Tarot: A Gateway to the Unconscious
/A Jungian perspective on tarot and how to use the cards as a tool for healing, transformation, and awakening
By Kimberly Lakein - April 6th, 2019
Image by keith gonzalez on pixabay,
The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck is so full of symbolism and archetypes that even after studying it for years, it still feels like I am merely scratching the surface. This deck consists of 22 Major Arcana cards and 56 Minor Arcana cards, which are broken down into four suits. The Major Arcana cards embody the archetypes, a concept created by the founder of analytical psychology, Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1919). The cards represent, in ascending order, the stages that the hero goes through and the archetypes he encounters on his hero’s journey, as depicted by the legendary Joseph Campbell (1949). This is an idea shared among students of tarot, and I first learned this in a tarot class by the founder of Sage Goddess and Doctor of Leadership, Athena Perrakis (2016).
Jungian analyst, Murray Stein (1998), defines archetypes in his book, Jung’s Map of the Soul, as “an innate potential pattern of imagination, thought, or behavior that can be found among human being in all times and places” (p. 233). At first glance, the artwork on the cards may look simple, but as the questioner takes the time to sit with the cards, the multiple layers of symbolism emerge. I have had the Rider-Waite-Smith deck for a long time, and although I own over thirty decks, I use this one in almost every reading I do. It speaks a language of symbols and archetypes to my psyche and opens a direct channel into my unconscious, which inherently understands the symbols the same way that it understands dream symbols. My hypothesis is that tarot can be used as a gateway to the unconscious, and through studying the work of Carl Jung, I found evidence for this to be true. The tarot cards are an effective tool of self-reflection on the journey on individuation, serving as bridges to the unconscious, illuminating new information, and transporting it to the conscious mind for healing and integration.
A creative way to work with the cards, as I have discovered, is to focus on the archetypes and their lessons-- not only from a predictive standpoint, but also from a space of embodiment. The cards inspire me to entertain new ways of seeing reality and operating in the world. My relationship to them feels as though I am in council with a group of wise elders, who share their wisdom with me anytime I desire to visit. The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck serves as a guide to myself and others through our individual hero’s journeys, and I will continue to discover hidden meanings as I deepen my understanding of the psyche. Psyche is defined as, “an inclusive term covering the areas of consciousness, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious” (Stein, p. 234).
The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot is one of the most well-known decks and was published by the Rider Company in 1910. It was created by mystic and academic A.E. Waite (1910) and illustrated by female artist, Pamela Colman Smith (1910), whose well-deserved credit is often omitted. Around the same time, Carl Jung wrote his doctoral thesis in 1902 called, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,” on experiments he did with his female cousin, who was a medium.
The Major Arcana cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck tell a story and foreshadow one another with shared imagery and symbolism (Perrakis, 2016). The symbols in the artwork of the cards speak to the unconscious, both on a personal and on a collective level. A symbol in the card will have personal associations and universal amplifications. The cards can be worked utilized in a similar way to the way one would work with dreams, serving as messengers from the unconscious. The cards have a way of helping one tap into their unconscious to unearth what they already know deep inside to be their truth--their internal wisdom.
Pacifica Graduate Institute Professor, Licensed Marriage Family Therapist, and Certified Jungian Analyst, Willow Young (2019), said in her Analytical Psychology lecture, “We have an ethical responsibility to confront inner figures who come controlling us and preventing us from becoming our whole selves. The process of individuation is to speak our own truth at all times when it arises.” Using the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck is an effective way to identify who our inner figures are and confront them, so that instead of holding us back they can be an alley on our path to individuation. Jung discussed this when he said, “...complexes behave like independent beings, a fact especially evident in abnormal states of the mind” (Jung, 1989, p. 394). If a person is reading the cards with an activated complex skewing their perception, the cards would reflect that, but it would be near impossible for the querent to be able to receive that information. “Complexes interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb the conscious performance” (Jung, 1989, p. 393). The querent would be looking for a certain answer and would not be open to anything else. It is not uncommon for this to happen to myself or people I am reading for. When the person is no longer under the influence of the complex, then the cards can be used to become aware of the complex’s existence, why it is there, where it originated, and how it can be healed.
The tarot is effective whether one views it as is a divination tool to obtain spiritual wisdom or purely as a self-reflection tool. The cards help the querent to view their question from multiple perspectives, and it is the querent’s task to stay as objective as possible when first viewing the cards. Traditional interpretations of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck include upright and reversed positions, which represent their light and shadow aspects. Shadow is defined as, “the rejected and unaccepted aspects of the personality that are repressed and form a compensatory structure to the ego’s self ideals and to the persona” (Stein, p. 234). In a reading, a card may reflect a person’s shadow directly, or it may inspire a response that reveals shadow material. The way a person reacts to a certain card will reveal aspects of their personal psychology, such as their shadow, complex, animus, or anima. A definition of the animus and anima are, “the archetypal images of the eternal feminine in a man’s unconscious, or the eternal masculine in a woman’s unconscious, that forms a link between the ego-consciousness and the collective unconscious and potentially opens a way to the self” (Stein, p. 233). It is important to note that when speaking in terms of gender, it does not have to refer to the sex one was born with. Everyone has both masculine and feminine energies within, and it is a personal decision how one relates and identifies with respect to gender. The anima and animus can be allies of healing whether one identifies as cisgender, transgender, genderfluid or nonbinary. One could feel whether they are drawn to work the anima or animus intuitively according to how they were feeling in the moment. If they were feeling more masculine in the moment, they could call on the anima, and vice versa. A way to receive an image from one’s anima or animus is through tarot cards, specifically, a card that elicits a strong emotional affect in the person.
Jung describes his relationship with his anima and her purpose in his memoir, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections:”
But the anima ... communicates the images of the unconscious to the conscious mind, and that is what I chiefly valued her for. For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt that my emotional behaviour was disturbed, and that something had been constellated in the unconscious. I would then ask the anima: ‘Now what are you up to? What do you see? I should like to know.’ After some resistance she regularly produced an image. As soon as the image was there, the unrest or the sense of oppression vanished. The whole energy of these emotions was transformed into interest in and curiosity about the image. I would speak with the anima about the images she communicated to me, for I had to try to understand them as best I could, just like a dream.
(pp. 187-188)
Out of all the cards, the Emperor evokes the strongest emotional response for me and reflects aspects of my shadow, such as the animus and complexes. The Emperor card used to evoke a fear response within me, but through working with it over the years, it has taught me its light aspects and how to illuminate them within my shadow. The Emperor has historically surfaced in readings for myself or others to represent an abusive male, or the perpetrator archetype, opposite of the victim archetype. The traditional meaning of the Emperor card is that he is a powerful leader and warrior. Some people may look at the card and feel a positive identification with his divine masculine qualities.
The Emperor is one representation of my animus, because I have powerful, domineering, authoritative qualities in my shadow, and I fear and repress these aspects of my personality. This is because I have associated, due to past traumatic events, power being misused, and relate my inner power to a fear that it will be destructive. However, the cards teach me that his shadow aspects, and can be used in a positive way, because his light aspects are that he is a warrior, a leader, an initiator, and gets things done. The Emperor is a teacher of power, and how it can be used in a constructive way.
The cards have figures representing the divine masculine, the divine feminine, or both genders as androgynous figures, such as the Fool, the Magician, and the Pages. The tarot cards are all about balance, and they reveal, through the suits and archetypes, both where a person has excess or a lack of certain qualities as well as what can be done to reach equilibrium. The tarot is a self-healing tool, bringing unconscious material to the conscious, integrating it into the Self on the lifelong path to individuation. Jung (1960) called this the transcendent function and describes it in his article The Transcendent Function as, “the collaboration of conscious and unconscious data” (p. 82)
The unconscious needs an outlet to communicate with the conscious mind. It needs a transmitter-- like a psychopomp, a doula or a shaman A shaman is someone who can walk in two worlds at once--the world of the living, and the spirit world. The animus is like the shaman of our psyche, communicating symbols on the tarot cards as archetypes, complexes, anima or animus. Young discussed exercises for working with dreams, beginning by stating, “I do not know what this means.” Next the dreamer brainstorms personal associations of the dream images and ending with amplification. (Young, 2016). Tarot images can be explored in the same way as dream images.
Whatever cards are drawn for a person are not by coincidence but by synchronicity. Synchronicity is defined by Stein as, “the meaningful coincidence of two events, one inner and psychic and the other outer and physical” (p. 234). An important practice for professional tarot readers to incorporate would be to not only channel what is coming through for them in the cards, but to dedicate a portion of the session to ask the querent what the cards mean to them, what feelings and associations arise for them as they gaze at the images. This exercise would provide a means for the unconscious to express itself through the person’s reaction and interpretation of the tarot card’s images.
Swiss Sociologist and Depth Psychologist, Theodore Abt (2005), said in his book, “Introduction to picture interpretation: According to C.G. Jung,” said, “...pictures become a bridge to the unknown spirit of the psychic background. While working with the unconscious, especially when patients remember few dreams or none at all, this is a way of gaining access to the unconscious spirit” (p. 30). In this book, Abt is talking about if someone is creating the painting, but I think that viewing artwork can have the same effect. If multiple people were looking at the same cards in front of them, each person would have a different emotional response and interpretation because different symbols in the cards would stick out to them, further evoking different personal associations to the symbols, thus communicating whatever needs to be communicated between the individual conscious and the collective conscious.
In his book, “Man and his Symbols,” Jung (1968) wrote about a colleague of his, who, by pondering indecipherable letters on the wall of the train he was riding, unexpectedly excavated his complexes by way of free-association, Jung said that this made him realize that dreams were not the only entry point to discover complexes by free association, as Sigmund Freud called it. Jung said, “One could begin from Cyrillic letters, from meditations upon a crystal ball, a prayer wheel, or a modern painting, or even from a casual conversation” (p.11) Just as how dreams are an important method in the Jungian perspective of healing and self-discovery for individuation, tarot is a practice that anyone could use to access the unconscious.
Anyone can use tarot cards, they do not have to be psychic. The cards can be utilized the same way that one would work with a dream, starting with hosting a beginner’s mind, then moving into association, and then amplification. There are many ways to work with tarot cards, but by using them in a way that aligns with the Jungian perspective of dreamwork, tarot cards can be a gateway to the unconscious for healing on the path to individuation.
Princess Jasmine reminding you that you are the magician! ;) You have the power to make all of your dreams true
References
Abt, T. (2005). Introduction to picture interpretation: According to C.G. Jung. Zurich Switzerland: Living Human Heritage Publications.
Jung, C. G. (1968). Man and his symbols. New York, NY: Dell Publishing.
Jung, C. G. (1989). Memories, dreams, reflections. (A. Jaffe, Ed.) (R. Winston & C. Winston, Trans.) (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work, published 1961).
Jung, C. G. (1960). The transcendent function. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 8, pp. 67-91). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1916).
Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s map of the soul: An introduction. Peru, IL: Open Court.
Young, W. (2019, Spring). Unpublished lecture presented in the course, Analytical Psychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA.
