CHAPTER 1
The Archetypes
The tarot is a deck of cards consisting of 78 pictures of archetypes. It isbroken down into three sections:
The Major Arcana—22 cards showing archetypal forces, usually depicted as peopledrawn from mythology or religious traditions.
The Minor Arcana—40 cards consisting of four suits each numbered 1 through 10.
The Court Cards—16 cards depicting a King, Queen, Prince, and Princess of eachof the four suits.
Before any serious discussion of the tarot is undertaken, it is probablyappropriate to first try to agree upon exactly what it is we are looking at. Thetarot, although familiar to cartomancers and students of the esoteric, stillremains largely unknown or misunderstood in the minds of the general public. Itis not uncommon to hear it called pure rubbish, wishful thinking,fortunetelling, even a tool of the devil.
But no matter how people feel about the tarot, whether they see it as arespectable form of divination or as silly superstition, it remains clear thatcards—whether they be tarot or the tarot's sibling, playing cards—have some sortof formidable allurement for the mind; not only have cards been around forcenturies, but they continue to be one of humanity's favorite pastimes.
Our interest in cards throughout history seems to be based on more than just ournatural love of games. If it were only for this reason that cards have endured,then we would not still have the tarot, which has remained so consistently trueto its original art forms. Tarot is very much like some other games we stillplay today, such as chess, backgammon, and checkers—they continue to carry theancient symbols from which they originally sprang. If we explore the reason fortarot's timeless form, we discover it is not a fluke that cards have remainedpopular in the collective psyche of humanity, but instead—because the tarot (andplaying cards) carry ageless images—they are expressions, literal pictures, ofwhat Carl Jung called the eternal archetype.
The tarot is a collection of 78 archetypes; playing cards use 52. In reality, wecan probably assume that there are an infinite number of archetypes existing inthe universe, or if you take a more holistic approach, you might say theuniverse is one big archetype of which we perceive infinite parts; we call theseperceived parts of the One different archetypes.
What is truly amazing about the tarot is its holism. At some point in ourhistory, someone, or group of someones, had enough wisdom and knowledge ofdimensions beyond our own to set down in picture cards 78 of these universalarchetypes. How someone managed to do so with such faithful, unerring precisionis an enigma that remains to this day one of history's unanswerable puzzles.
So what is an archetype? Carl Gustav Jung, one of the greatest psychologists ofour time, is the person responsible for defining in modern terminology what anarchetype is. Even though examples of archetypes have been with us from thebeginning in such familiar traditions as games, religion, mythology, legends,folklore, and fairy tales, as well as the esoteric arts (such as astrology,numerology, geomancy, and cartomancy), Carl Jung is responsible for bringing tous descriptions and knowledge of archetypes which are acceptable to our currentway of thinking. His theories and ideas have done much to change the foundationof psychology as we know it today. Jung spoke of truths that touched our heartsand sparked within us the recognition of something we thought we had lost.
An archetype is a difficult concept to define with any of the five senses.Sight, hearing, and even communication through the spoken or written word allbecome inadequate when attempting to define archetypes. Because archetypes areholistic, able to encompass worlds both visible and invisible, both physical andspiritual, by their very nature, they are ephemeral, like footprints left in thesand or wisps of shadows glimpsed for a moment just beyond our periphery ofvision. They are not bound by time or space, past or future, and they play indimensions most of us can only dream of.
We may recognize an archetype by the tracks it makes, by the effect it leaves inour lives in the form of strange incidents, revelations, or magical moments.Jung defined such a moment of archetypal recognition as a synchronicity. A morepopular definition of recognizing an archetype might be a startling coincidence.
Carl Jung dedicated his life to this search for the "something not perceived."He wrote of archetypes:
The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negativelydistinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like thelatter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently it is not apersonal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially ofcontents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared fromconsciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of thecollective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore havenever been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively toheredity. Whereas the personal unconsciousness consists for the most part ofcomplexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially ofarchetypes.
The concept of the archetype ... indicates the existence of definite forms in thepsyche which seem to be present always and everywhere.
[The instincts] ... form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact,that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconsciousimages of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns ofinstinctual behaviour.
Jung probably remains unsurpassed in his research and exploration of archetypesas applied to the human psyche. Although he consistently made subtle referralsto the existence of archetypes in other areas of life, the mass of his publishedmaterial deals only with the psychological aspects.
Another more mystical and less psychological way of viewing the archetypes is tosee them as emanations originating from the Godhead. The Godhead is one,undivided, the All-That-Is in a state of beingness where there is not, for allis. When the Godhead is pictured as light, as It is often described, the lightis seen to be pouring forth its rays, infiltrating all of creation with itself.The closer the rays of light are to the source of the Godhead, the purer andless divided they are. As...
