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 they descend further from the source, the less pureand more coarse they become, and the less they partake of is-ness. If this canbe pictured in linear time and space (which light isn't, but we must deal withwhat we can understand) we can see the Godhead not only sending forth pure raysof individual beams of Itself through the matrices of infinitude, but alsomodifying these beams at each progressive level of space according to theangles, or arcs, at which they are perceived.
Just as water seeks its own level, the individual rays of light beams being sentforth from the source consist of harmonically-resonant spectrums encompassingthe unique code-pattern that the All-That-Is has programmed in each. Eachspectrum is a part of the source, reflecting that part of the source which ithas sent forth from itself. At each level these light-blueprints fuse ortranslate according to the rhythms of the plane and process they areintermeshing with, and even though they remain whole, they appear translatedaccording to each level's perception of them. In other words, the Godhead sendsimages of Itself out to "become" according to each image's own innate nature.
As the groupings, or arrangements, of like light-beams reach closer to thecoarser portion of the cosmos, the light eventually materializes, groundingitself in its rhythmically similar material form. Each material form is but aphysical manifestation of the light-archetype from which it formed, partaking ofthe same code-pattern that formed it. Viewed this way, each archetype is anarrangement of energy-motion corresponding to its own like code-principle, notonly on this level but on all the similar levels that oscillate with its ownparticular light-blueprint. This implies that constant creation is forever andin all ways taking place, all archetypes mirroring the original source, the All-That-Isas it spirals down from the purest of matrices. Each archetype is thesame energy-motion comprised of the origin, structure, and dynamics of its ownlight ray from the source. This also implies that the source is creating lifefrom itself, and life is also creating the source from itself.
Although Jung limited his analysis to the human mind and spirit, couching hisinterpretations in psychological-sociological terms more easily acceptable tothe scientific communities, this universal principle is an alternate descriptionof archetypes as applied to the human psyche. He simply said it differently,more psychically.
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines an archetype as "the originalpattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations orcopies." If we consider Jung's psychological theory that archetypes comprise thecollective unconscious, the mystical theory of archetypes being light-beams ofGod encoded with God Itself, and take into account Webster's definition thatarchetypes are copies of the original model, we may find ourselves recalling theancient philosophy known as Taoism. Taoists say that all is one, and any idea wehave that anything is unique or set apart from anything else is merely illusion,stemming from our ability to perceive only a small part of any whole.
Included within this concept is the symbolism of the microcosm and macrocosm,the macrocosm being God, the microcosms being what we are calling archetypes.Everything is contained within everything else, i.e., the quark is within theelectron, the electron within the atom, the atom within the molecule, themolecule within the cell, the cell within the organ, the organ within the body,the body within the earth, earth within the solar system, the solar systemwithin the galaxy, the galaxy within the universe, and on and on ad infinitum,both inward as well as outward. Just because an atom is not aware of the organit is in, as we are not aware of the molecules within us, does not mean thatthey are separate or do not exist. It means that we cannot know of one anotherbecause of our lack of awareness.
If we view the infinite number of microcosms in a single macrocosm asarchetypes, we might better say that we are not aware of them because we areonly able to perceive at angles compatible to our own. It is no accident thatPlato knew about archetypes two millennia ago, and even called them such,because archetypes are the type of angle, or arch, in which we view the Whole.When we read cards, whether we know it or not, we are studying various angles ofother various angles, according to their own angle. Of course, this is true ofeveryone and everything, but what makes divination unique is that we areattempting to grasp angles which extend beyond our present ones; we areadmitting, hopefully, that the world extends beyond that of which we are aware.
There are numerous ways of describing the archetypes, and through the agespeople have done so in every way imaginable. But if we can read between thelines, we will discover all these seemingly different descriptions are more orless saying the same thing. Tarot cards do it with pictures. And seldom has theexpression "a picture is worth a thousand words" been more applicable than intarot.
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Most tarot decks use people to depict the archetypes. Over the ages so mucheffort and research have gone into the human figures of the Major Arcana, not tomention their surrounding symbols, that the Major of many decks speaks volumesof information through its currently understood symbolism. However, this doesnot appear to be the case with the Minor Arcana and court cards.
It is natural enough that the court cards should be people in tarot. The onlysymbolism we need from them is that of showing exactly what kind of people weare talking about. But the Minor Arcana is an altogether different story becausethe Minor is not only talking about people; it is instead more like the Majorthan the court cards in that it attempts to show an infinitude of universalpossibilities and archetypes. The Minor Arcana of most decks uses people todepict the wholeness of life, but there are some decks which also employ morecosmogonal symbolism.
For instance, playing cards use numbers, color, and arrangement of pips todepict universal meaning. And the Crowley (Thoth) deck is a fascinatingrepresentation of archetypes expressed not only by number but also as unifyingcoagencies and code-patterns. Lady Freida Harris, who painted the deck underAleister Crowley's direction, used mandalas, symmetries, and color to expressthe archetypes in the Minor Arcana. For example, Crowley's 2 of Discs shows acrowned serpent looping around itself into a figure 8 with two yin-yang symbolswithin each loop of the 8. One could hardly conceive of a more harmoniousrepresentation in a single picture for the 2 of Discs, expressing both itsexoteric meaning (juggling the dualities of everyday living) combined with itsesoteric meaning (opposites being the two halves of the same circle, implying nopolarity within polarity). The symbolism and imagery in the Crowley deck is anexciting and enlightening pansophy of the archetypes expressed in brilliantsymbolism.
This difference between expressing archetypes as people or expressing them assymbols is significant. In tarot, because we are attempting to interpret thewholeness of life from a few pictures painted onto cards, it is important thatwe not limit ourselves any more than we already, by necessity, are. Arche-typesare not only people — they are all of life everywhere — people, animals, nature,emotions, thoughts, spirit, events, and situations. To limit pictures or wordsto only people is like trying to describe the ocean by looking at one drop ofwater. In this sense, tarot decks depicting the archetypes as symmetries,manadalas, and universal symbols are usually more accurate than those using onlypeople.
This is especially true of the Minor Arcana because, as mentioned, while theMajor Arcana over the centuries has lent itself to archetypal analyses andsymbology expressing wholeness, the Minor Arcana is still sadly lacking in manydecks. Not only is the totality of the archetype lost in its picture of humandominance, but all too often the card's picture leads the student to view onlyone side of its human condition, with its polarity being completely ignored.
This is not to imply that people symbology in the Minor Arcana is always morelimited than those using symmetrical arrangements or code symbols, but it can bethe case. As a matter of fact, there are some decks available now with MinorArcana that are outstanding in the way they have incorporated symbology on andaround people. If we focus only on people, however, we may tend to forget we arenot alone in the universe, that God is all creatures and all life, and in tarotthere is nothing that can be said, told, or predicted for ourselves or othersthat does not in some major way involve all that is around us.
In religion, archetypes are often called devils, gods, angels, and demons. Inmythology they are heroes, heroines, and objects of power. Archetypes are in allthings, and express in all ways — people and objects included. But it is asincorrect to think of them as only entities (i.e., people or animals) as it isto think of them as only spirits or demons. For while they are these entities,they are also the processes and motion of all things. Archetypes arearrangements of processes and motion; they are dynamic oscillating motiongrouped and ordered by like-rhythms. Just as in physics the sub-atomic worldconsists not only of particles but also of waves, so in the physical world andbeyond, archetypes consist not only of entities but also of processes.
Archetypes are processes, or symmetries, of harmonically-resonant energy-motion.They are matrices of concordant form and motion, never static, corresponding toand intermeshing with lattices of like motion. When we spot a synchronicity, weare recognizing an archetype breaking in from another spectrum, or dimension, tocomplete itself in time-space.
Although he doesn't use the word archetype, in his book Notes to my Children,Ken Carey gives a delightful description of archetypes as found within people.To briefly summarize, he says that if we watch a river flowing, we will noticemany little ripples and whirlpools in the river. When the flowing river passesrapidly over something under the water, strange patterns are formed. But whatare they really, these patterns? Apart from the water, there is no definiteentity in the pattern, for every instant the pattern consists of different andnew drops of water. In some places where there is a rock buried beneath thesurface of the water, a pattern is formed that lasts, so that it remains a fixedpattern. It appears to be a thing of itself. In reality, however, it is a partof the river, constantly renewed by the river's flow, so that eventually theentire river may flow through this pattern. Whirlpools are created, which for atime form a powerful force of their own, until they eventually get swept backinto the river's flow.
