Ripa in the Iconologia tells us feathers are a symbol of foolishness. However, maybe they also emphasize his connection with the heavenly spirit. The movie Forrest Gump begins and ends with a feather drifting from and to heaven. Here the feather alludes to the foolish Forrest Gump as being a feather on the breath of God.

The horned hat in the Marseille deck links the Fool to the God Dionysus who was born with horns on his forehead. This linked him with the young kid or goat – a suitable sacrificial offering to the gods in the ancient world and gives an undertone of scapegoat to the insouciance of the Fool. Dionysus was said to have gifted wine upon human beings – and wine is one of the great doorways to ecstasy and revelry. April Fool’s Day is a remnant of the great drunken holidays when the Fool reigned supreme. Annual carousing in public on New Year’s Eve in New Zealand has become a Fools’ paradise for many, while Authorities wring their official hands.

There are a few particular animals associated with the Fools clothing. Asses (the ears on his cap) and cocks (his hood is called a coxcomb) – remind us of the Fool’s infamous lustiness, for both these animal’s names have become semi-taboo. In polite company we call them donkeys and roosters. Interesting to note that both animals are implicated in the sacrificial imagery of Christ’s story; it was a humble ass that carried Christ to triumph into Jerusalem to his death, and a cock that crowed three times to announce Peter’s betrayal. Do we take this to mean that the Christian Lord is a Fool?

Dionysus also celebrated his birthday at the winter solstice and was an ancient god of sacrifice.

The English Morris and Mummers’ Fool frequently wore a fox’s skin which may link him to Reynard the Fox, a trickster of European origins and hero of the 12th century beast epic Roman de Renart. Reynard like the Fool is canny, amoral rebel pitting himself against all authority – foxy indeed.

The Fool’s traditional bauble is a wand he carries, that is usually an inflated bladder filled with rattling beans or peas. It would often look like a phallus – like the manic Punch who has a colossal penis. The Fool’s bauble has two pendant balls and is obviously his tool, a fertility symbol. At the same time, as a scepter it connects him directly with the King as his alter ego. If you get hit with the Fools’ bauble, the joke is on you. His slapstick is the defenseless Fool’s only weapon.

Women Fools could carry a leather dildo called a Baubo. This name alludes to the cathartic and healing function of the bawdy Dionysian comedies which are associated with the Greek myth of the Goddess Demeter. She is pulled out of her grief by laughing uproariously at the grotesque crone Baubo’s dirty jokes. Baubo also entertains the Goddess by showing her bare rump and genitals.
Lewdness and fertility are associated with the Fool, although Love itself doesn’t sit easy with the poor Fool…… “in love everybody plays the fool’ or ‘I’m just a fool for you “ etc

The Fool’s Dog

Hounded by our instincts

The Fool, like the hero in the Fairy tale, is almost always in every deck walking with an animal companion, usually a dog who represents the forces of nature, our instinctual self, our desires driving us on, leading us into success or misery, happiness or failure.
The dog is our familiar, our domestic companion, our guardian. In the Marseille decks the dog is attacking the Fool’s bottom (who seems oblivious nonetheless).

Perhaps the idea being conveyed here is that the wandering Fool is a stranger in our midst and our animal instincts are warning us to be on guard?

Perhaps the dog represents our animal desires that are driving us onwards?

Perhaps we should be listening to the watchdog’s barking? What has it got to tell us? What is dogging us?

Perhaps the Fool doesn’t care his backside has been exposed by his animal drives? The Marseille Fool’s bottom is bared and yet his face is unembarrassed and shows no shame.

We seem unaware or ignorant of the dog’s power to make an exhibition of ourselves.

Perhaps ignorance is bliss?

If our head is in the clouds and we doggedly pursue a quest like Don Quixote, we will tilt against reality, fall prey to accidents and crazy whims.

Doggone!

Contemporary Fools

….. fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
(Alexander Pope. Essay on Criticism.)

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Fools rush in where wise men never go…
(Elvis Presley)

The demise of the fool – at least as an institution and as an accepted part of the ruling classes everyday life – began in the 17th century. The 1790 image shows us a stern nymph admonishing the fool in ass’s ears. “Know Thyself she instructs…. Tut tut – the Age of Reason(?!) and political correctedness is upon us.

Of course the Fool is still within and without, and of course in the modern age, Fools abound. They’re all around us. Popular culture is their playground and they pop up wherever you may least expect them – in our music, on the radio and TV, and of course in the movies.

Nothing is real – Strawberry Fields Forever
(The Beatles)

Some of my favorite Fools are:-

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol is a fabulous Fool as is the Book itself.

Charlie Chaplin like Don Quixote tilting against reality, the little tramp is the quintessential fool… with his gift for self-mockery, exploiting his own absurdities without any apparent loss of self-esteem.

Marilyn Monroe played The Fool in most of her movies where the Hollywood macho machine forced her into being the dumb child blonde. However she transcended her sex-objectification in roles such as Some Like it Hot or Diamonds are a Girls’ Best Friends with her comedic sense of timing and naivety in taking things at their face or literal value. Her waif-like vulnerability was often ingenuously/ genuinely funny.

Buster Keaton, Peter Sellers, Mae West, Judy Holliday, Lucille Ball, Guiletta Masina (Fellini’s wife in her role in his masterpiece movie La Strada.

Danny Kaye – one of my all-time favorite Fools. Spike Milligan.

And then there are the groups of fools and eccentrics, the Buffoons, the Keystone Cops in the 1930s the Carry On Films from the 1950s, The Goons 1950s, Dad’s Army and The Hillbilly’s 1960s TV, The Young Ones 1980s etc etc.

The Marx Brothers

And the inimitable Monty Python – their classic ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (and Death)’ as they swing from the crosses of Gethsemene in the Movie Life of Brian

The great Sammy Davis Junior, Vaudeville and Music hall “song and dance man”

Jack Nicolson’s The Joker in the movie Batman. He has no past and is never seen without the wild make-up of a joker in a deck of cards.

Billy T. James in his brilliant rendition as The Mexican Kid in the immortal NZ movie Came a Hot Friday.

Jim Carrey in The Truman Show plays a classic Fool, Peewee’s Big Adventure.

And then there’s real life.

The hippies and the young at heart of all ages wearing a medley of colours affecting rags and patches, baubles and bells. Maybe the motley of psychedelic colours of the ‘60s and ‘70s presaged a new dawn of consciousness for all of us? Remember those cries – oxymorons all – of “free love” and “make peace not war” while sticking flowers down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns…. Ah how foolish we were! Pied Pipers and Peter Pans all.

Backpackers, wanderers traveling around with all their worldly goods slung over their shoulder. Tramps, hobos, transvestites…. Fools are punks, the social outcasts, the homeless, the bawds, the drunks.

The centre of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one’s imagination can make sense of.
(Margaret Atwood.)

The King and his court can be a lovely symbol for the inner world of our psyche. The child/Fool criticizes the King, who stands for our adult ego – while celebrating the innocent self. S/he is equally at home in the everyday world of ‘reality’ where most of us try to live most of the time, and in the non-verbal world of the imagination where we visit not nearly enough.

Like Puck, King Oberon’s Jester in Midsummer’s Nights Dream, our inner Fool revels in moving freely between these two worlds, mixing them up to make fun of the waking consciousness.

“Lord what fools these mortals are!”
(Shakespeare)

The Fool’s world is often bizarre and delights in illusion and the imaginary. It is the Cheshire cat’s grin. It destroys logic and entertains in puzzle. It lies in the singularity of the Big Bang and the heart of black holes. The Fool will always have the last laugh.

Let us celebrate and crown our own Fool. “Ask ourselves where’s the Fool in my life? Who’s the Fool in my family or workplace, the community, the funny old world?”

Let’s skip into and through our own lives, looking for the Fool, playing the Fool, being the Fool.

“Esser come il Matto nel tarocchi” (to be like the tarot Fool – all over the place, at home everywhere and nowhere)

The Fool Spread

Devised by Fern Mercier

A circular spread with Number 7 sitting alone in the middle of the circle
Remember Folly is sister to Wisdom.

1. What kind of fool am I? This describes me and the journey I’m on.
2. Specifically in what area of my life is my folly located?
3. The Dog – my instincts/desires – that are driving and accompanying me?
4. The Knapsack – my baggage/resources – what am I carrying?
5. What in my wildest dreams do I want to be?
6. What is grounding me?
7. One card in the middle of the circle – what is my greatest Folly?

Bibliography Books and Magazines – (authors listed alphabetically)

FOOLS PLAYS A study of Satire in the Sottie by Heather Arden. Cambridge University Press 1980.

THE BOOK OF NOTHING by John d. Barrow. Vintage 2000.

SAMBO The Rise and Demise of an American Jester by Joseph Boskin. Oxford University Press 1986.

THE KING’S FOOL A Book about Medieval and Rennaissance Fools. By Dana Fradon. Duttons Children’s Books 1993.

THE FOOL – THE CLOWN – THE JESTER by Fred Fuller. From Gnosis a Journal of Western Inner Traditions No. 19 Spring 1991.

THE DEVIL’S PICTUREBOOK by Paul Huson Abacus Press 1971.

MYSTICAL ORIGINS OF THE TAROT From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage by Paul Huson. Destiny Books 2004

JUNG AND THE TAROT An Archetypal Journey by Sallie Nichols. Samuel Weiser Inc 1980.

ZERO The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. Souvenir Press 2000

CRAFTSMAN OF CHAOS by Lynda Sexson from Parabola. Myth and the Quest For Meaning. The Trickster Vol 4 No. 1 Tamarack Press.

THE WOMAN’S ENCLYOPAEDIA OF MYTHS AND SECRETS by Barbara Walker. Harper San Francisco 1983.

FROM THE BEAST TO THE BLONDE On Fairytales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner. Chatto and Windus 1994.

THE FOOL His Social and Literary History by Enid Welsford. Gloucester Mass. 1966.

BOOK OF FOOLS by Brian Williams Llewellyn Publications 2002

WOMEN ON TOP Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe. From Society and Culture in Early Modern France by Natalie Zemon Davis. Sanford University Press 1975.

www.clownbluey.co.uk

Images

1 IJJ Swiss Fool
2 Playing Card Joker
3 January 1st 2000 cartoon
4 Mitelli Fool 17th century
5 Ship of Fools
6 Velazquez Dwarf Jester
7 Fool and the Priest
8 Cleopatra and Fool Jacob Jordaens 1653
9 Keying Up Fool William Merritt Chase 1875
10 Absolutely Fabulous
11 Charlie Chaplin
12 Fool Laughing Anon Dutch c.1500
13 Visconti-Sforza Fool
14 Rahere, Last Jester to Henry 1 and Mathilda 1100.
15 Fool Tickling Woman’s Fancy
16 Marseilles Fool with Dog Jodorosky and Camoin
17 Nymph admonishing Fool
18 Charlie Chaplin
19 Buster Keaton
20 Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby (2 images) and Danny Kaye as Court Jester
21 Marx Brothers
22 Monty Python
23 Jack Nicholson as The Joker from Batman
24 Billy T. James
25 Jester in Motley – modern image

[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

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

Tarot and Carl Jung’s archetypal images

Psychologist Carl Jung’s biographer Laurens van der Post, in his introduction to Sallie Nichols’ book “Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey” (Nichols 1980), notices the contribution to analytical psychology made by “Nichols, in her profound investigation of Tarot, and her illuminated exegesis of its pattern as an authentic attempt at enlargement of possibilities of human perceptions” (1980: xv). Andrew Samuels mentions “systems such as that of the I Ching, Tarot and astrology” (1985: 123) as possible resources in analysis and quotes Jung writing 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. (quoted in Jaffe 1979)” (Samuels 1985: 123). Irene Gad (1994) has connected Tarot cards with the process of individuation and considered their archetypal images “to be …trigger symbols, appearing and disappearing throughout history in times of transition and need” (1994: xxxiv).

The essential identity of human experiences reflected in worldwide myths and folklore led Jung to postulate the existence of the collective unconscious or objective psyche that manifests itself through archetypal, symbolic and latent, images and is shared at a deeper level by all members of the humankind (Jung 1959). The collective unconscious is a symbolic “home” for the archetypes that transcend cultural or temporal barriers. Symbolic meanings of experience are “always grounded in the unconscious archetype, but their manifest forms are moulded by the ideas acquired by the conscious mind. The archetypes [as] …structural elements of the psyche …possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables them to attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are better suited to themselves” (Jung CW 5, 232). The contents in question are of the paradoxical character (hence, the reference to (dis)contents in the title of my paper): the nature of the relationship between the collective unconscious and the personal consciousness was of the utmost importance for Jung and he came to “the paradoxical conclusion that there is no conscious content that is not in some other respect unconscious” (quoted in Hillman 1979: 12-13). Thus, the purpose of Jungian psychology (and of Tarot readings) is to integrate the unconscious aspects of the mind into consciousness thus enabling the process of individuation and human development. Archetype is a symbol of transformation, and symbols –like those represented by the tarot imagery – act as transformers capable of raising the unconscious contents to the level of consciousness: the implicit meanings become explicit by virtue of “becoming conscious and by being perceived” (Jung in Pauli 1994: 159).

For Jung, the profound relationship between the soul of the world, Anima Mundi, and an individual human consciousness remained a great mystery. He did not distinguish between the psyche and the material world: they represent two different aspects of the unus mundus, or one world. Archetype is seen by Jung as a skeletal pattern, filled in with imagery and motifs that are “mediated to us by the unconscious” (CW 8, 417), the variable contents of which form different archetypal images. The archetypal images are the vehicles for/of information embedded in the collective unconscious, and the unconscious is capable of spontaneously producing images “irrespective of wishes and fears of the conscious mind” (Jung CW 11, 745). The archetypal images are “endowed with a generative power; … [the image] is psychically compelling” (Samuels, Shorter & Plaut 1986: 73). Contemporary post-Jungians consider the archetypes to be both the structuring patterns of the psyche and the dynamical units of information (cf. Semetsky 2008a; 2008b) implicit in the contents of collective unconscious. Hillman called for the rescue of images without which there are no symbols, and Jung was adamant that the “symbolic process is an experience in images and of images” (Jung CW 8i, 82).

The symbolic “language” of Tarot and synchronicity

The true means of communication between the conscious mind and the unconscious is a language of symbols: “symbols act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a ‘lower’ into a ‘higher’ form” (Jung CW 5, 344). It is the Tarot symbolism – the universal language of signs (Semetsky 2006a) – that establishes such an unorthodox communicative link. The importance of connection is paramount: “in Jung’s language, psychotherapy achieves its ultimate goal in the wholeness of the conjunction” (Hillman 1972: 293). The meanings of the symbols embedded in pictures are not arbitrary but accord with grammar of this universal language above and beyond verbal expressions of the conscious mind: “it is not the personal human being who is making the statement, but the archetype speaking through him” (Jung 1963: 352). In the “Four Archetypes” Jung says:

You need not be insane to hear his voice. On the contrary, it is the simplest and most natural thing imaginable. …You can describe it as mere ‘associating’ … or as a ‘meditation’ [and] a real colloquy becomes possible when the ego acknowledges the existence of a partner to the discussion (CW 9, 236-237).

An expert reader transforms such an apparent (yet only implicit) colloquy into an explicit dialogue when she functions as a “bilingual” interpreter converting the pictorial language of the unconscious into verbal expressions thus facilitating the transformation of in-formation into consciousness. What takes place is an indirect, mediated, connection akin to the acting principle of synchronicity posited by Jung in collaboration with famous physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli. Synchronicity addresses the problematic of meaningful patterns generated both in nature and in human experience, linking the concept of the unconscious to the notion of “‘field’ in physics [and extending] the old narrow idea of ‘causality’ …to a more general form of ‘connections’ in nature” (Pauli 1994: 164). Pauli envisaged the development of theories of the unconscious as overgrowing their solely therapeutic applications by being eventually assimilated into natural sciences “as applied to vital phenomena” (1994: 164). In his 1952 letter to Jung, Pauli expressed his belief in the gradual discovery of a new, what he called “neutral”, language that functions symbolically to describe the psychic reality of the archetypes and would be capable of crossing over the psycho-physical dualism[fn1]. Such a connective bridge is established during the Tarot readings.

Let me at this point employ a computer metaphor[fn2] borrowed from Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon:

Computers were originally invented to process patterns denoting numbers, but they are not limited to that use. The patterns stored in them can denote numbers, or words, or lizards, or thunderstorms, or the idea of justice. If you open a computer and look inside, you will not find numbers (or bits, for that matter); you will find patterns of electromagnetism (Simon 1995: 31).

We do not know what we may find if we ever “open” a human mind and look inside: mind is an intangible “thing” after all. But we may find something if we consider the importance of projection in Jungian analysis and the intangible mind as projected through the tangible properties of the cards with their picturesque images that embody powerful symbolic meanings. The cards are called Arcana, and the meaning of the word Arcana derives from Latin arca as a chest; arcere as a verb means to shut or to close; symbolically, Arcanum (singular) is a tightly-shut treasure chest holding a secret. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana encode information that affect human behaviour when this or that archetype is activated, such as The Fool embodies the archetype of the Eternal Child; The Hierophant – Persona ; Sun – The Divine Child; Judgment—the Rebirth, etc. (Fig. 1)[fn3]:

Citing Simon again, “a symbol is simply the pattern, made of any substance whatsoever that is used to denote, or point to, some other symbol, or object or relation between objects. The thing it points to is called its meaning” (1995: 31). Full of such implicit (that is, “existing” only in potentia) – and in need of mediation – meanings, pictures can be used to make inferences so as to explicate their meanings by creating an imaginative narrative[fn4] for the archetypal journey of individuation symbolized by the cards’ archetypal images. Especially if they can denote (as Simon indeed pointed out) the idea of justice – and “Justice” is the major card number XI; or thunderstorm – as portrayed in “The Tower”, the major card number XVI, and so on. Nearly every one of the 78 cards – 22 Major and 56 Minor – has an image of a living being, a human figure situated in different contexts. This figure is not just a physical body but the mind, soul and spirit as well. And while a body goes through life and accomplishes different tasks, the psyche goes through transformations, as life itself calls for the constant renewal and enlargement of our consciousness. Human experiences cross over the boundaries of an individual consciousness and expand to the level of culture. The journey through the cards’ imagery is therapeutic as each new life experience contributes to self-understanding, self-knowledge, spiritual rebirth and, eventually, the individuated Self represented by the last card in the sequence, “The World”.

The language of images delivers “the truths of gnosis …transformed into poetic and mythic language” (Martin 2006: 37). When symbolically represented in Tarot images, the transcendental realm is being brought, so to speak, down to earth by virtue of its embodiment in the physical reality confirming Jung’s insight that “psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing” (Jung CW 8, 418 ). They are united in analysis thus defying the ghost of the dualistic split haunting us since the days of Descartes both in theory and, significantly, in practice. The levels of praxis as encompassing human behaviour, decision making or choosing a particular course of action is of utmost significance. Jung was adamant that the general rules of human conduct are

at most provisional solutions, but never lead to those critical decisions which are the turning-points in a man’s life. As the author [Erick Neumann] rightly says: “The diversity and complexity of the situation makes it impossible for us to lay down any theoretical rule for ethical behaviour” (Jung 1949/Neumann 1969: 13) [fn5]

Yet, in practice (as complementary to theory) each and every Tarot reading (Semetsky 2005) becomes a step toward the conscious realization of the deepest meaning (corpus subtile) of a particular situation; subsequently, the enlargement of consciousness becomes itself a step towards individuation.

The Devil

Often, the action of the archetypes is such that they can possess the psyche in a guise of the unconscious Shadow. Jung saw how powerfully this archetype worked behind the scenes, implicitly affecting the psyche and explicitly influencing people to behave in a neurotic or compulsive manner. Among Major Arcana, the Shadow archetype corresponds to the card number XV, “The Devil”, the fallen angel, the dark archetypal Shadow as a dark precursor in the natural progression, or evolution, toward “The Tower” and then “The Star” (Fig 2):

In the guise of the Shadow, the Devil can easily possess one’s psyche and, importantly, the Shadow can often become projected onto the others, and one may very well attribute to significant others those qualities that one is tempted to deny in oneself. The Jungian concept of Shadow describes a cluster of impulses, complexes, shameful and unacknowledged desires, self-indulgences and being a slave to one’s own primitive instincts. Sexual compulsion, poor impulse control, or plain old greed are some behavioural patterns that may manifest in real life. It may be a fear, or a superficial complex of superiority when in fact deep inside one feels rather inferior. On the picture, the two naked figures chained to the Devil’s throne in the underworld lost the ability of clear judgment and seem helpless. The Devil’s heavy chains represent the self-destructive tendencies and weaknesses; bondage and fear. In interpersonal relationships, the Devil can reflect upon co-dependency issues. It may be a deeply engraved fear of breaking free, similar to battered women unable to leave and continuing to stay in the abusive relationship with spouses overwhelmed by submissiveness or sexual/economic dependency. For the reader, several questions immediately arise: What is it that is holding the subject of the reading in bondage? How to overcome the fears of one’s own free self? How to get rid of those chains? Is there any particular path to liberation?

One of the most popular spreads is The Celtic Cross, the structure of which is well known to the readers of this article, indeed. Its ten positions have meaningful connotations and thus provide a rich context within which the cards that “fall out” in this or that position are to be interpreted. The Fig. 3 below (with some additional cards, yet in principle the Celtic Cross) is a layout for Lola as one example of several documented readings (Semetsky 2006b). Lola (not her real name) agreed to having had her reading made public; she specified her main reason for the reading as a professional problem connected with creating her own project. She wanted to clarify issues, to focus on solutions and, as she indicated, “to find out what is making me resist and keeping from manifesting this project”.

Narrating the Images

Card in the first position was the Major Arcana’s Strength, crossed by the ten of pentacles in the second position. This indicated that, in the framework of her project, Lola’s main concern was with satisfying her ambitions and exercising her will power for the purpose of establishing herself in the professional world. The crossing position of the ten of pentacles, a very positive card by itself in its image of stability and security, carried however the message of the hindering influence: perhaps the unconscious goal of Lola was not the creation of the project but the creation of the safe and secure nest for herself by means of the said project. It was the feeling of incompleteness, manifested by the third card, the nine of pentacles, and also a rather well-controlled thought process, that motivated Lola to inquiry into the current status of her enterprise. Although in the past she went through some internal struggle with herself, perhaps through the period of self-doubt, as suggested by the five of wands in the fourth position, her endurance and determination so far have carried her towards achieving of her goal.

Self-mastery was suggested by the vertical line that consisted of the nine of pentacles, via the Strength, toward the two of wands. Apparently nothing was actively happening now, as suggested by the two of wands in the fifth position, and Lola was becoming restless. Despite her being goal-oriented and strong, the results of the project did not seem to will have been manifested in the near future. The waiting period of at least seven or eight weeks would be to Lola’s best advantage, and this time better be spent wisely, otherwise the project would remain vague and more as the product of Lola’s wishful thinking rather than practical reality. The card in the sixth position, the seven of cups, carried a strong message of “the castles built in the air” making the outcome of the project quite questionable. Apparently Lola’s talents and imagination worked overtime and clouded the clear picture of the project with the almost innumerable options. Yet, her focusing on a single goal would definitely contribute to her becoming clear about what exactly she wanted to achieve. At this point Lola interjected and said that she was in therapy and having weekly sessions.

So what is that keeping her from manifesting results? Is it because her mind is elsewhere? Lola’s mind seemed preoccupied with evaluating her private life rather than concentrating on the subtleties and details of her professional involvement. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth cards (that I added to the standard ten positions of the Celtic Cross) suggested a stable relationship with a man, responsive to Lola at the emotional level (The King of cups) and who seemed to be quite serious in his intentions.

Lola commented that the man was good and, yes, oriented towards a traditional relationship. However three cards in the seventh position clearly demonstrated that Lola’s mind was preoccupied with the thoughts about another man, with whom she was hoping for a romantic relationship. This man symbolised by the King of swords seemed to be quite an authoritative and independent personality, and perhaps those qualities both attracted Lola and kept her apprehensive about getting involved with him. Such a mental outlook clearly distracted Lola from concentrating on her project and devoting time, effort and energy toward its manifestation. The fourteenth card, the seven of pentacles, demonstrated Lola’s concern about the fact that she has invested in the project, and since no results as yet came to pass, there was a feeling of the waste of efforts, perhaps some financial loss too. Lola said that, yes, she put her own money into the project. The imagery carried an advice for Lola not to stop but be consistent in her efforts, perhaps reassessing what she has achieved so far and what still needed to be done, including reevaluating her own attitude and motivations.

Since the whole layout suggested that Lola was strongly motivated to get the project moving, her driving forces needed to be addressed in detail to find out what was keeping this project from being realized. The eighth card, the eight of swords, indicated that Lola’s environment was quite oppressive. But her project was an individual one, hence there were no factors coming from elsewhere, like administration, paper work, or peer pressure that would have created the obstacles hindering the development of any idea. In Lola’s case the restrictions came upon her through her own confusion and virtual blindness. This card further emphasized the necessity for the revaluation of her own motives, and some team work in cooperation was suggested by the three of wands in the ninth position. Perhaps Lola wanted all the reward for herself only, but at this stage if she does not cooperate with others the project would not move ahead from its present stage, and there would not be any hope for progress.

So, to achieve the successful outcome, Lola must get out of the conflict she has unconsciously and unwillingly created within herself, torn apart by the confusing issues of personal ambitions and relationships versus the ideals of her goal. What was the original purpose? There seemed to be a danger of the project becoming secondary to Lola’s primary concern with establishing herself professionally in her field. The Chariot, the tenth card, indicated a high probability for Lola to be able to carry on, providing she would learn to consciously control those opposing driving forces in herself. Perhaps the time of waiting period, aligned through the two of wands with the Chariot, would need to be spent in further counseling working on the issues that surfaced during this reading. Lola said that self-discovery was a part of her project. The cards, however, carried a strong reminder of not to lose the main original idea, nor turning it into a vanity exercise, that might happen to be lost in the clouds of the seven of cups. At this point Lola wanted to further clarify the sixth card and she picked up the supplementary card out of the deck for this position. When she turned it over, she discovered that it was “The Devil” (see Fig. 3).

Associations that this card usually brings forward are frightening. On the other hand, if and when the collective unconscious directs clients to sub-consciously choose this particular card (all the cards are face down), it means it is extremely important that this archetype must be addressed here-and-now. No wonder the total layout kept on pointing towards further counseling, as the Devil – one’s very Shadow -needs a lengthy exploration by itself. The time span of this reading session, fifty minutes, made inquiry into this major card quite limited, but nevertheless, very insightful for Lola. She exclaimed: “How frightening is to pick up the Devil card!”. I asked her what was so frightening (an associative process thus begun). Lola mentioned darkness, then paused and added the word fear.

At the unconscious level Lola’s psyche was overwhelmed by the dark underworld of fear and constrictive emotions, she fantasized about the project and eventually became enslaved by the idea she herself gave birth to. It was not she any more who controlled the course of events with regard to her project, the archetype took over and possessed her. She became obsessed with the idea and was now governed and controlled by it. The idea, instead of empowering Lola, became over-powering, the difference, however, being very subtle. Lola picked up one more card, to find out what, that she was not aware of, might keep her “imprisoned” (her expression) by the Devil. The card turned out to be the three of pentacles, very positive by itself, but in conjunction with the Devil, carrying messages of the inflated ego, and a strong desire to improve one’s own social status and to earn approval from people in the position of authority. Lola said at this stage: “Yes, I want recognition!”

So why was her project not manifesting? A further challenge for Lola would be to work on her motivations, on the relation between fantasy and reality, on ability to concentrate on a single goal, in general on making herself more of a whole person in order to achieve wholeness in her enterprises. Several times during this reading Lola repeated: “This is the story of my life…” On my suggestion Lola picked up the last card to find out what else might be helpful in addressing all issues that emerged in this session. The six of cups indicated the idea of an honest talk and sharing with somebody Lola could trust, perhaps continuing the therapeutic process that would bring potential healing.

Lola said that this reading contributed to achieving her purpose, stating that she “gained insight in what is restricting [me] in achieving [my] goal, namely fear and confusion in [my] specific intentions within the project”. She indicated that she would like to have a follow-up session explaining her answer as a desire “to find out more”. She said that the reading was significant and meaningful to her, providing the following comment: “I gained some clarity on where I need to focus my attention in seeing my project through as of today. I understood how Tarot works as a tool in self-discovery along psychology, allowing for more personal issues to come out and be pin-pointed for future discoveries”.

Integrating the Collective Shadow

At the collective level, the Shadow encompasses those outside “the norm” of the established order and social system, such as “criminals, psychotics, misfits, scapegoats” (Samuels 1985: 66). It is not only that they appear to stand outside the culture, but importantly culture itself fails to assimilate its own Shadow. The Devil card is a symbol of the ultimate slave morality, in Nietzschean sense, in the relationship between the oppressor and those oppressed. It represents a moment of psychological denial and the implementation of scapegoat policy by the dominant culture or nation, while in the meantime projecting onto some generic Other one’s own inferior and shadowy qualities. The scapegoat psychology is associated with what Erich Neumann called old ethics, and it is an ethical attitude indeed that is central with regard to the Shadow archetype. While the ego-consciousness focuses on indubitable and unequivocal moral principles, these very principles crumble under the “compensatory significance of the shadow in the light of ethical responsibility” (Jung 1949/Neumann 1969: 12; see footnote 5). The neglect of this responsibility tends to precipitate multiple evil consequences in the world.

While old ethic is the ethics of illusionary perfection and absolute Good that necessarily leads to the appearance of its exact opposite, the absolute Evil, the new ethics consists in recognizing our own dark side, that is, making the darkness conscious. The old ethics is “partial” (Neumann 1969: 74) as belonging solely to the Ego; the new ethics devoted to the integration of the Shadow is holistic and is a mode of existence of the individuated Self. The Self emerges only when the opposites exist as a harmonious whole and neither side is suppressed or eliminated. In his wonderful book Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as Symbol, Irish philosopher and monk Mark Patrick Hederman (2003) points out that the Apocalypse describes the Devil as Satan who passes judgment on us standing next to the throne of God; yet his other name is Lucifer, he who brings the Light in order to illuminate the darkness. In this allegory, “the evil that is the shadow side of everything that is bright and good remains hidden” (Hederman 2003: 176) or invisible. The perpetual presence of the shadow must be recognized – made visible – and integrated into consciousness; otherwise, it will fall into the depth of the unconscious where it will continue to crystallize.

The absence of freedom, the lack of hope, and the total powerlessness will reach their critical mass and will start acting from within the psyche spreading spontaneously until reaching the destructive climax. Non-incidentally, the subsequent card after “the Devil”, “the Tower” (Fig. 4) represents this upcoming climax:

In the Tarot feminist interpretation (Gearhart & Rennie 1981), the image of “The Tower” signifies radical intervention, revolution and the overthrowing of false consciousness, violent social conflict and change, destruction of the old order on a grand scale, and release from imprisonment in the patriarchal structure during the very process of its demolition. Jung spoke about the archetypal temenos in one’s psychic structure. The original meaning of temenos in Greek is a sacred precinct like a temple; a synonym for it is a hermetically sealed vessel or, for that matter, the Tower. Temenos, as employed in Jungian analysis, has acquired psychological connotations as the psychically charged area surrounding a complex, and may be experienced sometimes through the symbolism of any closed container such as a womb or a prison. Because the vessel -the womb, the prison, the Tower — is sealed hermetically, the force looking for its way out will be ultimately felt as acting from within in an erratic, horrifying and unpredictable manner (Semetsky 2000).

As regards real events in human culture, “The Tower” – which in some decks is called The Tower of Destruction – has an uncanny resemblance with the image of the destroyed Towers on September 11 (Fig. 5 as found on the Internet):

The Tower image is an embodiment of contradiction and the conflict of opposites; significantly Jung did use the notion of contradiction with regard to the meaning of the tower which he, at a symbolic level, identified with the Tower of Babel, that is, symbol of false omnipotence and mistaken certainty, a priori condemned to destruction during the most powerful and confusing instance of the contradiction and amidst persistent contradiction and mutual misunderstanding: the confusion of tongues, indeed. Fig. 6 below incorporates the elements of the famous Brueghel’s masterpiece[fn6]:

Thunder and lightning as per the image of “the Tower” are the universal signs of the wrath of gods; the symbolism of which also indicates a swift – and painful – alteration at the level of collective consciousness when it observes the aftermath of the destruction of the self-erected unstable structure. The ultimate destruction – a body turned into a life-less skeleton – is seen in this other poignant and maximally real image of 9/11 also published on the Internet (Fig. 7):

During a Tarot reading the appearance of the Tower card may indicate a catharsis, that is, a dramatic and forceful replay of the unconscious material that exceeds the boundaries of the current “circumference” of the mind and forces the darkness at the very deep level to break through into the surface of consciousness. However, the enforced evacuation, breaking all defences, frees one from being incarcerated in the symbolic tower of one’s own making, whether it is psychological, ideological, cultural, or any other belief system. Any unforeseen cataclysmic event that suddenly brings people down to earth by disturbing the existing norm and order of things through the abruptly terminated current psychological state or a break-up in a set of values privileged by a given culture, necessarily raises the level of consciousness. The breakdown in existing order simultaneously creates conditions for the potential production of a new order. Thus the image of “the Tower” card is a sign not only of a breakdown but a breakthrough when the darkness embodied in the preceding image of the Shadow-Devil is illuminated and made conscious.

I wholeheartedly agree with Mark Patrick Hederman (2003) who warns of a danger to ourselves and others if and when we choose to remain unconscious of the Shadow. If history and culture taught us anything, it is that in the 20th century “The Devil” fully manifested as

a hell on earth and that this hell was a human creation. It was a hell of cruelty and mayhem resulting from the incapacity of the powerful people to decipher their unconscious motivation… [E]ach of us has to discover and explore the labyrinth of the dark, the unconscious… Its language is incomprehensible, even inaudible to most. But, no matter how difficult it is to decipher, such work must be undertaken. We must recognize that most of our past, whether personal or historical, took place underground, in silent rivers, ancient springs, blind pools, dark sewers. While the task of making them accessible to our consciousness is difficult, it is nonetheless imperative. Even more so at the beginning of a new century when we hope to outline some plausible tracks into a better future. We have to read the signs of the times… (Hederman 2003: 21).

The signs of the times may come from the earth, such as volcanos or earthquakes; or from the water such as tsunamis; or from the air such as the attack on September 11; or from the fire when draft causes famine; in all cases the results are disastrous. Yet, the lives can be saved because all four elements of nature are trying to communicate with us in the form of real significant events that encode messages about the behavioural patterns, which have caused (or will have caused!) them. To decode these messages through the vibrant language of the unconscious embodied in the symbolic system of Tarot is not a utopian dream for the future but the reality of the present because this code is already available to us! Sure enough, the future can still be skewed because prevailing ideologies or grand meta-narratives are still here and remain the means “of imposing our own myopic architecture, of obliterating the splendour of what might have been: the future perfect” (Hederman 2003: 22; italics mine).

The least we can do is to have a hope for the better future. But, in accord with Jung’s reference to the foreknowledge by virtue of symbols as purposive, healing, and numinous, the better future might already will have been! Tarot readings perform an amplifying function in agreement with Jungian synthetic method that implies the emergence of new meanings as carrying the utmost significance. Synthetic method reflects the future-oriented path to knowledge, and the archetypes do determine “the nature of the configurational process and the course it will follow, with seeming foreknowledge, or as if it were already in a possession of the goal” (Jung CW 8, 411).

Significantly, the polyvalence of the image that follows the Tower in a deck, called “The Star”, connotes the field of meanings which include hope, healing, inspiration, creativity, and the realization of our spiritual dreams. Hence, we do understand the message that The Tower of Destruction, which preceded “The Star” temporarily, was only a stage in the directed-forward evolution of consciousness and the development of the humankind. We have learned our moral lesson embedded in “The Tower”. The presence of “The Star” in a deck, as a natural progression from “The Tower”, is a symbolic message that the Tower itself is a precursor to the renewal and the creation of new psychic space aligned with nature.

The image of “The Star” (Fig. 8 ) convenes oneness with nature – the wholeness of the symbolic conjunction – symbolized by the naked woman pouring waters.

As the first figure in the sequence of the Major Arcana – importantly, feminine – without any clothes on, “The Star” is a symbol of being finally stripped off the darkness due to the darkness itself made conscious. The eight stars with eight spikes carry the message of spirituality especially significant today, in the year two thousand and eight. The vessels are red, this colour representing full flesh-and-blood humanity in unity with spiritual essence (water, blue). “The Star” embodies the meaning of hope, healing, inspiration and the forthcoming new Aquarian age; in fact, this card is often called The Star of Hope. In the current global climate permeated by diverse beliefs, disparate values and cultural conflicts when different ideologies compete with each other at the global level and have led to destructions of “The Tower” scope, the universal value of Hope is paramount. We can bring in the revolution (as Neumann called it) in the societal value-system if we step into our own process of evolution and transform the potentiality into our very reality by virtue of the lived-through meanings contained in the (dis)contents of the Tarot symbolism.

Past/present/future

For Jung, “psychological fact … as a living phenomenon…is always indissolubly bound up with the continuity of the vital process, so that it is not only something evolved but also continually evolving and creative” (Jung CW 6, 717). Importantly, for Jung, the collective unconscious encompasses future possibilities, and “[a] purposively interpreted [image], seems like a symbol, seeking to characterize a definite goal with the help of the material at hand, or trace out a line of future psychological development” (Jung CW 6. 720), that is, to perform a prospective, prognostic function in addition to the symptomatic, or diagnostic, one. Jung’s understanding of dreams was that they function in a compensatory mode, providing what is missing, but also in a prospective and prophetic modes anticipating and predicting a possible future psychological direction.

Respectively, the metaphysics of time in the Tarot spread reflects a four-dimensional view, in which past, present and future events coexist. David Bohm, a physicist, has posited all possible events as enfolded in the timeless implicate order. In the actual world they unfold into explicate order thereby creating time in our physical three-dimensional reality. Referring to the experience of dreams, Bohm said:

When people dream of accidents correctly and do not take the plane and ship, it is not the actual future that they were seeing. It was merely something in the present which is implicate and moving toward making this future. In fact the future they saw differed from the actual future because they altered it. Therefore I think it’s more plausible to say that, if these [synchronistic] phenomena exist, there’s an anticipation of the future in the implicate order in the present. As they used to say, coming events cast their shadows [sic!] in the present. Their shadows are being cast deep in the implicate order” (Bohm, quoted in Hederman 2003: 43-44; brackets mine)

Ditto for the readings: when the cards are being spread in a layout that comprises positions signifying all three aspects of time simultaneously, human perception encompasses both past and future “memories” (Semetsky 2006a) compressed in the here-and-now of each particular reading. Hillman (1972) believes that it is the very art of memory that serves as a method for presenting the organization of the collective unconscious. The art of memory can be schematized as per so-called “Triangle argument” (Fig. 9 [from Kennedy 2003: 63, Fig. 5.3]) of the Einstein’s block-universe, which concedes that some events in the past and future coexist.

In agreement with the triangle argument, the subject of the reading in the present moment appears to coexist with itself later: “me-now” is simultaneous with “me-tomorrow” hence creating a non-linear and tenseless (a-temporal) “book” written in the symbolic language of images that can be read, narrated and interpreted. The aion (a spiritual-timeless time-series) becomes projected into chronos, that is, a linear time of our physical reality[fn7]. Tarot empowers us with the ability to make sense out of the chaotic flax of experiences as we become capable of learning from and within this very experience when it is being unfolded in front of our very eyes. The major function performed by Tarot is akin to Jung’s transcendent function in its providing a union of the unconscious and conscious contents thus leading to the individuation and the “achievement of a greater personality” (Jung CW 7, 136).

The images contained in the pictures, as Sallie Nichols reminds us, “were conceived deep in the guts of human experience, at the most profound level of the human psyche. It is to this level in ourselves that they will speak” (Nichols 1980: 5) along a continuous process of individuation and moral/spiritual education (Semetsky forthcoming) that will have enabled us to make decisions and chose ethical actions in harmony with the Jungian unus mundus.

Footnotes

[fn1] See Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932-1958. Edited by C.A. Meier, with a preface by Beverley Zabriskie (2001, Princeton University Press). This particular letter is designated in the book as 56P, pp. 81-83. See also my 2006 article “The language of signs: Semiosis and the memories of the future”, SOPHIA: International Journal for philosophy of religion, metaphysical theology and ethics, Vol 45, No.1 pp. 95-116. [return to paragraph]

[fn2] The computational approach needs qualification. At the cutting edge of philosophy of mind and cognitive science computers are understood as dynamical systems that indeed manipulate “bits”, but these units of information are not reducible to what in physics would be called particles. They are moments in the process of flow represented by analog (and not digital) information and defined as “bits” within a certain context only, that is, holistically as parts of the greater whole. [return to paragraph]

[fn3] [Images from Holley Voley’s 1909 Waite-Smith deck] [return to paragraph]

[fn4] Imaginative narrative is one example of research methodologies employed by the cutting edge scientific discipline called Futures Studies. [return to paragraph]

[fn5] From Foreword by C.G. Jung to Neumann’s book Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. Jung’s Foreword copyright 1968 by the Bollingen Foundation, New York [return to paragraph]

[fn6] This image is from the deck called The Lovers’ Tarot, by Jane Lyle; Illustration Copyright Oliver Burston 1982. The pack is published by Connections (January 2000) in the UK and St. Martin’s Press in the US [return to paragraph]

[fn7] In Atom and Archetypes: The Pauli-Jung Letters 1932-1958 (see note 1) there is an earlier unpublished essay by Pauli, written in 1948 and called “Modern Examples of ‘Background Physics’” (pp. 179-196). Pauli comments on the doubling of the psyche akin to a human birth as a division in two parts out of initial unity. Time-wise, the doubling of the time-series is represented by aion and chronos. At the time, Pauli remained agnostic on to “whether the ‘series’ is thought of in temporal terms or as a simultaneous juxtaposition” (p. 187) and referred to the idea of the transmigration of the souls when the timeless reality of the archetypes is being repeatedly interrupted by a temporal sequence of physical/biological lives [return to paragraph]

Inna Semetsky, PhD, has published a number of refereed papers related to tarot in various academic journals. She is currently at the Institute of Advanced Study for Humanity at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her personal webpage, “Inna’s Sense”, is at www.innasense.org

References

• Jung, C.-G. (1953-1979). Collected Works, Vols. I-XX, H.Read (ed.), R. Hull (trans.), M.Fordham, G. Adler, and Wm. McGuire. Bollingen Series, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. London: Routledge.
• Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. trans. R. & C. Winston. A. Jaffe, Ed., New York: Pantheon Books.
• Gad, I. (1994). Tarot and Individuation: Correspondences with Cabala and Alchemy. York Beach, ME: Nicholas-Hays, Inc.
• Gearhart, S. and S. Rennie, (1981). A Feminist Tarot. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
• Hederman, Mark Patrick (2003). Tarot: Talisman or Taboo? Reading the World as Symbol. Dublin: Currach Press.
• Hillman, J. (1972). The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. New York: Harper Colophon Books/Harper & Row, Publishers.
• Hillman, J (1979). Senex and Puer, in Puer Papers, C. Giles (Ed.). Dallas: Spring
• Kennedy, J. B. (2003). Space, Time and Einstein: An Introduction. Chesham, UK: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2003), 53.
• Neumann, E. (1969). Depth Psychology and A New Ethic, Great Britain: Hodder and Stoughton.
• Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: an Archetypal Journey. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc.
• Martin, S. (2006). The Gnostics: The First Christian Heretics. Spain: Pocket Essentials.
• Pauli, W. (1994). Writings on Physics and Philosophy. Charles P.Enz and Karl von Meyenn (Eds.), tr. R. Schlapp. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
• Samuels. A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. London and New York: Routledge.
• Samuels A., B. Shorter, and F. Plaut. (1986). A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. London and New York: Routledge.
• Semetsky, I. (2000). “Symbolism of the Tower as Abjection”. Parallax 15, vol.6, no.2, Leeds, UK: Taylor & Francis, pp. 110-122.
• Semetsky, I. (2005). “Integrating Tarot Readings into Counselling and Psychotherapy”, Spirituality and Health International, Whurr Publishers, UK, pp. 81-94.
• Semetsky, I. (2006a). “The language of signs: Semiosis and the memories of the future”. SOPHIA: International Journal for philosophy of religion, metaphysical theology and ethics 45 (1), pp. 95-116.
• Semetsky, I. (2006b). “Tarot as a projective technique”, Spirituality and Health International, John Wiley Publishers, UK. Vol. 7, Issue 4, pp. 187-197.
• Semetsky, I. (2008a, under review). “Decoding the Mentalese/managing the memes/interpreting signs”. Paper prepared for the First International Conference on the Evolution and Development of the Universe, 8-10 October 2008, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.
• Semetsky, I (2008b)“Simplifying Complexity: “Know Thyself”…and others”, COMPLICITY: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, Vol. 5 No 1, University of Alberta, Canada [pdf version available here]
• Semetsky, I. (forthcoming). Whence Wisdom? Human development as a mythic search for meanings. In Marian de Souza (Ed.), International Handbook on Education for Spirituality, Care and Wellbeing, Springer.
• Simon, H.A. (1995). Near decomposability and complexity: how a mind resides in a brain. In Morovitz H.J. and Singer J.L. (Eds.). The Mind, The Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems. Proceedings Vol. XXII. Santa Fe Institute in the Sciences of Complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 25-43.

There are a number of ways one can approach pip cards: through using a key-word mnemonic; geometrical, musical and numerological reflection; connections to their equivalent number in the trump sequence; and correlations to other systems of thought. Herein I want to show one way in which an aspect of the 64 hexagrammes of the I-Ching may be correlated with the 36 pip cards, excluding the four Aces.

Whenever working with various systems — whatever they may be — what I strive to do is to go back to their basis and seek to understand how the overall structure emerges. It is on this basis that, some twenty years back, I strove to understand the I-Ching on its own basis, as a reflection of the natural world. To make this brief, I shall here simply mention that early Chinese thought also had a somewhat similar fourfold elemental division to that of the West. For our purposes, I’ll use Air to the East, Fire to the South (if in the northern hemisphere, North if in the Southern), Water in the West, and Earth in the North (if northern, South if southern). It should be noted that, in the West these arise out of Ancient Greek thought, these four elements have themselves been considered to emerge out of two principles: that of moisture; and that of heat. These, in isolation, produce (respectively) Water and Fire; when mixed Air; and in their absence, Earth.

In the four cardinal directions, we have the rising of the Sun, its zenith in the South (in the northern hemisphere), its setting in the West, and its ‘midnight’ position projected to the North in completing a cycle and for its eventual return to the East. Here we already have two ‘active’, and two ‘recessive’ or ‘receptive’ positions: dawn and noon as active, and dusk and midnight as receptive.

It we take the dual form of an unbroken Yang line as active, and a ‘hollowed’ Yin line as receptive, we generate a relation between the four elements and the Yin-Yang lines, by a first step, as follows:

Southern Hemisphere view

Northern Hemisphere view

Of both the Yin and Yang lines, allocation to two positions makes for lack of clarity, and we can easily observe that the ‘force’ of the mid-day Sun is greater than that of daybreak and that, similarly, the receptivity of midnight greater than dusk. A second line can be added above each foundation line to show this thus:

Southern Hemisphere view

Northern Hemisphere view

A new problem arises, however, though both Fire and Earth are clearly distinguished, both Air and Water appear to now have an equality of active and receptive force which, having started with reflections that dawn (Air) is more Yang, and dusk (Water) more Yin, requires us to add a third line to show this. Adding a third line also adds yet other possibilities, resulting in not four primary points, but also their cross-points. The cross point are generated by the ‘secondary’ trigrammes.

Southern Hemisphere view

Northern Hemisphere view

The reasoning for the placement of the inter-primary trigrammes is straight-forward if the positions are taken, as we began, as reflecting diurnal motion: there is growth and hence a greater Yang energy from morning until afternoon, with Yin beginning to form a foundation in mid-afternoon, yet under a still dominant Yang, and so on around the circle of the day.

The figure that results, incidentally, is precisely the earliest form of the eight trigrammes, attributed to Fu Hsi.

It should be noted here that, as seen in diurnal motion, each element is not fixed to a cardinal location, but rather includes its quarter from (for example for Air) sunrise until the next period is reached. Hence two trigrammes are included as part of the element. Considerations as to the trigrammes’ titles — from dawn deosil: Light; Lake; Heaven; Wind; Water; Mountain; Earth; and Thunder — makes for important reflections to more deeply understanding each of these. From my perspective, the 64 hexagrammes can only be understood by understanding each trigram individually. The two keys that one may use to gain a deeper understanding of the trigrammes is to notice their respective positions in relation to the elements, and therefore also the seasons and diurnal motion, and, secondly, to ‘read’ them as individual sequences of activity (Yang) and receptivity (Yin) lines, working from the bottom up.

Formation of 64 hexagrammes

The hexagrammes are themselves composite, working on the basis of duality, whereby each trigramme is combined with every trigramme (8 x 8 = 64).

As for the trigrammes, each hexagramme can be understood as described above, ie, as series of actions and ‘receptions’, or what one does, and what one is subjected to; Secondly, one may read the hexagramme as the juxtaposition of two trigrammes; Thirdly, taking the second and fifth lines as representing individuals, the higher in the position of authority in relation to the lower; and fourthly, as patterns from which one may read the first line as the opening of the situation (or the desire one has of the situation), the final as the outcome (or the environmental limitations/support), and the middle four lines as two interpenetrating trigrammes, the lower leading to the higher. This last form, as the most dynamic, is also probably the most fruitful (and forms the basis, incidentally, of a spread I developed some time back I call the Dynamic Hexagramme Spread).

Hexagrammes on cards

The apparent disadvantage of using the hexagrammes on cards, instead of using one of the methods outlined above, is that any hexagramme is presented in static form: there are no moving lines. What we need to remember is that we read the spread. In a spread that contains more than one pip card, a number of hexagrammes will appear with each pip card assigned such. We should take these to be the transformations resulting from, poetically speaking, invisible moving lines.

Reduction of the 64 hexagrammes

Having sixty-four (64) hexagrammes and only forty (40) pip cards at first appears to pose a problem for any possible correlation, until we look more closely at the hexagrammes.

Most hexagrammes are the reversal of other hexagrammes. For example, the following two hexagrammes are reversals of each other:

If we take the reversals as representing two possible manifestations of a similar type of energy, we are left with 36 ‘archetypal’ hexagrammes, most of which have two possible manifestations – some do not have a ‘reversal’ in that the same image manifests (for example, six Yin lines reversed generate the same image).

Correlation: Hexagrammes & Suits

The Aces of the pip cards can represent the four elements in their purest forms. In some way similar to the way in which the four primary trigrammes do. If we therefore subtract these four Aces from the forty pips, we are left with thirty-six pips.

We now have a quantitative basis by which the correlations can be made. The qualitative basis begins from considering the four elements, and the primary trigrammes already correlated earlier.

We can, in fact, begin to enumerate certain qualitative rules for correlations:

1] Any hexagramme composed of a primary trigramme combined with itself (or, in other words, doubled) will be assigned to the element of the foundation trigramme.

2] Any non-reversible hexagramme composed solely of secondary trigrammes will be assigned to the element of the foundation (lower) trigram.

3] Any hexagramme composed of a primary trigramme combined with a secondary will be assigned to the element of the primary trigramme.

By these three steps, we can already assign twenty-four of the thirty-six archetpal hexagrammes. This leaves us only twenty-four of the sixty-four hexagrammes to assign, or only twelve archetypal hexagrammes to assign to the four elements.

4] Any hexagramme composed of two ‘adjacent’ primary trigrammes will be assigned to the element of the antecedent primary trigramme.

5] When the foundation trigrammes of the two forms of any archetypal hexagramme are those positioned adjacent either side a mid-point primary trigramme (on the eight-fold wheel), they will be assigned to the element of that primary trigramme.

We now come to the final eight hexagrammes (from the sixty-four), or, talking of their archetypal forms, the final four hexagrammes. These consist of the lower trigrammes of the two expressive forms of the archetype being found opposite one another on the wheel, whether they be primary or secondary trigrammes. Given that, both Kabalistically and Alchemically Fire and Water are more primal than, respectively, Air and Earth, the primary opposites will be assigned to Fire or Water as appropriate, and the secondary opposites to Air and Earth as appropriate:

6] When the foundation trigrammes of the two forms of any archetypal hexagramme are those positioned opposite one another (on the eight-fold wheel), they will be assigned to the primal element if the trigrammes are primary, or the composite element if the trigrammes are secondary.

Archetypal Forms

The above six steps have allowed us to assign each of the sixty-four hexagrams to the four elements, and therefore to four suits to which four elements can be more or less correlated. Our next step is to determine which of two expressive forms of an archetypal hexagramme shall be deemed the upright, and which the reversed.

In each case, the upright form shall be the one whose foundation (lower) trigramme elemental position correlates with the element of the card with which it is associated.

Pip card key terms

The final task is to assign each of the thirty-six upright forms with the pip cards, remembering that the Aces have no hexagrammatic correlation. In order to make it easier to do this, I use a key-term system for each of the pip cards irrespective of the suit, and then see how the construction of the upright forms of the hexagrammes fits.

2] Balance, relation
3] Communication, co-operation, expression, analysis
4] Stability, order, limitation
5] Creative tension, constructive freedom
6] Harmony, love, care
7] (Spiritual) goal, understanding, synthesis
8] Abundance,
9] Wishes, aspirations, altruism
10] Fullness, completion, satisfaction

Some of the more distinctive hexagrams can be easily linked thus:

2] Opposites (from step 6 of the Correlations section)
5] Secondary adjacents (moving widdershins) (from step 5)
6] Non-reversible secondaries (from step 2)
7] Adjacent primaries (from step 4)
10] Double primaries (from step 1)

The final four of each suit are assigned according to the position of the secondary trigramme of each hexagramme, and a numerological elemental correlation (remember that step 3 of the Correlations section has given us the element to which the hexagrammes are assigned, and thus, the upright form has also been determined).

3] Air quarter, Lake;
4] Earth quarter, Thunder;
8] Water quarter, Mountain;
9] Fire quarter, Wind.

Correlation: Hexagrammes & Pip Cards

The list that follows gives, for each card — and here I leave the elemental attribution to whichever is the preferred option from various assignations made by various authors — the number of the hexagramme(s) associated with it and the latter’s name(s). The numbers refer to the ordering of the discussion of each hexagramme in any standard I Ching book. Note that the bracketed column indicates the inverted form of the hexagramme.

I cannot recommend enough that each hexagramme be carefully studied. The table makes associations with any particular pip card simple, yet not simplistic. The only way to determine whether I Ching correlations are fruitful is to use them. For myself, I have on various occasions found them to be highly valuable