The Long Shadow of Jung

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In retrospect, I probably should have titled this essay “Saving Tarot from Psychology” as mentioned in the last paragraph, but I decided to let the original title stand as more representative of the overall thrust. More to the point, I already have an earlier essay with that title.

I’m greatly amused (I used to get indignant but it was pointless) whenever someone in the online tarot community states with lofty disdain, militant intransigence and preachy pedantry “You should never ever attempt divination with the tarot, it is appropriate only for psychological self-awareness and self-improvement. That’s what it was created for.” Huh? These are obviously people who weren’t around before the reform-addled New Age acolytes of analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung took over natal astrology and eventually the tarot. Psychological legitimacy became the “Holy Grail” for post-70s natal astrology, and now it seems to be having the same effect on modern tarot practice. But long before Jung there was fortune-telling with the tarot cards going back at least to the 1700s, and not all of it was of the turban-wearing, ring-bedecked, crystal-ball-gazing “you will meet a tall, dark stranger” variety. Cartomancy was popular in 18th Century Europe, and predictive astrology reached a high-water-mark in England with William Lilly, astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, in the 1600s. Although the Enlightenment put a big dent in such pursuits, in the 19th Century there were still many accomplished professional men and women on the rolls of established occult societies who practiced divination, among them doctors, lawyers and writers.

The notion that divination is illicit apparently stems from a perceived need to differentiate it from more seemly therapeutic uses for the cards. My first thought when I encounter this attitude is “Who appointed you gatekeeper?” I like to say that the tarot is “infinitely flexible and adaptable, and can handle almost any inquiry if approached with finesse.” It encompasses a vast ocean of recondite information that is awash in the Unseen, if not in-and-of itself then certainly through the symbolic connections that can be made with it by those sensitive enough to read the signs and hear the messages. It seems to me that self-absorbed naysayers who deny the validity of such numinous contacts only want to hear from their own sheltered subconscious. They somehow feel comforted by the fact that they are grounded in the inexact science of behavioral psychology, and wouldn’t dream of trying to hazard a guess about the future if it involves coaxing it from a deck of cards.

I should probably clarify my own stance. Personally, I don’t try to predict future events with any degree of assumed infallibility regarding time, place and descriptive detail if it goes much beyond circumstances that are already expected to occur and for which the querent is seeking insights into how they might be managed most effectively. Even in those cases I might help my clients “steer” but I won’t single-handedly try to chart the course. That’s their job, not mine. I’m neither an intuitive mystic (at least not entirely) nor a spiritual soothsayer and I don’t read minds, not even that of the immanent Universal Consciousness, I just “read the cards.” For their part, the cards offer signposts by which we can navigate, and they get their presumed authority from interaction with our own subconscious awareness of emerging eventualities (in the near term anyway) regardless of how we come by that knowledge. Once a projection extends farther into the future, all manner of unexpected exigencies can intervene to cloud the original forecast, in many cases making it totally invalid. This is particularly true if the scenario involves the personal agendas of more than one individual or the divergent priorities of any other independent arbiter of influence.

For this reason, I primarily look for the types of energy that may be at work in a developing situation and give my clients a heads-up as to what they might anticipate in the way of tendencies, trends, potentials and possibilities as they arise in the narrative discourse of the reading. The goal is to furnish them information they can act on if they so choose. Should I get inextricably cornered over the literal interpretation of who, what, why, how, where and when, I dust off my tap-dancing shoes, quickly brush up on my “weasel-word” innuendo, and try to talk my way over, under, around and between it without laboriously plowing through the hypothetical scenario in any kind of remotely absolutist language. Subtlety and nuance are the order of the day, and I try to get my sitters to buy into the predictive fluidity that such verbal legerdemain entails.

In fact, getting back to Jung, I don’t believe that tarot is particularly good at anything to do with the psychology of cognition. It is broadly allusive, not clinical; it encourages generalizing rather than particularizing; it can be mystically and metaphysically profound but analytically sketchy as well as diagnostically unreliable. Trying to map these dynamic sensibilities onto the human psyche with any degree of confidence that the results will mean anything factually conclusive is often an exercise in futility. We can say what we think the cards portend but we could be miles away from the truth as it applies to the subject under our microscope. Who but that individual can judge whether what we assume a person is “thinking or feeling” at the time of our probe is the “genuine article” or merely a product of highly imaginative speculation? There is no “magic bullet” that is going to fix the object of a lovestruck querent’s incipient affections in our sights long enough to take a “still photograph” for their virtual scrapbook; the human mind is mercurial and its thoughts are constantly evolving. I know it’s a bit facile to say so, but the putative “love interest” may have never spared a single thought for the querent and if they did, at the time of the inquiry it might be taking a back seat to “What’s for dinner?” or “Where’s the bathroom?” For that matter, unless they choose to follow through on them, what is our client going to do with our suppositions anyway beyond feeling good or bad about themself as a result?

It’s a flawed premise to begin with, often fueled by idle curiosity and the prurient motives of romantic wish-fulfillment. The whole thing reminds me of the scene from the Roman Polanski film The Fearless Vampire Killers, where the terrified chambermaid holds up a gold-cross charm to fend off the advances of a Yiddish vampire, who simply scoffs as he moves in for the “bite” and says “You’ve got the wrong vampire!” If you come to me with such questions, “You’ve got the wrong cartomancer!” As much as we might like to see it become a respected discipline akin to a forensic science, tarot-reading as it applies to the human condition will most likely always remain an anecdotal art. As a dyed-in-the-wool storyteller with no interest in chasing psychic phantoms, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m going to close with a thought that Rachel Pollack presented at a regional tarot gathering a few years back. When she began reading for others over forty years ago, she was committed to saving tarot from the tarnish of fortune-telling, but now she is more inclined to attempt saving it from psychology. To this I say “Amen!” It’s the same sentiment I’ve harbored for the last forty years myself. While Jung’s concepts of Animus and Anima, the collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation and shadow work certainly feed into tarot reading, I just don’t see them as the “last word” on where our insights come from; they mainly put some practical structure to it (call it “meat on the bones”), much like traditional “book knowledge,” esoteric correspondences and other accretions.

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on August 27, 2022.