Psychology of the Tarot

Did you know that besides their traditional divinatory interpretations, the Tarot’s Major Arcana cards are an absolute gold mine of psychological insight and wisdom? Psychology pioneer Carl Jung thought so.

The belief is that when a card from the Major Arcana appears in a reading it signals a particularly important issue or opportunity. Actually, the Tarot Major Arcana is an excellent “secret weapon” and adviser in times of trouble. Think the Oracle in the movie The Matrix, but easier to get to.

The best way to access that wisdom – besides calling one of our Tarot psychics – is to approach the Major Arcana cards as a kind of metaphysical board or video game with you as the starring character, witnessing the events and then realizing at almost the last minute you have actually been participating instead!

The Major Arcana cards which show up most often when a person is in an emergency situation are The Devil, The Tower and The Moon. The Star is a kind of transcendent rest stop between the experiences of The Tower and The Moon, where you realize what you’ve accomplished and learn the secret which will help you pass your Moon card test with flying colors.

The Devil
This card can represent a wide range of difficulties. What’s bedeviling you could be something as harmlessly annoying as family pressures. It also could represent real danger, as with an abusive relationship. The Devil and his victims most often appear, however, right after you say, “But I can’t do what I know I need to. I’ve tried and tried and there’s no way to do it.”

The Devil card says, “look again.” In almost every “traditional” modern deck, the Devil is depicted tormenting a man and a woman who are somehow chained to him. What most people don’t notice is that the chains binding those people are so loose that they could just take them off and walk away! So the Devil card also indicates that there’s a way to escape the situation, no matter how bleak it appears.

Once you make the decision to take off those chains and escape what’s bedeviling you, you immediately enter The Tower’s realm and become a lightning rod for a major bolt of transformative power – literally, a bolt of Kundalini energy – which often arrives in the form of a surprising and very disruptive event such as the loss of a job, a sudden need to move, a car breakdown or something even more significant. It may actually be the event that frees you from The Devil once you’ve decided to be free.

The Tower
This Major Arcana card says, “You are at Ground Zero, and if you’re lucky you have time to move out of the way by choosing change rather than having it happen to you.”

The Tower card says you’ve been living in a dark, damp and highly restricted stone tower of beliefs all your life, and you seem to be ready to move out of that tower and into a new life. After the bolt has hit, the Tower is reduced to rubble, and suddenly you can see vistas and possibilities that were invisible before. Some people choose to run around trying to rebuild their Tower – some choose to investigate the new horizons they can see.

The Star
If you choose those new horizons, you enter the realm of The Star, where you become aware – usually with a rush of goose bumps – that you literally are one with All That Is, that you and everything around you are made of and connected by star stuff, that ultimately there is no separation between you and your world, both seen and unseen.

The Moon
And with that, you have the key to successfully navigating the very scary-looking Moon card, the last step on your way to the green and blissful world of The Sun, which you can literally see at the end of the Moon card’s path. But before you can get to the path you must cross a stagnant, smelly pond, edge past a wolf, a madly barking dog, and a sleeping drunk, and maybe some other alarming-looking things, and then sneak between some towers that look a lot like the one you just escaped.

The key to this quest is to get across that nasty pond – the secret to accomplishing it is what The Star told you; “You literally are one with All That Is.”

Which is good, because what’s living in that pond are the last, disowned parts of your self – the things you’ve shoved in the closets of your psyche, the stuff you don’t want to think about, what Jung named your Shadow. If you can make friends with the Shadow stuff which you’ve avoided all your life – if you can make peace with it all as part of you – the Shadow will carry you across the pond and place you gently on the path to The Sun!

And just a few sneaky steps more and you’ve made it! The rest is bliss.