The Jungian Tarot and Its Archetypal Imagery

PREFACE

The Jungian Tarot, which I first published in 1988, is intended to be a visual introduction to Jungian philosophy. The key is the archetypal image encountered through creative visualization or, as Jung called it, "active imagination." It is a process which may, theoretically, lead to discovery of a true Inner Self. Such creative visualization is at the heart of all mystical and religious systems, from those of the ancient world, to the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, to Hemeticism and Rosicrucianism, to Alchemy, and to the remarkably creative occult exercises of the nineteenth century.
    Carl Jung, who brought the overview of a scientist to the age-old question of man's potential for self-knowledge, developed a special vocabulary (to which I loosely ascribe, but by which I do not feel bound). For example, he coined the word "individuation" to describe what tradition has called "enlightenment." Unquestionably spurred on by his own psychic experiences, Jung wanted to understand the nature of consciousness, and—ultimately—to solve the problem which so engaged the Greeks, the relationship between the one and the many.
    The creative visualization which stimulates inner development can be very spontaneous; it can involve little more than clearing one's mind and allowing whatever wells up to become the focus of an inner play. But I personally believe that there is greater utility in a structured assault on the unconscious such as may be achieved through the tarot images. These cards, without reference to any belief system, and even if considered merely arbitrary images, are very powerful stimulus cues to the imagination.
    Those familiar with my earlier work The Qabalistic Tarot, will be comfortable with an attribution of tarot cards to that central diagram, the Tree of Life. I consider this glyph to represent a hierarchy of archetypes and, indeed, a sort of road map of the collective unconscious. Thus one of my main efforts here is to demonstrate parallels between Jungian philosophy and Hermetic Kabbalah, a system which has been essential to Western mysticism since the Italian Renaissance.
    I am considering Jung's ideas about regressions from the personal into the collective to be commensurate with the Kabbalistic method of working backwards from the lowest level of the Tree of Life (the material condition), through the upper levels which symbolize not only the enlightened Self, but a condition of nonbeing which transcends all consciousness, personal or collective.
    This book also attempts to address a loose correlation of pantheons, under the file categories provided by tarot. It may be argued that ideas which emerge repeatedly across cultural boundaries lend credence to the postulate of archetypes which, in the minds of most people, is merely an interesting and remote theory. I am of the opinion that to rapidly (although admittedly arbitrarily in the present work) skim across ancient concepts of, for example, a mother goddess, is to consider the various faces of the Mother archetype represented in tarot as The Empress. And, again, the main reason for making such a comparison is to determine if the "true" nature of an archetype is revealed by those areas where far-removed cultures have deities with similar qualities. In this regard, the earliest mythologies seem to be the most useful.
    I must, however, stress that, as an art historian, my amateur incursion into comparative religion is very tentative and my sources are general. I should also admit that as a historian I have a specific bias. History is, to me, something secure against which religious, mythological, and psychological ideologies must be measured, and it bothers me to find so many discussions of the history of tarot predicated upon irresponsible speculation (one of the unfortunate legacies of eighteenth-century romanticism), especially when the historical tracks of the cards are so clear.
In this regard let me say that I have no doubt that the tarot originated in fourteenth-century Italy. And because the earliest extant decks are from royal courts, one must assume that the artists of these decks were professional manuscript painters who would have been subject, in their rare secular pursuits, to a sequence of archetypal images allowing for the most obtuse of psychological interpretations.
    Of course interpretation of the tarot in serious psychological terms would have seemed laughable, if not absolutely bizarre to its originators, who developed the cards as a game! It is not entirely clear how, over time, the cards came to be used for telling fortunes. But it was the spurious claim of the eighteenth-century writer Court de Gebelin, that the tarot cards originated in Egypt which sealed their later negative association with the "occult."
    It was not until the late nineteenth century that tarot was systematically related to Astrology, to Kabbalah, and to Alchemy. And it was the twentieth century which added an overlay of modern psychological theory. But many supposed changes in tarot interpretation have merely been a change in labels. The terms of the medieval philosophers have been systematically supplanted by a more precise psychological language for the same mental processes and conditions. A man described by the Renaissance as "Born under Saturn" might today be con-sidered to be a manic depressive. In any event, to view the tarot images in psychological terms may serve to amplify our understanding of a whole class of literature previously considered "mystical."
    But of course, in contemporary terms, the tarot does address little-understood areas of psychic experience. So the following essays are, by definition, subject to limitations. To approach symbolic structures in an intellectual way tends to avoid the real issue—the inexpressible, irrational, and unconscious materials which the symbols describe. The passion of inner discovery does not communicate easily, if at all. And researchers in these areas are understandably hesitant to express their own feelings and intuitions about what may be deeply buried behind a given symbolic image. This was certainly true of Carl Jung, whose weighty corpus of studies is strikingly different from the description of his own personal experiences with the unconscious as described in his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
    Finally, let me say that this work, which is predicated on Jung's rather remarkable methodology, is in no way intended to present a belief system. Nothing except the historical facts should be taken at face value. The exercise of dealing with each of the tarot keys as an archetypal image is meant to stimulate thought about the nature of consciousness and about the root causes of the human condition.
    The central, and empirically unverifiable, thesis of this book is that it is possible to establish true principles of organization and structure of the archetypes of the collective unconscious by correlating related deities, images, and ideas from historical pantheons under the file categories of the tarot.