More on Tarot

(The following is borrowed from various sources)

butterfly The Tarot is a visual map of consciousness and a symbolic system that offers insight into professional contribution, personal motives, and the spiritual development of each individual. As a map of consciousness, the Tarot represents a facet of the total life experience incorporating the “practical-everyday world” with the spiritual growth and evolution of each person. Basically, the Tarot reflects the opportunity that each individual has to visually see that life is a process of “walking the mystical path with practical feet.”

The Tarot operates primarily through the symbolic, non-rational aspects of consciousness, the same state from which dreams communicate. The quality and accuracy of the Tarot interpretation depends solely upon the ability of the careened, because it is only a reflection of the focus or level of consciousness of the inquirer. The Tarot is an excellent teacher, for as the user advances in expanded awareness, it reflects this expansion and responds uniquely to each individual, never teaching more than the person is capable of receiving.

The Tarot deck consists of the Minor Arcana, which has four suits, each with fourteen cards, an ace through ten, a king, queen, knight, and page of each suit; and the Major Arcana, with twenty-two cards, which bear the zero and Roman numbers I through XXI.

The Major Arcana reveals life principles, universal laws, or collective experiences that all humankind face. Just as the I-Ching is the Eastern Book of Changes, the Tarot is the Western Book of Changes. The I-Ching hexagrams represent changes in literary and nature metaphors; whereas, the Tarot is a visual representation of internal and external changes that are possible for an individual to experience.

Tarot is symbolic behavior or vision consciously performed. Those who participate, sense that they are doing an act that has symbolic meaning, and they consciously seek to transform that act into an active, dynamic symbol which is represented in the Tarot symbol reflected back to them. The meaning thus attributed reflects a movement that has the power of making “a symbol-in-motion” carry or bridge an inner world into a visible and physical form.

Without thinking about it in psychological terms, ancient and primitive cultures have always understood instinctively that ritual and symbols had a true function in their psychic lives. They understood symbol and ritual as a set of formal acts and visuals that brought them into immediate contact with the gods. Symbol served many purposes: it allowed them to show respect and reverence to the Great Powers; and it permitted them to touch the Power. The Power did not overwhelm them or possess them because the exchange was contained within the safe limits of symbol and ritual. Symbols allow us to reclaim the language that enables us to approach the soul, which is reflected to us in our dreams and contemplative states.

The Tarot deck psychologically reveals different visual portraitures of psychological states. For example: the suits as they are represented here mirror what is happening as far as mental beliefs, ideas and quality of thinking as revealed by of the Swords. Swords are pictures of our thoughts. Cups represent the emotional psychological factors, which would include our responses, reactions, and our feelings. All of the Cups indicate different qualities of love, and emotional states that range from happiness and satisfaction, to disappointment, anger, and fear. Wands represent the quality of vision, insight, perception, energy, vitality and spontaneity. Disks — or Pentacles as they are often referred to in other decks — represent the external reality or ability to manifest what we want in the outer world in the arenas of health, finances, work, creativity and relationships.

Just as psychological and spiritual information is revealed to us in our dreams or in contemplative states, the Tarot functions as an outer mirror of external experiences and internal psychological states as well. In using the Tarot and looking at it from a humanistic and psychological perspective, these symbols can teach us a lot about our own psycho-mythology. Much of the psychological world is concerned with Psycho-Pathology, or looking for that which needs to be fixed or healed within the nature. The DSM-I1I manual is a diagnostic tool that is used primarily to facilitate therapists in diagnosing people’s Psycho-Pathology. There is not yet a psychological manual to describe states of wellness. Perhaps Tarot is a visual map of both states of well-being and pathology. Tarot has the opportunity to be used by therapists as well as by the individual to assess one’s own psycho-mythology.

Psycho-Mythology is the psyche, which is comprised of two components, Logos and Eros. Logos is the inherent wisdom within the psyche; Eros is the inherent love nature in the psyche; and my: hos, or mythology, is associated with the inherent life purpose or life myth. Tarot has the opportunity to reveal to us individually, collectively and therapeutically, the quality of our current Logos and Eros, and how we are using both in actualizing our own life purposes or mythos. Basically, Tarot is a psycho-mythological tool, which can be used to reveal and acknowledge the inherent gifts and talents that are represented within the psyche as well as reveal, through the challenge symbols, personal Psycho-Pathology.

Psycho-Pathology can be viewed as neurotic states, or those issues that we see as character flaws, or under-expressed parts in our nature, or what Jung called the “shadow-parts.” Within the Tarot there are only thirteen symbols out of the seventy-eight that are seen as shadow-states, neurotic states or psycho-pathological states. So the inherent value of Tarot, if it were used within a therapeutic context, could be as a counterpart to the DSM-I1I Manual, which is a psycho-pathological diagnostic manual defining categories of dysfunctional behaviors, whereas the Tarot could be used as a psycho-mythological manual. It supports and serves as a diagnostic mechanism enabling persons to recognize their inherent wisdom, which is Logos, and their love nature, which is Eros. Tarot reveals how both Eros and Logos are working within their life purpose, which is mythos, and how their basic nature is revealed to them in multiple positive symbols. Tarot portrays the basic health and well-being of an individual. It reminds us that the thirteen challenges or shadow aspects are countered by sixty-five states of love (Eros) and wisdom (Logos).

The use of Tarot, as a psychological and mythical portraiture of oneself, is validated by this ancient saying of Novalis,: “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.” When an individual selects a Tarot symbol, the card itself represents an outer mirror of an internal process. And, in that moment, one could say that the seat of the soul or the human psyche is revealed in the connection between the outer portraiture of the Tarot, and its synchronistic appearance reflecting back an internal process.

The use of Tarot as an outer mirror for internal and external processes aligns with the basic functions of mythology, or the essential services that mythology provides for human growth and development, and as a resource for self-revelation and self-reclamation processes. In his book “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion,” Joseph Campbell cites that, “The first and foremost essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service then is cosmological: of representing the universe and the whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye.”

The symbols found on each Tarot card function as a way that the mind and heart can be opened to the utter wonder of what’s going on with the individual, internally and externally at that moment in time. The Tarot also represents a symbolic matrix, wherein symbols function simultaneously to reveal and conceal a representation of the outer universe and our own internal nature. This is further demonstrated in the examples that for every outer major discipline that we have, there is an equivalent internal discipline that corresponds. For example, if one is drawn to the outer discipline of astronomy, the internal discipline that corresponds with astronomy is astrology. If an individual is drawn to physics, the internal esoteric discipline that corresponds with physics is alchemy. If an individual is drawn to the outer discipline of mathematics, its internal equivalent as a discipline is numerology, and if an individual externally is drawn to science, the internal discipline that corresponds is symbols. Perhaps it is the function of the qualitative disciplines to reflect and explore the principles of affirmation, negation and limitation. And perhaps it is the function of the quantitative disciplines to support the principles of unity, plurality and universality. Myths and symbols, by our recognition of what has meaning in them, show us our own states of unity, plurality and universality. They also function as agents of affirmation or negation and limitation dependent upon the meaning that we place upon them or the sense of recognition experienced at that moment in time. (Campbell, 1986)