Deep, Distant, Dire or Ditched? — Competing Views on the Major Arcana
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Every time I encounter a new observation about the significance of the Major Arcana I feel compelled to revisit the subject in order to re-examine my own position.
When I was learning to read the tarot cards back in the early ’70s the consensus was that the 22 Major Arcana were a “big deal” whenever they showed up in a spread, coming on like “gangbusters” in order to awaken us to their often dire potential. When Jungian archetypes became the rage among diviners later in the decade, the trump cards took on a more contemplative psychological tone that had fewer immediate mundane implications, so we could attempt to distance ourselves from their insistent clamor by rationalizing their projected impact.
More recently I read an opinion that trumps represent deeply-buried issues that must be brought to the surface and dealt with if the querent is to successfully handle the conditions shown by the rest of the cards. The main problem I have with this viewpoint is that it comes across in practice as breezy “Self-Help 101” counseling rather than as actionable advice for the desperate seeker. What was once treated as an intrusion of external forces that will submit to head-on engagement eventually became a complex of entirely internal symptoms that are elusive rather than explicit.
The last option in the title, which I came to on my own a couple of years ago, is a logical evolution from the act of distancing, one that employs what I call the “prepared deck” premise. I sometimes separate the cards into three sub-packs — trumps, courts and pips — to be shuffled independently and applied only to discrete sections of a spread. In this way I can keep the Major Arcana “in their lane” and avoid having to puzzle over the “300-pound gorilla” dilemma where there is clearly little opportunity for it to dominate the querent’s life. For routine situations, leaving them in the general population had become a fruitless habit, like endlessly trying to cram ten pounds of “stuff” into a five-pound sack. This initiative ultimately led me to remove the abstract, archetypal trumps from the deck entirely when exploring simple issues of the kind best represented by the Minor Arcana. (This has been a controversial topic over which I’ve received a lot of push-back from the atavistic “New Age” crowd and their holistic world-view. Me, I’m an analytical pragmatist at heart with a mystic’s sensitivity to nuance.)
When I started reading professionally, many of the Major Arcana undeniably disturbed my clients and I had to massage the grim portent in the images to make it reasonably palatable even though I stopped short of trying to sugarcoat it. Jung at least gave us a “smoke-screen” we could hide behind by talking in broader, more open-ended terms, but the pictures still shouted rather than whispered. I tried valiantly to bring them into the realm of cognitive awareness but they are archetypal concepts for a reason: they incite primitive reactions that the conscious mind is not good at intercepting while the emotions readily embrace their stimulus.
I worked in both the traditional and psychological modes of interpretation for nearly 40 years, but it gradually dawned on me that I wasn’t seeing anything obvious in the way of routine events — nor even of relevant attitudes and behaviors — that could be attributed to the testimony in the trumps. They seemed to be operating at too high a metaphysical or spiritual level to impinge directly upon day-to-day affairs, so I formulated a theory that they represent the environmental theme or situational backdrop that persists for the duration of the forecast, and they don’t have much specific to say in nuts-and-bolts matters unless the Minor Arcana draw them out; in other words, they function within the matrix formed by surrounding suit cards and don’t jump into the fray with both feet unless “triggered” by ongoing developments. It could justifiably be said that if we set ourselves up for them, they will oblige.
This restrained degree of influence squares well with my own experience of their importance. I can usually put my finger on the presumed consequences of the more prosaic minor cards (both pips and courts) in a reading, but the trumps frequently defy easy assimilation into the narrative and thus they can “limp along” without driving the situation. Too often I wind up making blandly general statements rather than offering highly-focused, context-specific insights that further the story in meaningful ways, which I attribute to trying to force-fit putative “big-picture” considerations into the small-scale doings of the querent’s daily existence. I’m much more confident in tying the straightforward evidence of the minor cards into the archetypal background theme of any trump cards that are present since, while the latter can certainly create the atmosphere for “real-life” emergence of their major motif, strictly under their own power they seldom deliver on that promise. Or so it seems to me after five decades of effort to integrate them into my practice.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on April 12, 2024.
