I’ve been reading my Tarot over and over since I’ve gotten back to Melbourne. Fresh in the face of a familiar setting but with an unfamiliar protagonist (myself) these cards have been a resourceful way for me to stir my psyche and push new journal entries. I’ve always said when it comes to my own tarot deck, the order itself is random but there is nothing random about the 78 cards I shuffle between my shifting fingers.
For centuries these cards have been expanded and informed by the reader and the querent (individual seeking knowledge) who partake in this established ritual. These cards have never been idly static, instead they have shifted in design from deck to deck and by interpretation from reader to reader. These cards have been selected and informed by the deepest pools of our collective psyches. These decks run with archetypes that Carl Jung simply drooled over for the expressive ways they communicated our collective inner consciousnesses.
"It also seems as if pictures in the tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation...The symbolic process is an experience in images and of images."
Page 38
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Carl Jung 1969
I love both the clarity and space present within a tarot reading. There are enough links to shared archetypes for anyone to reach into, as there also is enough wiggle room for us to paint ourselves in the blank space left on the canvas. This is why Tarot is such a valuable tool for myself. Finding the story and the path between disparate and sometimes contradictory cards has allowed me to reflect into disparate and contradictory parts of my own self. The ways in which different readers and differing decks can have such rapidly different explanations reflects how we all interpret the world through our own lenses. Our trajectories are all initially laid out from within our own psyche, our own selves. We all walk through the vibrant light of paths that we have carved out. Walkways of thought and progression that are cast both as much by the lights of others as the shadows of ourselves. Never must we overlook the power of self-interpretation even when we are reflecting on shared cultural paradigms.
So this is where I’ve carved out my own Camino to explore my psyche, relentless Tarot reading. Over and over, with different spreads and different rules, I stretch towards the questions and answers these Arcana cards can bring me.
Interestingly enough when I find a spread of cards disconnected to myself on initial observation this is most often where I’ve found the most bejewelled of insights. Because in the end, we are such layered and context driven creatures that with enough reflection we will always be able to find part of ourselves that can relate to the divinatory meanings of these 78 images.
We all experience subjective experiences and thus we can always find our own subjective narrative built of shared archetypes. Shared archetypes that can call us to seismic action like the three of wands or images like the six of swords that recall us to remember that through life comes hardship and through hardship will eventually come release. In these cards that I have in my hands I can spread them out to prompt questions that I didn’t know were within myself. By hovering and dwelling on these archetypal cards I can construct new narratives and thus see the potential routes to be taken in life. Through this reflection the mental and physical structures of my mind are forever altered.
Cards are read and reflected, neural pathways are shaped and woven.
And if having the literal matter in your brain shifted by a spread of selected cards cannot be called magical, I don’t know what can.
Embrace your own magic, embrace your own devine stories, throw some cosmic spaghetti to your own wall and see what sticks. For with only a couple cards in hand you may expand a couple more things within your own mind.
Pollack R, 2012, The New Tarot Handbook,Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, USA
Jung C, 1969,The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA
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