An Alternate Take on the “Shadow” Card
It is a common practice among modern tarot readers to look at the bottom card of the deck after the rest of the cards have been dealt, with the purpose of discovering hidden aspects of the matter; this is variously called the “base” or “shadow” card. Personally, I want none of this in my own work since I seldom use “extra” cards of any kind, my assumption being that a card’s contribution to the reading will be determined by its appearance in the normal pull (and reversals already serve this purpose anyway). But I just encountered another use for the term “shadow card” in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Way of Tarot.
In his theory of “decimal counterparts” for the Major Arcana, Jodorowsky conceptually links cards that share the same number in the “Ones” place of their mathematical structure. His principal example is the Empress (III or 3) and the “Nameless Arcanum” (Death, XIII or 13). The shared “3” suggests that the creativity of the Empress is echoed in Death, hinting at the idea that the full flowering of her generative impulse is dependent upon a preparatory removal of impediments to birth (think “breaking eggs to make omelets”). He calls each card the “shadow” of the other, and expands the premise across all 22 trump cards. (For the record, I find some of his explanations too much of a stretch but the theory is credible if applied astutely, offering a numerological perspective that differs from the more common “Theosophical reduction” method of relating the trump cards.)
In thinking about this, I realized that the same “mirroring” concept can be applied to all 78 cards after a different fashion. I once created a table of the numerical values for all the cards, beginning with the Fool as “1” and ending with the King of Pentacles as “78.” I’ve used this framework to create symbolic correlations between cards that sit at the same distance from opposite ends of the series (see the table below). I’ve always thought of them as equal-and-opposite halves of the same paradigm, but I see no reason why one can’t be interpreted as the fainter “echo” or “shadow” of the other, the idea being that either one as “principal” card requires the complicity of its subordinate partner to reach its maximum range of expression. In this model I treat the Major Arcana as a separate subset (0 to 22) with the rest of the cards covering 23 to 78 (Ace of Wands to King of Pentacles).
Another way to look at “shadow cards” is according to their diametrically opposite positions on the “wheel” of Chaldean decans; in this pattern, each minor and court card has a counterpart across the circle, and the twelve “zodiacal” major cards are also represented (the seven planetary and three elemental trumps do not participate in this manner but by virtue of another rationale). The notion of taking the cards “two-by-two” rather than singly sets up the potential for an alternating current of force that can flow back-and-forth between the two extremes, each pole acting to bolster the “turn-around” by introducing its own galvanizing “spin.” It both this instance and the previous one, the outcome might also be characterized as an amped-up resonance between two complementary energies that raises the vibratory rate of each. I previously posted an essay on this subject, and also discussed the polarity in my essays on the Twos:
https://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com/2018/06/17/a-table-of-mirrors/
In routine use I would not grant each card equal emphasis or weight as Jodorowsky does because the one that does not actually appear in the spread is only a hypothetical or “hidden” component of the pair that is not central to the interpretation, although it may still provide nuance to the reading in small and subtle ways. It would, however, be a different matter if both cards show up in the layout since they could “charge up” one another, thereby amplifying the potency of each in the combination. Generally, though, one would be the driving factor and the other a muted reverberation of its portent that I may or may not deem significant.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 2, 2023.
