[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

The unconscious responds to vibration and to shape. The meaning of a concept is its cage, and for that concept to reach the unconscious it must free itself. This, I would say, is the key to understanding the Marseille Tarot’s distinctive language. The Marseille Tarot speaks a language of signs which expresses itself through direct revelations. We understand these revelations by drawing an analogy between the image we see and our personal story. Instead of affording an intellectual understanding of ourselves, the Tarot transforms the consciousness so that new realities and possibilities can emerge. The Marseille Tarot speaks the language that we can also see carved in the stone of European Romanesque churches, full of visual puns and graphic messages which are understood in a single glance. That is why they are so easy to miss! That is also why it is so easy to overlook The Marseille Tarot’s iconic language. Looking at these images is an enormous challenge to us because we have forgotten how to reach out through our senses. Images are poured into our eyes from increasingly bigger and better screens, sounds get plugged into our ears, we feel life through a joystick or a remote, and we type electric whispers, hiding comfortably inside our virtual placenta.

How can we understand a language that comes from a time long-gone, when men had a different relationship with their own senses? The over-saturation of pictures in our contemporary world renders each image we create obsolete as soon as we produce it. Perhaps that is why the Marseille Tarot’s primal, raw and humble images, bearing the voice of the stones within their forms, still have the power to ‘deliver’ us into this world.

The Marseille Tarot can only be known through direct experience. It expresses itself through shapes and colors as soon as we look at it, speaking a language which, in order to become alive, must kill the meaning of its symbols. It is a language that never lets itself be caged. This is not a symbolic language in the sense that each card is a memory prompter holding a stack of meanings. This is not the language of the occultist’s Tarot. The Marseille Tarot is not a book, because books where created to free our memory from its burdens. These cards shouldn’t be memorized: they simply awaken our memories when we look at them. The content is not in the card, but in us. The Marseille Tarot is more like the alphabet of an iconic language which we understand without uttering a word because we listen to it with our eyes. This is a language that doesn’t contain, but rather reveals, our inner truths.

The Marseille Tarot functions as an autonomous language because it is composed of several basic meaning units, a minimal inventory of concepts that are both decomposable and atomic, and which can be rearranged into a vast number of possibilities. As I suggested here: www.tarot-authentique.com what makes the Marseille Tarot units of meaning so effective is their high iconic level, their sharp simplicity.

If we can resist the temptation to find exact correspondences, that is, if we resist the temptation to put the bird into a cage, comparing the Marseille Tarot with our phonetic alphabet can be very helpful in understanding its language.

The Tarot is not the alphabet. The Tarot is an alphabet. Pointing out how the letter A resembles a standing Bateleur won’t be as useful as understanding that letter forms carry suggestions. These suggestions may become more discernible if, instead of seeing each letter as a definitive shape, we see them as snapshots of a graphic continuum. Shape is a consequence of movement, and movement is a visual manifestation of space. For the sake of orientation, let’s imagine two spatial axes, a vertical one that we will define as ‘being’ and an horizontal one that we will define as ‘becoming’. A single vertical stroke creates the most minimal shape in our alphabet, the letter I. We could take this basic shape as reference, and establish it as “being.” The letter I would represent the individual. Now, let’s assume that our sense of being gets reshaped by our sense of becoming. This is, when the vertical axis represented by the letter I is activated horizontally, we have the letter I reshaping itself to form all the other letters of the alphabet. When the letter I breaks apart and becomes receptive to the ground, we have an A. When the letter I grows arms to embrace the world, it creates the letter B. If the letter I curves itself, forming a letter C, it becomes receptive to the future. This way, by understanding the ‘motion’ that took place for the original vertical stroke to become any other letter, the content of such movements becomes an indirect tale. Each letter becomes a play, a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, giving us the chance to experience the alphabet in an entirely new way. This cognitive shift is similar to the one necessary for us if we want to abandon a symbolic conception of the Tarot, and start speaking the Marseille Tarot’s true language. This is a vocabulary made of shapes, and focusing on them is a visual meditation. This way, if we look at two cards in a row we can ask ourselves: “what needs to happen for this image to become that other one”?

Let’s look at one single letter. The letter M is one of our alphabet’s basic units of meaning. At first sight we could call it an atomic component. Letters are the basic cells of our language and cannot be divided. But a deeper look at its shape makes us think that the Letter M is also decomposable into a letter V hanging between two letters I. Perhaps a letter M shows two Is holding hands! Obviously, normal communication would become severely impaired if we insisted on derailing our understanding of each letter in this way, but from time to time it might be useful to play this game with letter shapes and let our amusement open the way to new insights. Is not this the very same thing that happens when we look at an individual Tarot card for too long?

In the Marseille Tarot, sound becomes an optical rhythm. Just as ‘A’ is the sound we experience when we look at the letter A, The Fool is the vibration one gets tuned-into when looking at The Fool. Every person who reads “Aaaaaa” generates a similar sound, just as every person who looks at The Fool comes into contact with the same properties of the image. If we were to ask ourselves “what does the letter A mean?”, we would be in trouble. The same thing happens with each Tarot card. Since different people will relate to The Fool’s attributes in different ways, we cannot explain in words what The Fool’s attributes are. We can only experience them. What we can do is to describe The Fool’s basic unity of meaning: a man walks to the right, his eyes fixed on the horizon, while seeming to ignore both the path he walks and the pain inflicted by an animal-like creature who is scratching his ‘noble’ (like Noblet?) parts. When we look at the card we take in this whole image at a single glance, just as we perceive the whole letter M by looking at it. But this atomic sense, indispensable for the image to become operative, can be decomposed. Now and then we may feel drawn to The Fool’s bag, or to his shoes, or to the aforementioned gray creature and its knotty, knotty, paw.

Even so, a letter alone is rarely useful to convey meaning. The same thing happens with each of the Trumps, Honors, and Pips on the Marseille Tarot. Exploring each letter on its own, or exploring each card isolated from its context, is deceptive. Concepts reshape their meanings according to whether they are expressed alone, or in the context of a phrase. Context is, in fact, what makes concepts useful.

To incorporate each simple unit of meaning into a more complex one, this unit must be elementary enough to prevent its own shape from drawing undue attention to itself once it has been integrated into a larger context. This is part of the secret of the Marseille Tarot’s iconicity.

Back to the alphabet: notice how much more difficult the act of reading a text becomes if we employ a fantasy font in which the basic features of each letter have been obscured by capricious ornamentation. There is no point in devoting too much attention to each letter, because the meaning of the word “BABY” is not B and A and B and Y. The word’s gestalt outweighs each letter’s single identity. Likewise, when we look at some cards spread over a table, we see all of them at once. It doesn’t really matter which card was laid down first, or which one second. We apprehend the whole gestalt and it immediately becomes a coherent unit of meaning. The Tower, The Fool, and The Star together become “The fool leaving the Tower for the Star”, or more precisely, indicate that we must “get out of there in order to find relief”. We are afforded an overview which integrates and expands the individual attributes of the three cards. Just as letters disappear within the words they create, these three cards aren’t just three cards anymore, but an event which vibrates analogically with our own experience and thereby reveals its meaning for us.

Syntax allow us to build complex concepts by grouping simple ones. In this way, the atoms of our language: (Pips, Honors, and Trumps) generate larger units of meaning. Instead of going card by card, like a child in a spelling bee contest, maintaining a holistic view of the cards will allow us to practice this unique optical language.

This is the way the Marseille Tarot speaks to us.

Enrique Enriquez

New York, January 2008.

* The images illustrating this article are from the Jean Noblet Tarot:

published by Jean-Claude Flornoy www.tarot-history.com
online images on www.tarothistory.com

“To ride on a broomstick and fly: combine belladonna leaves, stramonium, munkshood, and celery seeds to make an ointment. Add one toad and boil until the skin falls off the bones. Strain and apply the ointment to the body.” This seventeenth century formula, as told by Jeanne Rose in her book “Herbs and Things”, is indicative of what many people, even today, envision a psychic to be associated with.

[LoScarabeo's Witchy Tarot]

Although, certainly, they may not think the ingredients are made up of such things as toads and bat wings, many people do believe that those who are openly psychic are ‘devil worshippers’ and practitioners of ‘black magic.’ Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, words like “new age,” “metaphysics,” “psychic” “paganism” and “occult” are merely spiritual belief systems which fall outside of the widely accepted ‘organized’ religions, such as Christianity.

Just as organized religions have their ‘tools’ that they use for rituals, such as the rosary in Catholicism, or the menorah in Judaism, many metaphysicians have tools to practice their craft and beliefs. One of the tools is “The Tarot.”

The tarot reader interprets cards of various symbolic drawings and combines that interpretation with her or his psychic abilities to gain a greater understanding of the unconscious mind. Geri, a Catholic raised, non-denominational minister, uses the Tarot as her main tool. When she was asked how people perceive her, she said, “…there are the ones who raise their eyebrows in terror. They think you’re going to cast a spell on them because they immediately label you a witch.” Contrary to that belief, however, many psychics are everyday people in everyday clothes, working everyday jobs, living everyday lives. Furthermore, these people are coming out of the closet, so to speak, using the tools of the trade, making metaphysics a viable part of life in our current world.

Today a common name for it is “New Age.” Some people call it “self-spirituality,” “new spirituality” or “new age religion,” but whereas religions are organized, “new age” is more of a ‘movement. Furthermore, in many organized religions, there is pressure to make others convert. New Age believers rarely subscribe to that. Geri sees it as “a complete psychological and philosophical system,” and as a way of giving people the freedom to believe in whatever they choose. “It gives you the freedom to be you,” she explains.

Ann, a reader who uses runes as her tool, sees her readings as a result of her beliefs. She defines her beliefs in this way: “We’re not a religion; to me it’s a philosophy.” She believes, as many with an interest in metaphysics do, that her beliefs are hers and that other people’s are theirs. She thinks that no one has the right to judge other people and their views on life. “The only person you have to account to is yourself,” she says, and stresses that because she’s learned to communicate with her ‘higher self’ there is no need for a middle-man, such as a Pope or a Rabbi. Additionally, even though she agrees that many religions teach good things, she expresses her beliefs this way: “I don’t think his way is any wiser than what I believe; I have the same contact with the good Lord as he has…I don’t feel like I’m anybody’s disciple.”

This is not to say, however, that Ann doesn’t keep an open mind. She takes the ideas and philosophies that work for her, leaves the rest, and doesn’t feel threatened when others have the same view of her beliefs. What are her beliefs? She believes in peaceful coexistence.

Each one [religion] has to be the one because they are afraid of the other guy; whereas, if we could all live next to each other…everybody just does their thing, believes in their own thing, as long as they don’t try to make the other one believe in the same…but, that doesn’t make for bigger populations in your religion unless you try to convert–or wipe everyone else out.

The latter has been the cause of wars for centuries.

The philosophies that New Age is loosely structured around stem from ancient far eastern religions. The idea is that all people need only to look within themselves to find the higher spiritual source that they search for. Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, explains it in this way:

It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.
I can not teach you how to pray in words.
God listens to your words save when He
Himself utters them through your lips.

These lines seem to embody a very basic metaphysical belief–the belief that God, as each person perceives Her or Him to be, lives within that person, and that one must listen to oneself to truly find her or his own Higher Spirit.

One of the problems that psychics and believers of this type of ideology have are the pre-conceived notions that uninformed people have about those with alternative philosophies. In his book, The Kabbalah, Poncé states, “The commonly accepted picture of a mystic–or anyone for that matter who consciously seeks to find meaning on life–as a self-indulgent escapist has also contributed much to the misunderstanding of mysticism in general”.

The word “mysticism” is key here. The word relates to the word mystery: “something unexplained, unknown, or kept secret” (Webster’s). This suggests that it is really only a mystery to those who are uninformed about the subject of metaphysics. Yet, a shroud of mystery is pervasive. When asked how he generally perceives psychics, Tim, a college student who has never had a psychic reading, yet is very open-minded and curious about them, stated, “For some reason, in my mind’s eye, I’ve always seen them as gypsy type ladies, women of mystique. Of course, they’re attractive, too. They just have to be attractive for some reason.” This idea is not surprising, considering the multitude of movies and television programs that portray psychics in that very, stereotypical role.

There’s quite a difference, however, between those who are curious and those who are staunch non-believers. Tim, our college student, expresses a desire to learn more about the roots of metaphysics, specifically the Tarot, and wants to form a more reasonable understanding about it. “I know it’s not just card reading.” He states, “There’s got to be more to it than that.” In contrast, Susan, a church-going Christian, believes that the whole idea is the work of the Devil and that opening oneself up to psychic powers is opening oneself up to the evil forces that he brings.

Perhaps she is not completely wrong. It is for that precise reason that psychics have their own personalized rituals that they use for protection against those unknown forces, much like Native Americans did when they burned sage for protection. That ritual is still in use by many who practice metaphysics today.

The Tarot, runes (or stones), palmistry, and the crystal ball are all just tools that are used by psychically gifted people to tap into their power. Many psychics believe, however, that everyone has that power, more commonly known as a “sixth sense,” but that they are just not aware of it, or have just not developed it. For Geri, “It’s basically for personal growth through meditation with the [tarot] cards,” which she feels gives her direction and guidance. That, too, is what many people go to readers for, even though it may be a little scary at first.

Meg, an R.N., states she had never been read, but recently went to a seance for the first time where she was told by the medium (a person who communicates with spirits who have passed on) things that Meg knew the medium couldn’t have known any other way but telepathically. She thinks that with the ‘law of averages’ people can’t just pick things out of the air like that and be right, unless there is something more. When asked how she might feel getting a personal reading of some kind, she said, “I’m frightened [because] I just can’t explain it. But, I really can’t disbelieve it because it’s so odd.” She doesn’t feel so much that something will happen to her; rather, she is more afraid of finding out something that she really doesn’t want to know.

Meg’s perception of psychics is somewhat the same. When someone tells her about being psychic, she says she feels “…they can look right through you and know your inner feelings and inner thoughts.” She agrees that maybe she gives them credit for more power than they really have. This is not surprising though; the seed was planted early.

Although Meg stated that she had never been read, actually she had been, and just hadn’t recognized it. She relayed a story about what sounded like some sort of vagabond at the Five and Dime in Chicago, where she grew up. For a dollar, he would correctly tell the serial numbers on it. For a dollar more, he would let the people write three questions on a slip of paper, which he would then answer. Meg was at an impressionable age at the time, about 16 years old, and she wanted a car, but she did not include it in her three questions. He answered her three written questions and then, as she was leaving, he said, “Oh yeah, don’t worry. You’re going to get that car you want.” It made such an impression on her that she tried to get her mother to go back with her, to no avail. She, herself, went back to look for the man, but he was gone, never again to be found.

“New Age” is not new. As Geri says, “It is just the current name. With each generation it’s becoming more acceptable.” In fact, she ascertains that she has read of it being called “New Age” as far back as the early 1800’s; before that, people were hanged because of it. That shows that even though tactics may have changed, human nature surely hasn’t.

Throughout history, most of the major wars have been rooted in and fought over religious beliefs. Even today, we are in a war with fundamentalist underpinnings. The Middle East has not seen peace for many people’s lifetimes and it continues to either spread or move around. Why? Because those ethnocentric people are threatened by, and demonize, anyone who doesn’t have identical beliefs, organized religion or not.

But those who eschew organized religion and are involved in spiritual and psychic beliefs are not the “devil worshippers” portrayed in the movies and in modern propaganda. To the contrary. Most are just everyday people want to live their lives in the best way that they know how, and they are willing to let others do the same. It seems like a fair enough proposition.

for tarot readings and New Age gifts, see www.spiritcaat.com.

> www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Boiardo

Some time between circa 1460 – 1494, Count Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote a poem about cards, the structure of which either mimics or anticipates tarot: apart from the brief opening and closing sonets, the first four ‘chapters’ (of five) have fourteen parts, and the fifth twenty-two. This mirrors precisely tarot as we know it, with four suits of fourteen cards, and a fifth trump suit of twenty-two.

It is one of the oldest references to a deck with 22 trumps. From this some have suggested that perhaps Count Boiardo invented this structure which, on this argument, eventually became the standard structure for tarot.

Biography

Count Matteo Maria Boiardo of Scandiano was born in Scandiano circa 1440. In 1476 he moved to Ferrara as court poet of Ercole D’Este. In 1480 he was appointed Moden’s governor, and died in Reggio Emilia in 1494.

Decks

A deck, based on extant designs from the 15th and 16th centuries, has recently been produced by LoScarabeo using this poem.

Content

Content of the said chapters
by Matteo Maria Boiardo
about a new game of cards.

Four passions of the soul, milady,
Are forty cards in this game.
The lesser gives place to the worthier,
And their meaning gives them their suit.

Each suit also has four figures,
Each of which I place in due role,
With twenty and one triumphs; and in the meanest place
Is a fool, because the fool the world adores.

Love, hope, jealousy and fear
Are the passions, and the cards have a tercet
So as not to leave the player in error.

The number in the verses runs:
One, two, three, ending at the highest;
Now it remains for you to find the art of the game.

Fear

HERE BEGIN THE FIVE MOST
BEAUTIFUL CHAPTERS ON FEAR,
JEALOUSY, HOPE, AND LOVE, OF
COUNT MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO
FIRST CHAPTER – FEAR (Whips)

1) FEAR keeps a soul is such doubts
That it has little reason to live happily,
Because it never enjoys and is always afraid.

2) FEAR, where there is some danger, forbids
All pleasure, and makes a man so faint-hearted,
That reason can never appease the soul.

3) FEAR makes the lamb tremble in the fold
If it hears the wolf outside; and it stays so enclosed,
That the subtlest breeze can hardly reach it.

4) FEAR keeps four horses at the service of a chariot
Under a cane, tied to a yoke;
It also keeps many in servitude, whom I do not excuse.

5) FEAR so grips us sometimes, that we cannot
Express our feelings, which is a great damage,
Because respect is a fellow of fear.

6) FEAR makes so that someone never defends himself,
And in case of conflict chooses to implore
And surrenders without using his weapons.

7) FEAR: if you reach the armed men in a joust,
Their courage will be dead under your influence;
Whenever you are present, you can see it on their faces.

8 ) FEAR troubles the senses, and makes pale
the face; one feels his heart tremble because of it,
And the eye shows it with an oblique glance.

9) FEAR has no doubts, about what is
present: but even though it be far away, it fears
Danger, and to fear danger seems near.

10) FEAR is certainly vain when you imagine it,
And where fear reigns, everyone agrees
That that body is ill and not healthy.

11) FEAR transformed Phineas, a tower among men,
Into stone, by the face of Medusa;
But fortune does not help the timid.

12) FEAR once turned king Ptolemy
Against Pompey, merely because Ptolemy was afraid
That Caesar would have taken his kingdom away from him.

13) FEAR prevented Andromache from saving
Her son, seeing Ulysses: and made him enter
Into the same tomb as his father Hector.

14) FEAR: Dionysius, instead of a barber,
Had his own daughters shave him with coals, in order
To avoid iron; and in the end he did not avoid it.

Because it is difficult to avoid what has been decided by heaven.

Jealousy

SECOND CHAPTER ABOUT JEALOUSY (Eyes)

1) JEALOUSY cannot spoil a true love,
Because if a lover goes with pure faithfulness,
Love rewards him at the end of his service.

2) JEALOUSY is a hard thing, when it seeks
to be useful to the rival in love:
Because often imploring grants mercy.

3) JEALOUSY makes sad a merry heart,
But often its spurs are the reason
That brings a lover to virtuous honour.

4) JEALOUSY, when it comes, it is better not to think
That you can fight it, because it wins everyone:
But it is good to be able to tolerate it.

5) JEALOUSY is searched by everyone, then everyone
Wants to avoid it; before, everyone wants to know;
Then everyone wants to lack knowledge.

6) JEALOUSY must not always take the rival
As an enemy; on the contrary, if he
Wants to win, he must be patient.

7) If JEALOUSY takes to see the thing that you love
Next to your rival, you think
That he is always talking in your interest.

8 ) JEALOUSY is so bad where it strikes,
That there is no cure for it;
If it grows too much, it is lethal.

9) JEALOUSY is no less frequent among the Gods,
Then among people; look at Juno,
Jealous of her Jove in some guilty situations!

10) JEALOUSY never puts anyone on the road
to certainty, it does not open the doors of truth,
It keeps people between hope and doubt.

11) JEALOUSY never was sure of Argus and
Of his cunning eyes, until the footsteps
With the name of Io were given to it.

12) JEALOUSY induced king Turnus, who was the heir
of king Latinus, to start a lethal war:
And he was killed, because death proceeds of such things.

13) JEALOUSY made Juno come to earth many times
For various loves of Jove,
Because whoever has it in the heart can never rest.

14) JEALOUSY made Vulcan change his shape
And catch Venus and Mars in his own net,
And the Sun made the proofs be manifest,

With its eclipses, signs and comets.

Hope

THIRD CHAPTER ABOUT HOPE (Vases with cover)

1) HOPE sometimes keeps a body joint with
A soul, that would not live without it,
And in the end it always reaches the palm of victory.

2) HOPE has never been defeated by any doubt,
But it is solid and constant to the end,
When Reason arrives to help hope.

3) HOPE when is limited to a boundary,
If it wants to move further than should be done,
Founds thorns before it reaches the flower.

4) HOPE when it comes together with reason
Is the sweetest food for the heart that wears it;
If it comes in another way, it brings more suffering.

5) HOPE keeps us in games and festivity
When power is fighting against will;
But, without order, it contains bad things.

6) HOPE, you are a friend of nature!
You keep your followers in such peace,
That any suffering does not seem to be hard.

7) HOPE, if you are not there
When someone has his own, you put such doubts
That he will not dare to say it is mine.

8 ) HOPE gives by itself to the soul
That which the soul desires, and it seems
It already has it, and it finds no resitance.

9) HOPE does not allow to be sad to someone
who is caught in a cage, when it is with him,
Nor to a shipwrecked, even if he is on dry sand.

10) HOPE wakes up the poor man who works
Digging, making a mountain, or a lake, flat,
Because he hopes to receive a prize for his efforts.

11) HOPE transformed Horatius in a lion, a dragon
So that he had the bridge cut, and went down
Desiring the safety of his homeland.

12) HOPE brought Jason, of unstrained soul,
And the Argonauts to the golden fleece
Through many adventures and a dangerous travel.

13) HOPE led Judith
Out of Betulia, to put Oloferne to an end,
and it seemed it was nothing but a big hope.

14) HOPE drove Eneas out of the Trojan border
To Italy; and his successors founded
Alba and then Rome for the Latin people.

Who once were the rulers of the world.

Love

FOURTH CHAPTER ON LOVE

1) LOVE, if someone wants to be in good relations with you,
He has to be ready, courageous and prompt,
For, in the end, who holds on wins the prize.

2) LOVE, there is no doubt that jealousy
Is always with you many places:
But if it is little, it’s good, too much is bad.

3) LOVE, the end and final goal of your earnings
Is a continuous sighing until you die;
And he who laughs one day, cries thereafter for an year.

4) LOVE, this desire holds so strong
Of aquiring what you impress in one’s heart,
That it seems that doors do not open for your aim.

5) LOVE teaches to us not to be afraid
In every deed: because a courageous
Is always a winner in courtship.

6) LOVE, if sometimes you wound an heart,
And heal it with that same arrow,
How much it is favoured in your kingdom!

7) LOVE made that wise king go
As an animal for seven years: because its law
Makes the prince equal to his own servant.

8 ) LOVE made so that Apollon looked after
The herd of Admetus, and in the end it was not
Cruel to him; it corrects its people in such ways.

9) LOVE finds new arts; and under its honey
It always keeps a bait; and it makes its servants happy,
Whenever it finds one that is loyal.

10) LOVE puts to trial the desire of all its servants;
And if it finds it vain, it turns it
in so many shapes, that he complaints more every day.

11) LOVE made this big giant Cyclops
So full of love for Galatea,
That possibly no lover burned as much as he did.

12) LOVE made Paris so courageous,
That he dared to abduct beautiful Helen,
Beacause Love makes each heart generous.

13) LOVE, the son of Venus, made her
Burn for Adonis and with such flames:
Because Love infuses its star also from heaven.

14) LOVE made Jove descend many times
In different shapes, of bull, of swan, of gold,
And, in shape of eagle, he also took Ganymedes.

And it made Pasiphe fall in love with a Bull.

Triumph of the Vain World

CHAPTER ABOUT THE TRIUMPH OF THE VAIN WORLD

World, you are vainly loved by the mad,
And a fool thinks he can bring you on his donkey,
Because the stupid only trust your state.

Lazyness kept Sardanapalus idle between feathers,
Lustful concubines and banquet,
For so long that he lost the habit of reigning.

Hyppolita endured such efforts, that she is the only
Of the amazons who is crowned by merit:
And her name still flies in Scythia and in Greece.

Actheon was inflamed of love for an heavenly
Person, so much that he was transformed in deer:
So a man should not put his desire too high.

Rightly did Laura triumph over the perverted
Child Cupid, because she neither moved
Her eye from virtue nor ever put a foot wrong.

Antiochus was so secret, that he almost
Died for his love for Stratonica;
But the kind physician helped him effectively.

Grace does not go by chance, but with reason,
To the discreet and wise, for in love can be proud
He that hides his strongest passion.

Anger filled king Herod so much
That he ordered to kill Mariamne than
He calls her, and crying suffers with love.

Psyche was patient in what happened to her,
And because of that she found help in her troubles,
And in the end was made a Goddess, to be an example for us.

An error make Jabob a slave for seven years,
Because he did not speak of Rachel to Laban;
But time repaired all his damage.

In Penelopes there was such perseverance,
That, by weaving and undoing her web,
She deserved to rejoin her beloved Ulysses.

Egeus made for himself a cruel doubt,
So that he was quick to seek death in the sea,
As soon as he saw Theseus come back with black sails.

Sophonisba was faithful to Massinissa
Beyond doubt, because she promised to drink poison
If she were forced to follow the triumph.

Nesso deceived when he said to Dianira:
Give this cloth with blood to Hercules,
If it ever happens that you have to fight for love.

In Hipermestra, as in a cunning snake,
There was wisdom because wearing the clohes of a woman
She saved her husband who was bloodless with fear.

Chance fell on Pompeyus, that for many years
Had seated at the top of the wheel,
But in the end fortune submerged him with troubles.

Emilia, the faithful wife of Scipio, showed
Modesty; because when she found him with a maid,
He did not talk of his sin not to make it public.

A spark brings danger of a big fire:
See how Cesar was killed in the senate
By only two people; after he survived the anger of Sulla.

Experience was in Rhea, who after hiding
Jove in mount Ida, ordered to make noise
So that he could not be found because of his crying.

Time, you that hurry men to death,
You saved Nestor, and if in the end he came to an end,
It seems impossible to think of such a life.

Oblivion, you are the end and boundary
Of all, you took to Lethe Elice and Dido,
And among your ruins you have fame and time.

Inner strength made happy the death of
Lucretia: to clean her fame
She killed herself, and she prepared for the offender a dark net,

Giving an example to those who love their own name and honour.

SONNET OF EXCUSE

I see my error, but I follow
The common deception, and I esteem this to be a small fault,
Because being wrong together with the majority of people is better
Than saving oneself in case of a public damage.

I see men go deceiving themselves
And try to make hours seem short to them:
So, in order to make the deception even greater,
I have made this game, and I am the first to condemn it.

Because there is nothing else to spur it, but wings
That time, which is so precious and dear,
Sends away, like the string of a bow sends an arrow.

But since there is no way to stop it,
And escaping tedium is a natural instinct,
I excuse myself for learning from nature.