A Philosophical Essay on

Tarot Divination
and
Human Consciousness

by David Bruce Albert Jr., Ph.D.

(c) 2015 by David Bruce Albert Jr.

Contact the author at: doctordruidphd@yahoo.com
Works quoted in this essay are believed to be in the public domain unless otherwise
stated.
Tree of Life diagram and tables of card meanings adapted from The Book of Thoth by
Aleister Crowley.
Some typefaces used in this work were developed by Kevin King of Kingthings -http://www.kingthingsfonts.co.uk .
Printing Date: 12. January 2015
Revision Number: 29

I. The Tarot and Human Consciousness

The Tarot may be thought of as an art form that has a variety of uses and meanings. It
can be viewed as a work of art that is appreciated for its beauty and complexity,
irrespective of whatever other functions it might have. Depending upon the specific
Tarot deck, it can serve as a textbook for the study of an esoteric system. It can serve as a
stimulus for active imagination or meditation, and it can also be used for personal
analysis. When many people think of the Tarot, however, what they are really interested
in is its use as an oracle: a method of discovering things that are normally hidden from
view. Usually this means discovering things that are in the past or future, or some great
distance away, or for some other reason inaccessible to ordinary methods of discovery.
To understand what an oracle is, and how it works, it is first necessary to understand
something about how consciousness works. Consciousness is that part of the psyche, or
totality of all mental processes, that is aware of itself and aware of the outside world.
What differentiates consciousness from everything else is its self-awareness and its
subjectivity: its awareness that what is happening is happening to me, and that there is a me
for things to happen to, an individual that is distinct from its surroundings and persists
as a single, unique being over time.
Consciousness normally interacts with the outside world through the senses -- sight,
smell, taste, hearing and touch -- and this process of interaction is called perception.
Experiences that consciousness understands in this way are said to be immediate,
because there are direct connections -- or at least there appear to be -- between the
experience, the body, and conscious awareness. In addition to perception, consciousness
is also capable of introspection -- having experiences of itself, and not just of the outside
world. Thoughts, recollections, reasoning, and similar introspective events might also
be considered immediate, as they are observed and experienced in much the same way
as perceptual experiences.
The purpose of an oracle is to allow consciousness to discover events that are not
immediate to it, which in the case of oracles usually means separated from
consciousness in space, time, or both. How the oracle is able to reveal non-immediate
experience to consciousness remains a matter of theory. One such theory is based upon
the observation that there appears to exist within the unconscious a pre-existing image,
or pre-cognition, of certain events of which consciousness cannot be directly aware. The
unconscious is a general term that refers to those elements of the psyche of which
consciousness is not directly aware, either because the element has insufficient psychic
energy -- which can be understood for this purpose as importance -- to come into
conscious awareness, because it has intentionally been pushed out of awareness, or
because it is of such a nature that it cannot be directly understood by consciousness no

matter what its level of importance.

It is this last category of unconscious contents that is of primary interest in
understanding how an oracle is able to reveal hidden events. It would appear, based
upon the results of experiments, that within the unconscious are representations of
events past, present and future, to which consciousness does not have direct access.
While consciousness does not directly perceive these representations, psychoid processes
in the unconscious do, but these processes cannot communicate with consciousness
directly because they involve modes of perception and categories of cognition that are
completely alien to consciousness. Instead, they communicate with consciousness
indirectly, such as through dreams, fantasies, and the imagination. This indirect
communication is symbolic -- its meaning is cloaked in an abstract and seemingly arcane
imagery that can only be understood through interpretation.
For clarification it should be mentioned that the often heard term subconscious is a
different concept from that of the unconscious, and the two should not be confused.
Subconscious is a value term -- it implies that those things in the psyche of which
consciousness is not aware have a lower status or importance than consciousness. These
would be things that have been forgotten, things that have been repressed, or
intentionally pushed out of consciousness, and things that have not yet accumulated
enough energy to become conscious -- but the idea is that these things are all readily
understandable by consciousness, because they are fundamentally the same kind of
representations. The theory of the subconscious specifically denies the existence of the
last category of psychic elements that are different in kind from consciousness, but can
have just as much, or even more, energy in the psyche than consciousness itself.
Unconscious is, in itself, a contrast term and not a value term -- it simply means that
everything that is not conscious is unconscious, without suggesting inferiority or other
ordering principles. As it is the category of unconscious factors that are different from
consciousness that is of interest in divination, the idea of a subconscious implies a
theoretical framework that does not apply to the analysis of divination, or of the psyche
that experiences it. It should also be noted that the terms conscious and unconscious,
while they seem to imply mental contents that are relevant to the individual, do not
necessarily imply that such things are exclusively "in the head," in the brain, or even
particular to the individual.

Symbols and Self-Consuming Artifacts

While there may already exist a foreknowledge of future and other non-immediate
events in the unconscious, the only way consciousness can be aware of them is
indirectly, through symbols used by the unconscious to communicate their meaning.
The function of an oracle such as the Tarot is to coax these unconscious representations
into consciousness using a set of symbols whose meanings are already somewhat

familiar. Instead of waiting for dreams, whose images can be difficult, if not impossible,
to decipher, the oracle provides a ready-made set of symbols for which consciousness
already has some basic understanding. The oracle then acts as a translator between the
language of the unconscious and the language of consciousness, using a pre-defined set
of symbols familiar to both.
The good news in this is that through the use of an oracle, consciousness can gain access
to unconscious representations, including those of past, future, and distant events, of
which it could not otherwise be aware. The difficulty with this process is that the
symbol does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, but requires interpretation and
analysis to have any meaning at all. This interpretation process, called divination, has
both intellectual and intuitive components: it involves the aligning of a body of
knowledge about the history and meaning of the symbols, with a series of subjective
impressions and feelings with which the symbols are imbued by the unconscious.
Divination is therefore both rational and irrational at the same time; it could be said that
it involves both a learning, and to some extent an un-learning, or willingness to
abandon the purely intellectual interpretation of the symbols, to arrive at an
understanding of what lies within the unconscious.
Divination therefore involves an essential paradox: one must learn a set of meanings for
the oracle's symbols in order for consciousness to understand them, yet one must also to
some degree abandon those meanings to the often abstract and contradictory
impressions through which the unconscious communicates its hidden wisdom. The
situation closely parallels a similar problem in art critique that is addressed by the
concept of the self-consuming artifact. According to this theory, a work of art such as a
painting, a poem, a piece of music, and so forth have no meanings by themselves; the
meaning of an artwork emerges through a dialectical relationship -- a sort of backand-forth give-and-take -- between the work and the observer. A person viewing a
painting, for example, comes to it with certain attitudes, expectations, beliefs, tastes, and
so forth, which when engaged by the painting, focus the attention on various aspects of
the work. As the work is studied, different aspects of it become more or less important,
which in turn alters the way the observer views it. This new attitude toward the work is
then modified by further study, and the dialectic between the work and the observer
continues until the painting itself vanishes in the train of ideas it produces. The artwork
itself is consumed by its interpretation, and thus the meaning of the work is not in
the work itself, but in the process of interaction between the object and the subject who
views it.
Similarly, Tarot cards used in divination are self-consuming artifacts. There is no
meaning in the card or symbol itself -- it is really just ink on cardboard. When a card is
viewed in a reading, it calls forth certain associations in the consciousness of the diviner
-- keywords, recollections, learned sets of meanings, perhaps its significance in some

esoteric system, and in the case of Tarot decks, meaning that may be suggested by the
illustrations themselves. But as the diviner studies the card, impressions from the
unconscious emerge that affect and alter those ideas -- the meaning of the card changes,
and the diviner comes to see the card as being something different than what has been
memorized. This new understanding results in new ideas that become associated with
the card, which are then further modified by impressions from the unconscious. This
back-and-forth dialectic between conscious and unconscious continues until the image
of the card itself vanishes into the train of ideas it calls forth, and these ideas become the
meaning of the card in a reading. Even though individual decks may be designed
with more of an intellectual or intuitive bias -- some decks have detailed symbolism and
imagery that appeal to the analytical faculties of consciousness, while others are
designed to appeal more to unconscious intuition -- both conscious and unconscious
faculties must come into play for the dialectical process between conscious and
unconscious to work.
This idea of the Tarot as a self-consuming artifact has a number of important
consequences. First, Tarot cards have no a priori meanings in themselves. While a diviner
may have memorized keywords, learned certain sets of meanings, or studied the cards
in relation to one or another esoteric or occult system, these things are not the meaning
of the card in a reading -- they are seeds of meaning in the dialectical process of
interpretation, starting points for the imagination, and not endpoints of understanding.
A given card may, therefore, mean different things in different readings, and will most
certainly mean different things to different diviners. The meaning of a card in a reading
is therefore necessarily imprinted with the consciousness of the individual diviner, but
it is also to some degree imprinted with the original image which seeds the interpretive
process. The same card -- a card of the same suit and number, for example -- in two
different decks may, in fact, have two distinctly different meanings when actually read.
Further, depending upon the design and artwork of a deck, cards that are meaningful to
one person my be meaningless to another.
This is why it is critically important that a person desiring to read the Tarot as an oracle
do so with a deck of cards whose images are appealing and engaging. Again, the Tarot
is above all else a work of art, and art that is offensive or meaningless to an individual
reader will fail to engage the dialectical process of divination. If the symbols are rejected
by either consciousness or the unconscious, or by both, what occurs when the cards are
read is simply a regurgitation of memorized meanings, and not any kind of intellectual
and intuitive dialectic that draws forth hidden contents from the unconscious. One can
only translate between two languages if one understands both of them, and attempting
to read with a deck with which one has no intellectual or intuitive connection is a waste
of time and effort, amounting to nothing more than pulling the printed messages out of
fortune cookies. Those connections are both conscious and unconscious -- a deck that
seems uninspiring and uninteresting will be just that when it is read, and a deck that

just feels wrong almost certainly is the wrong one to use.

Because conscious and unconscious engage one another during a reading, without ever
actually collapsing into one another, the meaning that emerges from their interaction is
fractal. Fractals are repeating patterns of interaction that occur at boundaries between
states of being that do not intermix. The rainbow of colors that appears when oil and
water mix on a roadway during the rain is an example of a fractal. Similarly, the familiar
mandalas of dream imagery and mythology are fractal images that occur at the
boundary where conscious and unconscious meet. A similar boundary condition to that
which exists in dreams also exists in a divination, and therefore meanings may emerge
from a divination that take on a character of their own, often unexpected, and
sometimes quite alarming. Consequently, a divination that is done to find an answer to
some specific question may produce a result that has nothing to do with the question, or
at least not apparently so. This does not necessarily indicate a failed divination, but
rather suggests that the unconscious has something more important to say.
The interpretation of the Tarot is a melting pot of many factors: the diviner's knowledge
of the symbols, the hidden contents of the unconscious and the objective situation to
which they apply, the beliefs and expectations of the diviner, and maybe even the luck
of the draw. This is why divination can never be a pure science -- science requires
objectively verifiable and repeatable events, and divination, being based in subjective
elements of the consciousness and unconsciousness of the diviner, is neither. That does
not in any way mean it is invalid or meaningless, it simply means that the scientific
method is not the optimal tool for understanding it. Or at least not the scientific method,
as it was understood several hundred years ago. Whether those who believe in a
scientific world view like it or not, science has evolved beyond the assumptions on
which it was originally founded, and there may be more science in divination that there
superficially appears to be.

The Acausal Connecting Principle

In connection with this idea, two points need further elaboration. First, this bit about
the luck of the draw leads into some very complex scientific and theoretical subjects.
But it is a critical point, for if the Tarot, or any other oracle for that matter, is to have any
meaning, there must be some relationship between the symbols selected for a particular
reading, and the events with which those symbols are supposed to be connected. That
relationship cannot be arbitrary, or else the message of the oracle is just nonsense. Yet it
cannot be cause-and-effect, at least not as the term is understood in classical science or
philosophy.
Cause-and-effect, in its classically understood sense, requires three conditions to
establish a causal connection between events. There must be contiguity, or physical

contact between the cause and the effect, either directly, or through an unbroken chain
of physical connections. To say, for example, that pressing the brake pedal caused the car
to stop, there must exist a physical connection, or unbroken train of connections,
between the pedal, the mechanical and electronic devices that connect it with the
brakes, the brakes and the tires, and the tires and the road, in order for pressing the
pedal to stop the car. Similarly, there must also be succession, meaning that the cause
must precede the effect in time. If the car stops before the brake pedal is pressed, one
would ordinarily look for some reason other than pressing the brake pedal to explain
the stopping.
The third condition is regularity, meaning that events of one kind regularly follow events
of another. Cars generally do stop when the brake pedal is pushed, but the real meaning
of regularity only emerges when the idea of causation is used to derive natural laws,
abstract principles in science that force things to happen in certain ways. If events in the
world are the results of causation, bound by the natural laws to happen in certain ways,
then it turns out that the world cannot be any other way than it is -- things must happen
the way they do, because they cannot happen any other way. Taken to its philosophical
extreme, this idea of natural law bound causation is the cornerstone of determinism, the
philosophical view that everything that happens is the results of causes and effects that
cannot be otherwise than they are. The entire universe is thus woven into a network of
causes and effects which cannot and could not be otherwise than the events that
precede them dictate. This includes human thoughts and behavior, and thus
determinism denies that there is any such thing as free will, other than just as a
psychological illusion. People feel good when the think they have a choice, but the
reality is that everything they think and do is embedded in a web of causes and effects
that determine outcomes invariably.
Determinism has many adherents, particularly among those who profess a scientific
world view, and believe that science -- as they understand it to be -- is the sole mediator
of fact and truth. Determinism would indeed be a persuasive theory except for two
problems. The first, as discovered hundreds of years ago when all this first got started,
is that while regularity may be useful as a general category of understanding how things
happen, it cannot be anything that compels things to happen in a certain way. Regularity
basically consists of two parts: observations that things always happen in a certain way,
plus the principle of necessity, which actually compels them to happen that way.
Necessity is a concept from logic used to manipulate abstract terms in equations, but in
trying to apply that same principle to actual events in the world, philosopher David
Hume noted that there is no observation of physical events that can prove an abstract principle.
If science is to be based on observations of actual things, and not on mere ideas about
them, then, if there is no way to observe necessity, then it just doesn't exist -- it is a
fantasy of the mind, imposed by the mind on the things it sees. Though it might be a
useful tool for predicting how things are likely to happen, there is no such thing as

necessity to force them to happen in that way. And if that is true, then determinism, and
the scientific world view that rests upon it, are nothing more than phantasms of the
mind.
It should be clarified that "science" is one thing, and the "scientific world view",
"scientific materialism", and other related philosophical interpretations are another. At
its roots, science is an empirical method, which means that it is a way of learning from,
and understanding, experience. The various "scientific" world views are, in general,
extrapolations from science into metaphysics -- they are taking what is learned through
science, and turning it into what is fundamentally a religious system of beliefs that, in
themselves, have little to do with direct experience. It is, as Hume suggests, inferring
necessity from observation, and is more a function of human belief than of anything
that can be scientifically studied. There is nothing in science itself that denies divination,
the unconscious, or subjectivity; quite the opposite, there is a substantial body of
scientific evidence that supports all of these.
Unfortunately, Hume's critique seems to undermine the validity of science and
empirical knowledge in general, which is a bad thing for those who believe that learning
from experience is something of value. After a few false starts, German philosopher
Immanuel Kant came up with what looked like a workable solution. Kant's
philosophical system of Transcendental Idealism is as intricate and complex as any
fantastical machine ever could be, but the gist of his argument is that necessity does in
fact exist, but it exists in the way the mind works. Necessity, and particularly as it
applies to causation, is an inherent property of the way the mind understands things. So
it isn't a requirement that it be directly observable; it is sufficient that it emerges from
observations by virtue of the way the mind works, because the way the mind works is
pre-determined by a set of built-in categories, of which cause-and-effect is one. The fact
that the mind works at all is therefore sufficient to establish necessity, and along with it
causation, and science in general as a means of classifying and understanding
experiences.
It is impossible to convey the complexity and persuasiveness of Kant's arguments in a
short space, and his deduction of the categories -- the vital part of his system that
connects the mind to the real world -- has raised more than one set of eyebrows, but it
does appear that at the very least, he did rescue cause-and-effect from its Humean
grave. If only it could have stopped there -- if only science could have been kept as one
possible way to the truth, among others. Sadly, it didn't stop with that: philosopher
G.W.F. Hegel basically turned Kant's Transcendental Idealism into what amounts to a
religion of Objective Idealism. Hegel came up with a system of dialectical logic, by which
he was able to argue that ideas like causation are objectively real, existing things, which
control the way everything in the world works. Events in the world, and in fact all of
world history, moves at the mercy of this set of ideas which taken together form the

Zeitgeist -- the Absolute Idea, whose character is reflected in the thoughts, ideas, beliefs,
and historical events of the world it oversees.
Yes, it sounds crazy, and it is, but unfortunately the Zeitgeist, like any dictator, gets its
power from being believed, not from being sane. Where Kant psychologized causation,
making it a feature of the way one see the world, Hegel psychoticized it, making the way
the mind works the controlling force of the way the world works. As psychoanalyst Carl
Jung later observed, Hegel's philosophy is what happens when the contents of the
unconscious are turned loose on the world without any sort of rational restraint -- one
winds up believing in fantastic beings addressed in fantastic language. Kierkegaard's
words are somewhat less polite.
What has all this got to do with reading the Tarot? For the oracle to have some meaning,
the symbols drawn in a reading cannot be arbitrary -- there must be a meaningful
connection between the events of the past, present, and future through representations
in the unconscious, and the actual cards drawn. Since contiguity, succession and
regularity are not possible in this case, then cause-and-effect, as classically understood,
cannot be the connecting principle. If, however, cause-and-effect turn out to be a feature
of the mind and not of the world, then this clears some space for the possibility that
there may be other, acausal principles at work. So, the first point against the principle of
determinism, which rules out any possible connection between events other than
causation, is that causation, ultimately, is a figment of the mind and not an objective fact
about things in the world. And the belief that the only way for events to influence each
other is through contiguity, succession and regularity, is just a fantastic being
addressed in fantastic language.
What is the evidence for, as Jung called it, an acausal connecting principle? Jung himself
details several examples in his On Synchronicity, a seminal work in the field. Beyond the
experiments described by Jung, further work in parapsychology and related fields has
established, by experiment, that events do connect with each other by means other than
physical causation. But the most persuasive evidence comes from science itself. Without
going into the details of what makes quantum mechanics and chaos theory work, it can
be said in summary that discoveries in psychology and physics including synchronicity,
entrainment, participation, superposition, relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness and
complementarity have undermined the traditional view of cause-and-effect as the sole
explanation for connections between events, clearing a theoretical space for
understanding how events can connect with each other across space and time without
direct physical contact. As Bram Stoker said, The superstition of yesterday can become
the scientific reality of today, and while it is no more possible to prove beyond
reasonable doubt that either synchronicity or some other acausal principle, or causeand-effect itself, exist as necessary principles, it seems reasonable to conclude, based on
experience and experiment, that both principles have their usefulness in explaining

connections between events under appropriate circumstances -- just as cause-and-effect

may be a category of the conscious mind, so might synchronicity be a category of the
unconscious. And while there is no amount of evidence, argument or experience that
will change the beliefs of those who cling to the Zeitgeist of outdated views of science, it
seems just as reasonable to expect that what is revealed to consciousness by an oracle is
approximately true, as it is to expect that the sun will appear over the horizon
approximately in the same place and at the same time tomorrow as it did today.
In the light of the fact that science has evolved beyond materialism and determinism,
can there be a scientific explanation of how cards drawn can reflect events hidden in
the past, present or future? Experiments suggest that there are, within the unconscious,
pre-cognitions of events of which consciousness is not aware. There are, according to
this view, representations in the unconscious of the very information that is inaccessible
to consciousness; if so, then the issue becomes understanding how to get that
information out of the unconscious in a form that is representable to consciousness. The
essential problem becomes one of selecting the right symbols upon which the selfconsuming process can work, which comes down to explaining how the cards drawn
can reflect the meaning of the unconscious pre-cognition. . One way to explain this is to
appeal to the theory of superposition, an idea from physics which, in a nutshell, means
that any system that can be in multiple states in fact exists in multiple states until it is
observed. In terms of a deck of cards, this means that until the cards are actually drawn,
they are in fact in no particular order. Which card is on top, is not determined until
someone actually draws it and looks at it.
Now right away, common sense unleashes its usual flurry of objections. It can't be,
the order of the cards must be fixed before they are drawn. All right then, let us
construct an experiment to test this theory. How would one do it -- how would one
determine whether the cards are in any specific order, without actually checking to see
what order they are in? It can't be done; it is a case of Hume's argument all over again -there is no observation that can prove the belief that the cards are in any particular
order until they are drawn. The belief that the shuffled cards are already in some
specific order before they are drawn is much like the belief that the numbers that will
come up in the lottery are already determined before they are drawn. Oh, if it were only
so...
But it isn't so, and the belief that the cards must be in some fixed order is nothing more
than the same figment of the mind as cause-and-effect. It is just another mental residue
of the 18th century Zeitgeist that serves more to blind one to the truth than to elucidate
it. If one can get beyond that kind of prejudice, then it becomes apparent that there is no
reason to believe the cards are in any particular order until they are drawn.
If the oracle is to have some meaning, the cards must be in some kind of order, an order

that connects with the pre-cognitive image of the event in question within the
unconscious. If the physical act of shuffling the cards does not determine their order,
then what does? What the theory of superposition states is that for the cards to be in
some specific order, there must be an observer. To discover who that observer is,
remember that what is in the unconscious is a pre-cognitive representation of a nonimmediate event. Representation implies that there is an object -- the event in
question -- and a subject to whom that event is represented. That subject is a psychoid
process in the unconscious, and it is not much of a leap to suppose that if such a process
can connect with events in the past and future, there is no reason why it can not also
connect with events in the present, such as the shuffling of cards. So, the observer that is
needed to order the cards is the psychoid process to whom the events in the past or future are
represented.
The order of the cards, then, is not arbitrary as it may at first seem. The unconscious has
psychoid processes that perceive events through categories different from those of
consciousness, perhaps including categories like synchronicity, future events taking
shape, and so on; these processes then act as observers that can order the cards in a
draw. Whatever the objections of "common sense" or commonly held beliefs may be, the
issue here is not to gratify prejudices and beliefs, but to explain what is observed to
happen. Many people who practice divination have experienced this kind of alignment
of cards, with later verification of events that actually happen. It doesn't always work
this way, but then again, sometimes it does, and it is an explanation of those cases where
it works that is sought here. Some people who read the Tarot probably aren't looking for
this kind of experience, and are really reading the cards for something other than this
kind of divination. Others, however, are reading it for this purpose, and the point here is
to establish the theoretical possibility that such experiences are possible, and to provide
a logical explanation of how they are possible.
Alternatively, it could be assumed that the Tarot really is a farce -- that the images are
sufficiently general that it doesn't matter what cards are drawn, the unconscious can use
them to communicate whatever message is desired. Other kinds of divination -pyromancy, listening to the wind, reading tea leaves, etc -- seem to work in this way,
using the apparently random patterns in the oracle to bring unconscious contents into
awareness. But then again, anyone who has ever practiced dreaming the fire knows
very well that what is seen in the fire can take on very specific meaning that is far from
random, and who is to say, without evidence to the contrary, that the unconscious isn't
able to manipulate the flames into a meaningful image, or that the flames themselves do
not reveal a hidden meaning? Again, the objective is to establish possibility and
reasonable explanation, not to establish last and final proof.
To break the hold of determinism and its related reductionist philosophies, all one
needs to do is to show that there are other explanations that are consistent with

observed fact. If the explanation given above is reasonable, and by reasonable is

meant logical and consistent with the facts, then it isn't mere luck of the draw as to
which cards come up in a reading; the order of cards drawn may very well be the logical
consequences of the processes involved in reading and interpreting the cards. The
information revealed by the oracle isn't necessarily pure chance plus vivid
imagination, but perhaps the result of identifiable and explicable processes.
In connection with this argument it should be mentioned that despite the best efforts of
diviners, divinations go wrong, and go wrong often. This does not mean that divination
is nonsense, or does not work. It is merely a reflection of the fact that the principles of
physics that lie behind the operations of divination are relative and not absolute, being
governed more by statistical probability than logical necessity. Physical processes are
"noisy", in the sense that they seldom produce results that are exact, but more often
produce a cluster of results that approximate the ideal. In the case of the Tarot, this
means that despite the best efforts and intentions, cards often come out in an order that
appears to be nonsense. As will be discussed shortly, divinations that "work" often
carry with then subjective feeling that they are "right", as opposed to others that carry
no such feelings, and seem to be nothing but gibberish. Thus, a layout of cards that
appears to be nothing but nonsense probably is just that, and this is a consequence of
the statistical nature of the very processes that make divination possible in the first
place.

Conscious and Unconscious

The other point that needs further explanation to complete the story of how divination
works, is to provide some explanation of how the unconscious can be aware of events in
the past, present and future to which consciousness itself does not have access. The
whole possibility of there being any such thing as divination rests upon the idea that
there can be representations of non-immediate events in the unconscious, so the
question must now be one of what these representations are, and how they get there.
Since cause-and-effect is not a possibility, then the explanation will have to come from
somewhere outside of the classical Zeitgeist of determinism and materialism. In fact,
there probably can't be a scientific explanation, understood as involving repeatable
and verifiable experiments, because the contents of the unconscious are purely
subjective, and have no meaning in themselves until they are interpreted. Interpretation
is a self-consuming process involving personal psychological elements, so there is no
way to sort that out in terms of quantifiable data. That does not mean there is no
explanation, nor does it mean that it doesn't happen; it just means that a scientific
explanation may not be the best way to go. But then, no one other than those dedicated
to the Zeitgeist of the 18th century, would say that science is necessarily the only way to
the truth.

In order to understand how the unconscious is able to communicate with consciousness,

and exactly what it is that the unconscious communicates, it might be best to begin with
an illustration of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.
Fortunately, the Tarot provides an excellent means of depicting this relationship.

The two key elements of the psyche that contribute to consciousness are the Ego and the
Self. As used here, Ego means something slightly different than is used by Freud,
Jung, and others. It is used in a technical sense to refer to those ongoing processes in the
psyche that relate the individual to the outside world. It is the point at which the psyche
connects with the objective, external world. It is not only the perception of the senses,
but also the expression of the contents of consciousness to the outside world. The Ego is
the perception of the individual as existing entity in an existing world, and the and the
expression of that individuality in a world of other individuals. As such, it is
appropriately represented by the Empress, as the soul of creative expression.
The Self, on the other hand, is the seat of individual uniqueness. It is an ongoing process
that impresses its uniqueness on all of the experiences it encounters. It is the seat of

subjectivity, that which makes each individual unique, and the contents of the psyche
unique in each individual. As an aside, it is probably for this reason that the Vulcan
Mind Melt may be an impossibility, for the Self encodes, so to speak, the contents of
the psyche with its own unique signature, and thus, any attempt to read those
contents in any sort of objective way would likely yield only garbled nonsense.
Thoughts, perceptions, feelings and ideas are necessarily yours, and belong to no one
else. Specifically regarding the Tarot, it is one reason why the interpretations of cards
will necessarily vary between different readers, for meaning is only possible in
relation to the interpretive processes of consciousness, necessarily stamped with the
uniqueness of the individual. As the Self is the ultimate source on the individual's
identity, and permeates and affects all of the operations of consciousness, it is well
represented by the Emperor.
For consciousness to exist at all, the Self and the Ego must exist in a complementary
relationship. For consciousness to have meaningful experiences, they must be
experiences of something, and the Ego provides the object of the experience. But
experiences must be experienced by someone, and that is the function of the Self: to be
the subject of the experience. Consciousness is therefore a dialectical, hand-in-hand
relationship, through which the perceptions of the outside world and the introspections
of the mind's own internal workings are integrated and understood. This state of
dialectical complementarity is represented by The Lovers.
Being a dialectical relationship between existing and distinctly different entities, any
love relationship is fragile. It can be fractured by external factors that stress it, and
ultimately tear it apart. In order to prevent this, there are certain aspects of the
relationship that must necessarily be kept private. The internal workings of
consciousness are not for public scrutiny, and therefore consciousness commonly
interacts with the world through a persona, a kind of mask that consciousness presents
to the outside world. When people describe themselves in objectified terms -- I am a
writer, for example -- the person is describing their persona, or the face they present to
the outside world. Thus consciousness always engages in a certain amount of deception
-- known to existentialist philosophers as inauthenticity, a kind of lie that
consciousness tells to the world in order to protect itself and in order to present itself to
the outside world in a way that consciousness believes will make it acceptable to others..
Neither consciousness, nor the world in which it operates, seems able to tolerate the
notion of, I am who I am, and so, at least to the outside world, consciousness remains
hidden behind the mask. Thus, the Magician, sometimes rendered as a street performer
who cheats and deceives his audience, or even as a sage who keeps his inner wisdom to
himself, represents the persona, or mask, behind which consciousness hides itself from
the world.
Consciousness is also in danger of being torn apart by internal stresses. Just as in a love

relationship where each individual has his or her own being, own feelings, and so on,
which can come into conflict, so the Ego and the Self can find themselves at odds.
Sometimes the individual who, at some deep level, the person actually is, comes into
irresolvable conflict with the demands of living in the world. When this happens, those
aspects of the personality that are in conflict with the way consciousness sees itself, or
sees how it needs to appear in order to operate in the world, are repressed, or forced out
of the awareness of consciousness. Though these aspects of the personality are forced
out of conscious view, they nonetheless continue to exist, and continue to function in the
psyche independently of consciousness as complexes. Left to their own devices, these
complexes can accumulate sufficient energy to reappear in consciousness without
conscious control -- they suddenly erupt into behavior, as if out of nowhere. The
"Freudian slip" is one such eruption; odd feelings or reactions to certain situations,
certain dreams, or even voices being heard are other more extreme examples. The action
of these repressed complexes seems foreign to consciousness, as though there is
someone else "in the head" driving the psyche. This "someone" is what Jung called "The
Shadow", a negative complement to the Persona -- another false "person" created by
consciousness to hide what it is ashamed of or fearful of -- and its presence and activity
creates the same kind of inauthenticity and stress as the Persona. This kind of internal
stress can literally tear consciousness apart, and when it does, depression, neurosis, and
finally psychosis can ensue. The unity that consciousness brings to the psyche dissolves,
and psychoid processes from the unconscious can emerge into behavior, often with
bizarre and disastrous consequences. The unity behind the mask vanishes, and what
appears to the outside world is a bewildering jumble of disconnected complexes and
behaviors. There is no one behind the mask to work the controls, only a confusion of
individual, disconnected processes. Consciousness either vanishes completely, or else
can only watch in horror as disconnected processes from the unconscious take control of
the psyche. This state of dissociation is represented by the Fool, the person behind the
mask having vanished, and the psyche presenting to the world a hodge-podge of whoknows-what.
It should also be mentioned that a similar danger exists with regard to the persona -- the
ego can become so obsessed with its outward appearance that it actually believes it is
the persona, and the Self can be repressed to the point that the structure of
consciousness itself is imperiled. This is the psychological meaning of "selling one's soul
to the devil". Sorting out what is the Self and what is mere persona is a major topic in
existentialist psychology, but what is important to note here is that inauthenticity, either
with respect to the person or the shadow, creates the possibility of fracturing the
structure of consciousness, and is a major source of neurosis and psychosis.
For consciousness to maintain itself as a unified whole, and maintain its central and
controlling force over the psyche, it must do so by accumulating sufficient energy to
maintain its position of power over the other contents of the psyche. This psychic

energy, sometimes also called libido, has its origins in the unconscious. Just as it was
necessary to use the term Ego in a somewhat different way than it is used by others, so
the term libido also has a different meaning than the way it is used in medical analysis.
If the unconscious is the source of the psychic energy that drives consciousness, then
while it is often thought that unconscious and consciousness are inimical to one another,
as enemies in the psyche, in truth the psyche can only function as a unified whole when
consciousness and unconscious work cooperatively. Returning to the question of the
origin and nature of unconscious representations is therefore really to ask about the
origins of consciousness itself.
The unconscious speaks in two distinct voices, identified by Jung in Liber Novus as the
Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths, and both have a role to play in the reading
of the Tarot. Spirit of the Times is a direct translation of the German word Zeitgeist, which
has already appeared in connection with Hegel's philosophy of Absolute Idealism. In
those philosophical terms, it is the reification of human thought into objective existence,
a perversion of Descartes' famous saying into, I believe, therefore it is. In
psychological terms, it is an image in the unconscious of what Julian Jaynes calls the
bicameral mind. The bicameral mind is a physiological adaptation in the brain to social
behavior. The basic idea is that the brain observes patterns of acceptable and
unacceptable behavior among others, then transmits those patterns through the speech
mechanisms of the brain as voices that command obedience. This speech is often heard
as the voice of an authority figure, and serves as a sort of automatic means of the
leader's commands being issued in his or her physical absence.
Now one might wonder how well all these commanding voices would go over with
consciousness, but the bicameral mind, according to Jaynes, actually pre-dates the
existence of consciousness. That is to say that until relatively recently -- the last two
thousand years or so -- there never really was any such thing as consciousness. No self,
no ego, no individuality in the psychological sense. Incredible as this might seem,
Jaynes' evidence and arguments are quite persuasive. Entire societies and civilizations
were built out of this physiological mechanism of pattern recognition and commanding
voices. There simply was no such thing as consciousness to think for itself, or to resist or
refuse the commands of the Great Leader in the head.
While the bicameral mind can be an important survival mechanism, it can also be
ruthless to those things it does not recognize as acceptable. Wars were fought, countless
numbers died, and civilizations rose and fell based upon the physiological
discrimination between us and them. What could possibly have gone through the
mind of Socrates, one wonders, that would cause him to favor death over exile? The
answer is that the bicameral mind morbidly fears any loss of orientation, and rather
than experience a loss of familiar patterns and surroundings, it would prefer to destroy
itself.

This was ultimately the downfall of the bicameral mind. The bicameral mind is a rulefollowing entity, and when the rules no longer work, it can no longer process and issue
commands -- when the familiar patterns disappear, the voices fall silent. Changes in the
environment, migration of peoples, development of trade, and other factors so
disrupted the social and environmental patterns by which the bicameral mind oriented
itself that it could no longer operate. These same factors necessitated a certain kind of
fracture is the psyche -- a person would need to be one thing, and appear to be another.
The need for a mask created the need for a person behind the mask, and this opened the
door for the appearance of individual consciousness.
There is a lot in Jaynes' theory that is open to argument, but what does at least appear to
be right is that there exist in the brain physiological mechanisms that orient thought and
behavior to prevailing social norms. That can be a good thing -- it keeps traffic moving
in the right direction, for example, but it can also produce embarrassing glitches, when
things that are normal in one culture are done casually in a different culture where
they are considered unacceptable. Nonetheless, because the bicameral mind imparts a
knowledge based on tradition and authority, it has been symbolized as the Hierophant
of the tarot. Normally this kind of knowledge is transmitted to the Ego -- responsible
for connecting consciousness to the outside world -- more often as feelings, desires,
revulsions, and so on, rather than as intellectual content. While the Spirit of the Times is
the image in the unconscious of these physiological processes, consciousness usually
does not hear voices; this knowledge most often is manifested as vague feelings, or a
sense of what is the right or wrong thing to do, without any real rational justification.
Images in the unconscious are not real, in the sense of having an objective,
independent existence; the representation is a way for consciousness to understand
and interact with a mental process with which it cannot directly communicate. Though
the image or representation itself is not real, what it represents is very real. The Spirit of
the Times is a representation of a physiological process, the bicameral mind, that
originates in the anatomy and physiology of the brain.
The Spirit of the Times can be a good and helpful thing, but it can also be mercilessly
punishing and horrifically destructive. Because it appeared in evolution prior to the
development of individual consciousness, individuality can be a thing quite inimical to
it, especially if that individuality takes a course that diverges from social norms. For this
same reason, the bicameral mind can still influence the operation of consciousness, and
often undetected, through its connections in the primitive wiring of the brain. The
bicameral mind is the source of the persecution of those whom it sees as violating
accepted social standards of thought and behavior. Ideas, thoughts and beliefs that are
either rejected out of hand without any consideration, or by virtue of irrational
prejudice or silly cranked logic, or that are accepted without critical reflection because
everyone knows that, reveal the hand of the bicameral mind in shaping the contents

of consciousness. This would include things that are accepted without question because
they are scientific, or rejected because it is judged by the bicameral mind that they are
not, scientific being a major component of the modern Zeitgeist, which is, in fact,
the external objectification of the Spirit of the Times. Similarly, the habitual and incessant
use of we and our as the subjects of written or spoken sentences, and the obsession
with, and endless chatter over "relationships" and "lessons" are pure effluvium of the
bicameral mind -- they are Freudian slips that betray its need to justify what is said by
appeal to social conformity, and its inability to conceive of individuality. Worse, when it
turns out to be the individual him- or herself that is actually the target of the bicameral
mind's wrath, its unconscious, physiological processes can amass sufficient energy to
temporarily, or even permanently, fracture and displace consciousness itself. Once
consciousness breaks apart, the commanding voices reappear, and destructive behavior
emerges without conscious control. Stories of people who commit suicide because of
abuse in social media, or who amass weapons and use them on innocent victims, are
tragic reminders of the bicameral mind's intolerance and ruthlessness against anything
it sees as non-confirming.
While for a time the destiny of the human race was shaped by the Spirit of the Times, the
fact of the matter is that the Spirit of the Times lost the evolutionary battle for the control
of the psyche to its rival in the unconscious, the Spirit of the Depths. Despite the
observation that the bicameral mind still exists, and still exerts a powerful influence on
consciousness by way of the Ego, it is no longer the determining force in the psyche. The
controlling factor in the psyche is consciousness, and consciousness owes its existence to
the Spirit of the Depths. Just as the Spirit of the Times to some extent could be said to have
created the Ego, those representations of the outside world of which consciouses is
aware, so the Spirit of the Depths created the Self, and along with it gave rise to the
possibility of an inner, unique and individual existence.
What, then, is the Spirit of the Depths? The Spirit of the Depths is another term for what
Jung calls the collective unconscious. The collective, or transpersonal unconscious is a set of
psychoid processes -- mental processes of which consciousness cannot be directly aware
because they differ in kind from what consciousness can understand. Differ in exactly
what way? To some degree, Jung accepted Kant's idea of pre-formed categories in
consciousness, modes or forms of understanding by which consciousness connects with
the outside world. Categories like number, extension, cause-and-effect, and so on are
forms of understanding that consciousness uses to classify and understand what it
observes in the world. It may well be that Jung applied the same idea to the
unconscious, theorizing that there exist in the unconscious forms of thought analogous
to the categories, but for the purpose of apprehending things of which consciousness
cannot be aware. He called those unconscious categories archetypes, and through his
studies in mythology, dream analysis and alchemy, identified several of them as
recurring themes and images that appear throughout history, and repeat themselves in

contemporary dreams, fantasies, creative processes, and psychiatric disorders. Like the
Spirit of the Times, which is a representation of the physiological processes of the
bicameral mind that interacts with patterns of behavior it observes in the world, the
Spirit of the Depths is a representation of psychological processes in the unconscious that
interact with some other actual thing of which consciousness cannot be directly aware.
If patterns of social behavior are ultimately the objects of which the Spirit of the Times is a
representation, then what are the objects of which the archetypes of the Spirit of the
Depths are representations?
The key to identifying the source of the Spirit of the Depths is to be found in the way that
the unconscious speaks in a Tarot reading. The Spirit of the Times, while in its classical
form speaks to the psyche in actual auditory hallucinations, in a Tarot reading makes
itself known as an organizing force. It is generally objectively oriented, referring to
things, situations, and behaviors in the observable physical world -- that is, things that
are immediate, as the word has been used here. As the primary function of the
bicameral mind is aligning the behavior of the individual with social norms, so the
Spirit of the Times, when it speaks through the Tarot, does so often in the form of
criticism, judgment, and advice. It teaches lessons, meaning that it instructs the
individual in ideas and behaviors that, one way or another, promote the integration of
the individual into the social environment. As it is objectively oriented, it is primarily
concerned with things as they are, or as it thinks they should be, and how the
individual should fit in with what exists in the immediate present, or what can be
predicted based upon observations of what exists in the present. It can, therefore, make
predictions -- or at least reasonable guesses -- that grow out of what it can observe. It
can, for example, predict that if you don't put gas in the car, it won't run, even if it can't
directly explain why.
While many people use the Tarot in this way -- for counseling or advice -- this is not
divination as the terms has been used here. Divination involves seeing beyond the
limits of the immediate, and beyond what can be predicted from the immediate. Many
use the Tarot for this purpose, as well as for insights into what may lie outside the limits
of the physical senses, and what can be deduced or inferred from them. Since there is
nothing in the physical observation of the external world that can yield this kind of
information, divination focuses on inwardness -- what can be learned from inner
sources that often transcend time and space, and have little to do with ethical questions
of fitting in. This is not to say that the Spirit of the Depths always speaks nicely. The
Spirit of the Depths draws one inward, but what is found in that inwardness is not always
pleasant. It is the Spirit of the Depths that speaks through dreams, and dreams can turn
into nightmares, particularly when the Spirit of the Depths and the Spirit of the Times are
in conflict. When there exists a basic conflict between who the individual on the inside
is, and what that individual tries to be, or must be, in the world -- and this is not
uncommon in a world whose Zeitgeist seems controlled by the bicameral mind -- then

the Spirit of the Depths goes on the attack. That attack can erupt in behavior as neurosis
or psychosis, but often first appears in dreams. As a brief aside, human consciousness
seldom exists in perfect balance between the two unconscious voices. Those whose
consciousness tends toward the Spirit of the Times have what Jung called extraverted
personalities, meaning they look to the outside world for orientation and meaning.
Those who tend to seek after the Spirit of the Depths, in contrast, are introverted
personalities, and shun the objective world in preference to subjective meaning and
experience. Thus, extraverts deny or condemn the use of the Tarot for discovering
spooky omens, while introverts wonder if the extraverts have yet received their orders
of the day from the Great Leader in the head. A sad situation, for there is room in the
world of the Tarot for both approaches.
The Spirit of the Depths, then, focuses on subjective inwardness as its source of
inspiration and information. While the Spirit of the Times focuses on objective situations,
the Spirit of the Depths focuses more on subjective impressions. Thus the Spirit of the
Depths is more adept at dealing with general concepts than keywords, preferring to
develop meanings through introspection and intuition, as opposed to the preference of
the Spirit of the Times for fitting social behavior into objectified circumstances. The Spirit
of the Times commands, while the Spirit of the Depths whispers, and what the Spirit of the
Depths whispers often appears to have its source in something that lies far outside the
realm of objective reality and social behavior.

Inwardness and Unknown

But what is there in its inwardness that could provide this kind of insight? Surely not
anything in the physical brain, for such information would be limited to the immediate,
or what can be deduced or inferred from it. For this reason, the Spirit of the Depths
cannot be an image of anything in the real world, as the term is ordinarily
understood, because if it were, then consciousness would have direct awareness of it. By
real world is meant the world of time and space, of distances to and from, of time
before and after. So the world of which the Spirit of the Depths is a representation
cannot be any such thing, if it does indeed perceive events in the past and future. But
can there be any other sort of world? The logical answer is, why not? Why could there
not be a world whose characteristics are the logical complements of the real world as
it is known to consciousness, and why could that world not be just as real to the
unconscious as the familiar world of space and time is to consciousness?
Such a world would be one in which events are not separated from one another by time
and space, a world in which all events are immediate to one another. It is, of course,
difficult to conceive of such a world, because consciousness is used to understanding
events and objects by virtue of their similarities and differences from one another.
Indeed, if Kant is right or even close to being right, it just would not be possible for

consciousness to have any direct comprehension of such a world. The categories by

which consciousness understands the objective world are those that identify and
differentiate events and objects based upon their physical and temporal differences and
similarities. Which is likely the reason why any intuitions of such a world would have
to be unconscious -- they would correspond to categories or archetypes in the
unconscious, of which consciousness can have no direct comprehension. But to say that
the unconscious might have direct access to a world in which events are not
distinguished from one another by separation in space and time is to raise a number of
potentially disturbing issues. The word that is generally applied to a world or state of
being in which there is no differentiation of time is eternal, the word applied to a world
or state of being in which there is no differentiation of space is infinite, and the term that
describes the experience or intuition of such an infinite and eternal world or state of
being is mystical experience.
Walter Stace, in Time and Eternity, his definitive study on the subject, proposes the
Intersection Theory as an explanation of mystical experience:
There are two orders, the natural order which is the order of time, and the divine
order, which is the order of eternity. In the moment of mystic illumination the two
orders intersect, so that the moment belongs to both orders. Within that single
moment of time are enclosed all eternity and all infinity.
One thing that should be pointed out is that while the term mystical experience is often
used in a religious context, it need not necessarily be confined to that context. There is
nothing in the concept of infinity or eternity that necessitates or implies the existence of
any form of superior or intending being, nor is there anything in either of those
concepts that denies it. Whether or not there exists any such being or beings is a
separate issue, and quite irrelevant to the question of how the unconscious perceives
past and future events.
What is directly relevant to the topic of divination is that in order for the unconscious to
have a representation of events beyond the limits of physical space and time, it must be
capable of interacting in some way with a world very different than that to which
consciousness is accustomed, a world in which events of the past, present and future,
both near and far away, are directly accessible. The Intersection Theory suggests that it
is possible for the unconscious to do just that, by having one foot in the world of space
and time, and one foot in the eternal, so to speak. But to take this idea to its logical
conclusion, it would appear, based on the observed timelessness of unconscious
archetypes, that perhaps the collective or transpersonal unconscious, or at the very least
the object of which images in the collective unconscious are representations, is itself this
world of the eternal and infinite. As Helen Chappel said in The Waxing Moon,
Somewhere in the heart of the cosmos, what we call time has no relevance, and it is

clear from the above that somewhere in the very heart of the human psyche there exists
a persistent connection with, and perhaps actual presence of, the world of the eternal
and infinite, which many authors prefer to lift out of its religious associations by
referring to it as the Other Side, Other World, Outside, the Entelechy, the Tao, the
Unknown, or, as it is more popularly known, the Force. And it may be of interest to
some to note that the German word for force or power is Kraft. Because of its often
incomprehensible nature, and the intense feeling of mysteriousness that it frequently
carries with it when it appears in consciousness, it seems appropriate that the Spirit of
the Depths be represented by The Priestess.
Under the right circumstances, which are not necessarily predictable, the complex
patterns of meaning that emerge during a divination may coalesce into a unity of deep
and moving significance. A true divination, one that intertwines conscious and
unconscious in active dialectic, is essentially an intersection of the kind Stace describes,
and it cannot be predicted a priori what the content of that experience will be. One of the
characteristics of this kind of mystical experience is numinosity, described by Rudolf
Otto as feelings of awe or dread, the feeling of something uncanny, eerie or weird; a
sense of impotence and nothingness as against overpowering might; the conviction that
one is confronted with something overwhelmingly alive, vital and active; a sense of
mystery, of wonder over something which is, in at least some respects, radically other
than the objects of ordinary experience; and, fascination or attraction. It is for the
purpose, among others, of producing this type of experience that the Tarot is often used
in ritual magic. Not every diviner will experience this, and most probably won't, but
those who do can be led to deep and life-changing insights. It is a possibility of which
one should be aware, and even if a divination does not have this impact, a divination
that goes well will usually produce some degree of numinous feeling. It comes down to
the observation that a card reading that feels right probably is right, and a reading
that feels empty and unenlightening probably is just that.
Does this mean every tarot reading is a mystical experience? Is this the only legitimate
use of the Tarot? Not at all. There are many who use the Tarot objectively, in the sense
addressed by the Spirit of the Times. It is a perfectly legitimate thing to seek insights and
guidance in difficult or confusing situations, and as the Spirit of the Times is adept at
identifying patterns and trends in objective situations and how one can fit one's
behavior to them, it can be a source of advice that might not otherwise be available. But
this is not the only use of the Tarot; it can also be used subjectively, for insight into
matters that have no direct correlates in the physical world. Whether for introspection
into one's own mind, or divination into the past or future, the Spirit of the Depths can be a
source of otherwise inaccessible wisdom. The matter under consideration is that, given
the observation that divinations and insights do occur, and there is ample experimental
evidence that they do, then what does this say about the nature of the human
consciousness that seeks and understands these insights?

Just as the psychic energy that energizes the Ego comes from the physiological
processes that reveal themselves to consciousness as the Spirit of the Times, so it is also
the case that the psychic energy that drives the Self comes from the Spirit of the Depths.
Unconscious impressions originating in the bicameral mind are ambiguating, tending to
make one blend in with the group, while impressions arising from the collective
unconscious are individuating, tending to emphasize one's uniqueness as an individual.
This at first may seem paradoxical, but it is important to realize that the collective
unconscious has nothing to do with the bicameral mind. The bicameral mind is a
physiological adaptation to social behavior, while the collective unconscious is a psychological
adaptation to the Unknown. The term collective refers to the fact that it is shared, as
anything eternal and infinite necessarily must be; the alternative term transpersonal
means that it is something that does not have its origins in the personal history of the
individual, but is nonetheless a part of the individual psyche. In contrast to experiences
of the bicameral mind, which are basically the same in everyone, experiences of the
collective unconscious are uniquely yours. Your dreams are not anyone else's; even
though they may have common underlying motifs and themes, they are nonetheless
products of the interaction of those patterns with the Self, and therefore belong only to
you. The dream may be interpretable in terms of general archetypes, but the experience
of those archetypes, and the way they manifest in consciousness, is different for
everyone.
This is a thing that the Spirit of the Times finds intolerable. Individuation is a process that
the bicameral mind instinctively rebels against, and draws upon every possible resource
to oppose it. In the present age, the bicameral mind counters anything to do with
mysticism, and the individuation it promotes, with modern reductive and
deflationary theories based in materialism, determinism, atheism, and all the other
isms whose purpose is to reduce the world to what it can understand. The whole
modern Zeitgeist of materialism and science-worship is, in fact, a projection into
reality of the bicameral mind's inability to conceive of anything beyond its own
immediate experience, and the idea that society is real, and individuality is an
illusion, is the stuff of psychopathology, not science or philosophy. By reducing dreams
to neural discharge, visions to hallucinations, feelings to chemical imbalance, and
the Self to mental image of one's place in society, the bicameral mind collapses reality
into its own narrow well-ordered world like a compulsive neurotic rearranges things on
a shelf. Anyone who has ever had a lucid dream knows how utterly stupid the idea that
dreams reduce to a neural playback of the days events is, and anyone who has ever
had a mystical experience, including one of divination, has already run where the Spirit
of the Times can never tread.
Which leads to the next logical step in the study of the nature of consciousness as it is
revealed through the Tarot and divination. If the Spirit of the Times is upset by the

argument that the unconscious has its roots in the Unknown, then it will really be upset
by the conclusion that, as the existence of consciousness depends upon the Self, and the
Self derives its psychic energy from the Unknown, then it is an inescapable fact that
consciousness owes its own existence to the participation of the Unknown in the psyche.
It is the Spirit of the Depths -- the voice of the Unknown itself -- that breathed life into
consciousness in the first place, and lifted the human soul out of its physiological
prison. The Spirit of the Times not only lost the evolutionary battle for control of the
psyche, but lost it to the very thing of whose existence it cannot conceive, and
consistently denies. Though couched in religious language, as would be expected given
the circumstances in which it was written, this short passage tells the story of that battle,
and its outcome:
So is every man: he is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like
morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing
with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and
forgetfulness . . . to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw
him up from nothing, were equally the issues of an almighty power.
-- Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying, (1651)

The Age of Endarkenment

What started out as in investigation into something the psyche does -- divination -- has
led to some remarkable conclusions about what the psyche is. If it is true that the psyche
got to be the way it is through an evolutionary process, the next question becomes,
where is it going from here? Evolution is not a goal-oriented process, it does not do
things in order that... and it does not stop with some end point having been reached
It is, rather, an ongoing process of adaptation. To what, then, is the next thing to which
the psyche must adapt?
What exactly is meant by the term evolution in the first place? It certainly is not about
"monkeys turning into men." It is, in actuality, a very simple and straightforward idea -that living things adapt to changes in the world they inhabit by changing themselves.
One aspect of this process is that, in a world where the environment changes -- gets
hotter, wetter, and so on -- the characteristics of an entire group of creatures changes as
it tracks changes in the environment. Individuals that are better able to survive under
changing conditions reproduce and pass their characteristics on more effectively than
those that don't do as well in the changes. An example of this process that has become a
serious medical problem is that when infections are treated with antibiotics, the few
bacteria that survive the treatment go on to multiply, and pass their resistance to the
antibiotics on. What has happened is that where antibiotics were generally effective at
treating infections, now resistant strains have emerged that are, in some cases,
untreatable, and infections that were formerly easily treated have now become life-

threatening.
It is through a process similar to this that the bicameral mind first established itself in
the human psyche. In the early days of human existence, living as a group in a world
full of predators and hostile conditions brought with it a survival advantage, and those
who lived in that way passed on their abilities to do so -- including the necessary
physiological mechanisms in the brain. Unfortunately, as the social environment, and
the complexities of surviving in the world become more difficult to model in the brain's
pattern recognition systems, the bicameral mind, by itself, became less of a survival
advantage -- that is to say, it became maladaptive, an actual disadvantage.
This cleared the way for another type of psychic process to gain ascendancy, and that
process is what is now called consciousness. Consciousness is a complex interaction of
physiological, psychological, and perhaps even other sorts of systems and processes. Its
chief survival advantage is its ability to function outside the limits of its immediate
environment -- it can predict and anticipate situations that cannot be directly observed.
While the physiological systems of the brain can only say, "I am hungry, I need to gather
food," consciousness can say, "It might rain tomorrow, so I had better gather up food for
tomorrow now."
While consciousness was the evolutionary step that moved the psyche beyond the
confines of its immediate environment, how exactly it does that remains a matter of
speculation. What is clear is that while physiological systems, including the bicameral
mind, are rule-following systems, the survival advantage of consciousness is that it can
operate as a rule-breaking system. Its ability to peer into the future and see what the
senses cannot see is due to its ability to think beyond the simple rules of cause and
effect. Whether through vibrations of microtubules connecting with quantum foam,
non-linear system behavior, traversing subspace wormholes, fractal intersections with
the Unknown, or who-knows-what may lie at the bottom of it, consciousness was able to
break the chain pf physical and causal dependency, and learn to think beyond the brain
and its immediate environment.
All this is fine and well, except that two developments have radically altered the
progress of evolution. The first is that humans have learned to apply technology in
order to evade adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Instead of humans
adapting to a changing environment, the environment has been changed to adapt to
human needs. The second problem is that the modification of the environment to suit
human conditions has multiplied the human population without any selection pressure
for diversity. This means, in a nutshell, that the genetic shifts in the human population
that would normally occur due to changes in survival requirements are no longer
occurring. These two factors, taken together, have essentially stalled the process of
human evolution.

Even worse than this is the fact that increasing population density has isolated the
individual from the means of his or her own survival. Where the ability to adapt to
changing conditions was once an essential element of human survival, now the
increasing complexity of social interdependence has shifted survival needs away from
adaptation toward accommodation -- the ability to fit in to an existing network of social
demands, instead of the ability to change in response to shifting conditions. The
consequence of this is that the rule-breaking capabilities of consciousness, and the
psychological resources that enable it including the concept of individuality, are
becoming less and less welcome in an increasingly regimented social order.
Individuality is, in the minds of many, now "properly" considered a mental image of
one's place in society, as opposed to some form of metaphysical identity. Once the very
cornerstone of psychological existence, individuality is in danger of being reduced to
mere "particles in space", or blobs of DNA floating in a social sea.
Individuality cannot disappear as long as consciousness is intact, but in fact, it is
consciousness itself that is in danger of collapse as a consequence of humanity's
evolutionary standstill. The increasing pressures of social order have re-invigorated the
physiological mechanisms of the bicameral mind, and where the voice of the Spirit of the
Depths first drew consciousness out of its physiological chains, that voice is being
drowned out by the boom-box shouts and incessant chatter of the Spirit of the Times. As
the balance of energy in the psyche has shifted from center toward the bicameral mind,
the Ego has become a battleground between the physiology of the brain and the
Unknown. Consciousness becomes entrapped in a web of social media and group-think
push and shove, the Unknown withdraws, the Self languishes, the Ego shatters, and the
Fool rises. Once the Ego is destroyed, consciousness collapses, and psychosis
supervenes. Those who perceive themselves as not fitting in either take their own lives,
or assemble weapons caches to carve a place for themselves. The proof of that thesis is
simple enough: as Joseph Campbell once said, "Read the newspapers."
This process of recameralization has found its way into philosophy, and from there, into
the general Zeitgeist of the present age. Under the banner of "secular humanism", the
modern intellectual climate seeks a return to the views of the "Enlightenment" of
centuries ago -- views like atheism, materialism, determinism, mechanism, and the
whole host of other "isms" that coalesce in the "modern" view of science worship and
objective, deflationary and reductive thinking. Centuries ago, these beliefs were
necessary and welcome counterparts to the hardened, dogmatic religious Zeitgeist of
their time, and performed a necessary clearing of intellectual space that allowed new
ideas and methods of investigation to grow and flourish. Now, however, these very
beliefs, having failed themselves to evolve, have become the modern equivalent of the
religious dogma of the late Middle Ages. Even religion itself has suffered under their
sway -- gone are the concepts of mystical participation and the "god within", replaced by

worship of objective, external entities, and strict adherence to rigid codes.

These coalescence of these outdated views from centuries past into the modern
Zeitgeist, both invigorating and invigorated by the bicameral mind they once
challenged, have plunged the modern world into an Age of Endarkenment. Where these
ideas once served to open minds, they now slam the doors of credibility shut on
anything that does not fit within the limits of the closed minds that adhere to them, and
have become the weapons of persecution and ridicule against anything that lies outside
their limits. All of this bears the unmistakable trademark of the bicameral mind, and
one does in fact hear, among the voices of the modern Zeitgeist, calls for a general
return to that very mental structure. This is not surprising, given that deflationary
views, which discredit anything that does not fit immediate experience, narrow one's
thinking to that which is best comprehended and organized by the bicameral mind.
And, it should be kept in mind, also serve to discredit, ridicule, and hopefully keep at
bay, the very voice of the unconscious that once rose up and crushed the bicameral
mind's rule over the psyche, and obliterated tis power over human destiny.
Sadly, this process of recameralization has found its way into the Tarot, too. It is, as
already mentioned, a legitimate use of the Tarot to consult the Spirit of the Times for
advice and insight, but it is not legitimate to proclaim that as its only use. Further, it is
all too easy to slide from advice to command, and from insight to uncritical belief. The
popularity of lists of keywords and books of canned "meanings" suggests that all too
often, the modern Tarot has become the dupe of the bicameral mind. This kind of
objectification closes off the possibility of any true insight beyond the immediate -- by
memorizing canned meanings and keywords, one is merely re-ordering what one
already knows, rather than discovering anything new. The demand for "standard"
artwork in a "standard" format further reinforces the demand of the Spirit of the Times
that nothing outside of its framework of ideas be allowed to enter. The nonstop babbling
about "relationships" shifts the focus away from existing individuals, toward the
objectification of social behavior patterns that is the part and parcel of bicameralminded thinking. The bottom of the barrel is surely the endless chatter on the internet
and elsewhere in which one reads the details of others' personal business exposed to
public view with all the dignity of a street-corner flasher. This is what Kierkegaard
called leveling, the exposure of the inner workings of one's own mind to the view of
others, and is the ultimate insult to the dignity of the individual. Consciousness can
only exist insofar as its inner working remain its own; this kind of exhibitionism
ambiguates individuality in social chatter, collapsing the "I" into the "we". When the
details of one's private life become a public spectacle, then there is no private life, there
is nothing left of the individual, and the process of consciousness on which it depends
dissolves in the unending mire of social babble.
In the Age of Endarkenment, the individual does not exist. Everything the mind does in

understood in terms of physical and chemical processes in the brain, and in how those
processes manifest in external social behavior, thus depersonalizing experience. Hand in
hand with this goes the belief that there is no "inner life" -- there is no subjective
meaning, and everything in the psyche is understood in terms of social behavior. This is
because science -- which as every good materialist knows, is all about "measurement" -and inner states cannot be measured, while behavior, as in running rats through mazes
or people through turnstiles, can be. Since what cannot be measured does not exist, then
neither subjective mental states, not the individual itself, exists, as far as the "real" world
is concerned. As Jung once said,
The political and social isms of our day preach every conceivable ideal, but,
under this mask, they pursue the goal of lowering the level of our culture by
restricting or altogether inhibiting the possibilities of individual development.
-- Jung, C. G., Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1933/1950
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of recameralization is the use of chemical agents to
actively suppress those processes in the brain that promote individuating experiences. It
is interesting to note that while the traditional "psychedelics" are banished under the
strictest of legal sanctions, it is their pharmacological complements that are touted as
the solutions to all psychological problems. Such problems, are, of course, "chemical
imbalances" that need to be corrected. For if they are not, then perhaps depression has
its origin in something other than social behavior, which would lead to the possibility
that there is something in the psyche other than social behavior, and the possibility that
the reductive world view might not be right. Psychedelic experiences are, if nothing else,
individuating, and often point to a reality beyond that which is experienced through the
senses; psychedelic drugs are merely analogs, or chemical variations, of substances
already produced in the brain. Could what is called "depression," or at least one
component of it, be the inner voice of the Spirit of the Depths whispering its blasphemous
suggestions that there is more to life than living as a rat in a maze, or as a brain in a vat?
Could it not be the voice of human evolution itself, raising itself in protest -- and maybe
in warning -- against the abandonment of all it has achieved? By selectively suppressing
brain structures and functions that are adapted to the functioning of consciousness, and
particularly the pathways in the brain that generate the kinds of disordered activity that
enable consciousness to function independently of the brain's underlying physiology,
"medications", in effect, turn the evolutionary clock backwards. Chemicals do not cure
depression or any other mental condition -- they alter the chemistry of the brain to
produce socially desirable behavior, perhaps in the process undermining what it is to be
a human being in the first place. In a world of "Just Say No" to drugs, drugs have
become the Spirit of the Times' way of saying "No" to consciousness. Depression and its
related psychic phenomena are not chemical phenomena of the brain, but existential
phenomena of the psyche. They are fragmentations in consciousness brought about
when the social and environmental factors that affect consciousness pull it away from

the Self. It is convenient to say that depression is a biochemical phenomenon, then

chemically alter the brain and claim a "cure", when in fact what has been done is the
pharmacological equivalent of a frontal lobotomy -- one has damaged the brain so that it
can no longer experience the full breadth of consciousness. This is a little like solving
the problem of a defective water pump in an automobile engine by removing the pump;
it does solve the problem, but only for a short while.
This is also why dreams must be explained as physical and chemical processes in the
brain, and they must be recollections of social and objective events. For if they are
something other than "replays" of ordinary events, then there might really exist inner
mental states, a subjective reality might also exist, and perhaps the object of that
subjective reality -- the Unknown -- also exists. Then the bicameral mind would have to
face up to the fact that the world it has created is a farce, that its dominance over the
psyche is counter-evolutionary, that "society" is, after all, a mere projection of itself into
reality, that the Zeitgeist of science worship and materialism is a lie of its own telling,
and the psychosis it has inflicted upon humanity is its own doing. A prominent atheist
once said, "Religion is a disease of which the human race needs to be cured," and in a
sense, he is right. There is a disease which needs curing, and the blind acceptance of
unprovable "truths" as a requirement of social acceptability is a symptom of that
disease, as well as a hint of its cause. The only problem is that Herr Professor forgot to
look in the mirror when he said it.
Where, one may ask, is the Spirit of the Depths in all of this? Has it simply gone away,
abandoned by humanity, and therefore abandoning humanity? Highly doubtful; the
processes of evolution that first introduced the psyche to the Spirit of the Depths do not
run backwards, nor is the Unknown likely to disappear. Like H. P. Lovecraft's Great
Cthulhu, it lies not dead but dreaming, sleeping in the deepest recesses of the human
psyche where the physiology of the brain can not touch it. Evolution is a natural
process, and does not obey the laws that the bicameral mind seeks to impose upon it.
The Spirit of the Depths is still there, showing itself in the depression and malaise that
permeates modern life, revealed in glimpses of dreams and fantasies, and, on occasion,
appearing cryptically in divinations and premonitions. It lies there in the shadows,
biding its time, waiting for the stars to be right for it to re-emerge.
And then what? There are two possibilities, one unthinkable, and the other
unbelievable. But it will be one or the other. The unthinkable option is unthinkable
because the bicameral mind can not see it. Being a rule-following entity, limited in its
vision by the patterns it observes in social behavior and its immediate environment, the
bicameral mind cannot conceptualize the possibility of events that lie outside the limits
of its experience. This is the reason that consciousness evolved in the first place: its
survival advantage comes from its ability to envision and plan for conditions and events
that cannot be predicted from past experience.

What is meant by "survival advantage"? The bottom line is, it means that those who had
consciousness survived, and those who did not have it did not survive. If Jaynes is right,
all of the ancient civilizations were bicameral-minded. What happened to the Egyptians,
the Babylonians, and others? The only thing that is known for sure is that they are gone,
in many cases entire civilizations vanished without a trace. Others succumbed to foreign
invasion, and others to environmental disaster of one kind or another. Once the familiar
patterns of social behavior are disrupted, the bicameral mind has nothing to guide it.
Unlike consciousness, there is no autopilot, no introspective space to detach from the
immediate environment and contemplate alternatives. The psyche falters, the mind fails,
and nothing is left but primitive groping in the darkness.
Consider the following scenario. On September 1, 1859, astronomer Richard Carrington
was making sketches of sunspots in his observatory, when he noticed that one of them
began to brighten. By the time he fetched a colleague to observe it, the flare had faded.
Seventeen hours later, the chunk of the sun's atmosphere that had been blown away by
the explosion slammed into the Earth's magnetic field. In the resulting geomagnetic
storm, telegraph lines caught fire, telegraph equipment burned and exploded, operators
were shocked and communications circuits failed. It has been estimated by some that if
such an event were to happen now, the damage done to the Earth's electrical power
grids could take up to ten years to repair. Ten years? What would happen to a city like
New York if the power were cut for ten years, or even one year? Hard to say, because
there would be no communications to find out. The bicameral mind cannot think it
through, because there would be no social pattern for it to orient itself. As population
density has increased, its reliance on technology for basic needs has made it vulnerable,
and the bicameral-mindedness needed for it to function has blindsided it to disaster.
Some have argued that such an event would set human civilization back 150 years. The
population of the Earth in Carrington's time was about 1.5 billion. Now it is over 7
billion. What do you suppose would happen if the technology necessary to sustain such
a population is destroyed by an event like this? Cthulhu f'htagn!
Events that strike out of nowhere, beyond the bicameral mind's ability to conceptualize
them, are called contingent events. Consciousness hedges against contingent events
through its ability to break out of the rule-following behavior of the bicameral mind -its ability to think beyond the immediate, and its cause-and-effect limitations. It does
this by invoking chaotic system behavior, fueled by the psychic energy it receives from
the Unknown. But when the Spirit of the Depths is silenced by an out-of-control
bicameral mind, energized by the demands of social interdependence, that advantage is
lost. Pollution and overpopulation become moral taboos, global warming becomes a
political football, warnings of impending earthquakes by scientist -- not mystics or Tarot
readers -- go unheeded, while sales of assault rifles skyrocket, and jabber on social
media continues to multiply. One wonders just how much good a cache of weapons will

do when the water supply fails, and won't be back for a decade or so. There is no logic
to it, of course, and that is because logic is a thing of consciousness, not of the reflex-like
behavior of the bicameral mind. This is why the bicameral mind has become
maladaptive: the world it has created cannot be sustained against contingent events, and
it does not have the logical capacity to reason its way out of the problems it has caused.

Consciousness Beyond Endarkenment

If the unthinkable is, well, unthinkable, then what is the alternative? Perhaps the answer
might be found by considering what did, in fact, happen historically. What happened is
that the Spirit of the Depths wrenched control of the psyche from the bicameral mind,
and consciousness was the result. In the present age, however, the dialectic between the
Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths which formed the basis for the structure of
consciousness has become a tug-a-war, with the structure of consciousness being
fractured by the demands of the physical and social environment. What has become
clear in the present age is that the bicameral mind is holding the process of evolution at
a standstill, and in order for the process of evolution to proceed, it seems reasonable to
think that one way for this to happen is for the process that originally drew
consciousness out of the bicameral mind in the first place, to proceed. This means a shift
of focus in consciousness away from the Spirit of the Times, toward the Spirit of the Depths.
This shift is already incipient in the psyche despite the strangle hold that the bicameral
mind holds over it in the present age. The Spirit of the Depths still speaks in dreams,
fantasies, drug-induced visions, and even through the Tarot, to those willing to listen.
And no matter how strongly the bicameral mind objects, among those who hear the
voice, there will always be some who will understand.
Since it is unlikely that the physical or social environments are going to change
voluntarily, and the consequences of an involuntary change are horrific, then what must
change is the psyche of the individual. To escape the inevitable consequences of
recameralization, consciousness must evolve beyond its susceptibility to
recameralization. As unbelievable as it may at first seem, the logic is nonetheless
straightforward, and it leads to the inescapable conclusion that for consciousness to
evolve, and the consequences of recameralization to be avoided, then consciousness must
evolve beyond the body out of which it arose.
Of course the bicameral mind, through its reductive and deflationary conceptions of
itself and everything else, will offer every objection, but a critical analysis of those
objections reveals that they all stem from the underlying belief that things cannot, and
must not, change. Because if they do, then the bicameral mind is finished. But so it must
be, else humanity faces disaster, and even possible extinction, at the hands of contingent
events and their consequences, the necessary conditions for which have been prepared
by the bicameral mind itself. Beyond the usual refrain of the Zeitgeist that there is no

Unknown, no unconscious, no dreams beyond the physiology of the brain, and so on,
there have actually emerged some interesting proposals as to how the human mind
might evolve beyond it present state, one of the most intriguing being that the future of
humanity consists in a fusion of the mind with the technology it invented. In simple terms,
this means that the human mind gets "downloaded" to some sort of computer-like
device. The mind then runs on this device, much like software runs on the hardware of
a computer. In this way, whatever limitations are impose by the body on the mind can
be overcome, as, V'Ger-like, the mind directs the growth and complexity of the device it
controls.
It takes a very hardened materialist to believe that the brain is much like a computer, or
that the mind is anything like software, and the arguments against this point of view are
legion. Chief among those arguments is that while the bicameral mind is certainly
computer-like, the whole point of consciousness is to behave as a rule-breaking entity,
something that algorithmic processing systems like computers are specifically designed
to avoid. Even a moments' reflections will reveal that no machine, or software, is perfect,
and if everyone exists as a rule-following entity in a machine, who presses the reset
button? The whole idea of this proposal is essentially to make the bicameral mind the
one and only possibility, which would complete the recameralization process, possibly
forever. Or at least until the power goes off...
In the end, what one believes is itself grounded in the psychology of the individual.
Those who are swayed by the Spirit of the Times might wish they could "upload"
themselves into the "cloud", and those who are more in tune with the Spirit of the Depths
would be glad to see them get on with it. Whether one takes the "medication" and/or
pushes the button is a choice each must make. Perhaps evolution means human
consciousness must diverge; that some will stay, one way or another, locked within the
bicameral mind, while others choose to leave it behind. Like the proverbial evolutionary
fish that walked out of the sea, some went forth, and others stayed behind. The sea
cucumbers that scavenge the bottom of the ocean are still there, long after whatever it
was that emerged from the water went on to become what human beings are today.
For those who choose the Spirit of the Depths, the situation is very much analogous to
that of the proverbial land-walking fish. No one could have predicted -- had there been
any consciousness to do the predicting -- what would happen once that step was taken.
And if consciousness can dissociate itself from the body, it is just as impossible to
predict what would come next. Can consciousness survive such a dissociation, and
continue to exist in the absence of any physical connections to the body -- maybe even in
the absence of any physical body at all? Evidence from parapsychology, from astral
projection and related methods, and from various religious practices suggest not only
that it can, but perhaps even flourish in that state.

One of the observations made in the famous Rhine experiment that yielded the first real
scientific evidence for divination is that the attitude of the subject plays a large role in
the outcome of the experience. Those who believed it would work had a much better
success rate than those who did not. It is no secret that those who believe, for example,
that the Tarot can yield divinatory insights tend to be much better at it than those who
don't. This is due to the subjective nature of the processes involved -- what the mind can
do is deeply tied to what it thinks it can do. Those who believe there exists and
Unknown are more likely to hear the voice of the Spirit of the Depths than those who do
not. Closed minds are, to some extent, their own justification for what they choose to be.
One path of evolution may, therefore well be, to arrange the marriage of the Empress
and Emperor in the temple of the Priestess, rather than the church of the Hierophant.
For that to happen, the focus of consciousness must shift from the social to the magickal
-- consciousness must become its dreams. In many ways dreams and the Tarot are
complements of one another -- dreams draw consciousness into the unconscious, while
the Tarot draws the unconscious into consciousness. The end result is the same -- the
opening of the veil between the mind and the Unknown. Divination is, therefore, more
than a vision of a world as it might be. It is a window into a world as it can be, and if the
potential disasters of recameralization are not to extinguish humanity once and for all,
probably must be. It is a vision into a world in which consciousness has finally walked
forth from the physiological sea out of which it originated.
What has been presented here is a theory of human consciousness -- what it is, how it
came to be, and where it might be going, based on observations of the phenomenon of
divination. Theories are not facts; they are a combination of observations, plus some
mental activity that looks for a way to string those facts together into a meaningful story
that explains those facts, and makes useful predictions. To some extent, therefore, all
theories have a subjective component. This is why different theorists will look at the
same facts, and come to different conclusions. Add to that the fact that all theories have
an ideological component -- a set of beliefs that are held so strongly that observations
not in accordance with those beliefs are discarded out of hand. The "modern" theorist,
under the sway of the Zeitgeist of scientific materialism, therefore disregards the
phenomenon of divination and proceeds to explain the mind as the brain plus social
behavior. Thus the epithet "modern" is more indicative of a certain psychological type,
than it is of logical or empirical validity. A different psychological type looks at
divination, and arrives at a completely different theory of what the mind is.
Since there is no escape from the subjective element of theory, one must choose -- the
issue cannot decide itself. The worlds of the objective materialist and of the subjective
idealist are incommensurable, and therefore arguments about which theory is right or
wrong are not analyses of facts, they are struggles for a way of life, erupting into fights
over what kind of world one wants to live in. Fortunately, in the case of the Tarot, it is a

fight the individual can settle for him or her self. Which voice will be the muse, is your
choice alone. All a discussion of theory can hope to do is point out that the choice is
there.

II. Tarot Divination

Having established the possibility that there exist within the unconscious
representations of events, and perhaps other kinds of knowledge as well, that are
inaccessible to consciousness directly, attention must now be given to the process by
which that information can be made available to consciousness. This process is called
divination, the word itself deriving from "learning the will of the gods." While it is not
necessary to suppose that the Spirit of the Depths is any sort of personal or intending
being, it clearly is something alien to consciousness in terms of what it knows and
understands.

Structure of the Tarot

An oracle is a divinatory method that is used to communicate with the Spirit of the
Depths. The ability of the Tarot to function as an oracle comes from its design and
structure. Although there are numerous variations in the design of specific decks, Tarot
decks in general share a common structure that makes them Tarot decks, as opposed to
being something else. Typically the cards of a Tarot deck are separated into two
subdivisions: the Minor Arcana or "lesser secrets", which is very much like an ordinary
deck of playing cards, and the Major Arcana or "greater secrets", a set of usually 22 cards
with the cryptic images that give the Tarot is reputation for mysteriousness. The origins
of the Tarot are not known for certain; it is not clear whether the cards were first used as
playing cards that later were adopted for divination purposes, or the other way around.
The origins of the images found in the Major Arcana are also unclear. Some find that a
historical study of the Tarot helps to enhance their understanding of its meanings, but
for the most part, the details of its origin probably make little difference, as the structure
of the deck became more or less fixed with the appearance of mechanically printed
decks, and subsequent refinements made by individuals and members of various occult
groups and societies in the years that followed.
Tarot decks are available in a wide variety of styles which, for the sake of convenience,
can be grouped into three general types, the major differences being found in the way
the cards of the Minor Arcana are illustrated. The classical or Marseilles style
follows the pattern from centuries ago: the Minor Arcana cards resemble modern
playing cards, with the exception that instead of following the modern "French" pattern
of clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds, the suits generally follow the "Italian" pattern of
wands or staves, cups or chalices, swords, and coins (or shields, plates, "pentacles", or
other disks of some kind). This style of deck has little in the way of embellishment in its
numbered cards -- there are so many swords, cups, and so forth, with little beyond
minor ornamentation to suggest any particular interpretation. There is good and bad in
this -- while these decks offer the diviner the greatest possible freedom in interpreting

the cards, they also offer very little in way of suggestion to stimulate the dialectic of
interpretation. This can make them difficult to use, but on the other hand, they have a
certain "charm" and feeling of authenticity unmatched by more modern decks.
At the other end of the spectrum are what might be called illustrated or descriptive
style decks, in which the Minor Arcana cards are presented with pictures that suggest
their meanings, similar to the Major Arcana. Illustrations vary in complexity; some
being simple and cartoon-like, others involving photographic and/or computer
generated artwork, with to without various occult or esoteric symbols. While these can
be easier to read, they can also cause difficulties, chief among them that because their
designs follow the ideas or teachings of their designers, they may have a focus or
emphasis that conflicts with the ideas or tastes of the diviner. A more serious problem
is that the reader may focus on the image as the meaning, and just accept that the card
means what its image shows, which amounts to reading the card as a sign and not a
symbol. This effectively halts the interpretive dialectic, and reduces the reading of the
cards to nothing more than fortune cookies.
Between these two extremes are the abstract decks, with illustrations that rely on
color, geometric arrangements, and other artistic devices to assist in the interpretation of
the card, without forcing a specific meaning. Many of these decks incorporate mandalalike imagery that is specifically intended to engage the conscious-unconscious dialectic,
much like images produced in dreams and active imagination. While this style of deck
may be a little more difficult for some to learn than a fully illustrated deck, it may also
be more robust in its interpretive capacity, and easier to read than a classical deck.
Mention must also be made of the trend in modern Tarot decks to follow one or another
system of interpretation, or set of designed-in meanings. It has become an unfortunate
situation that decks are identified as "standard" or "non-standard", based upon whether
they follow one scheme of meanings and illustrations or another, "standard" of course
reducing to what one considers the standard to be. The demand for "standard" decks is
generally heard from those who read the Tarot in an objective, socially oriented way -- in
other words, the situation has all the features of the "standard" conflict between the
Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths. Those who cry for conformity to a set of
standards are generally those who read for the bicameral mind, and have little interest
in divination as it is being considered here.
The important thing to keep in mind, as already mentioned, is that the artwork, style
and arrangement of the deck must be such that it engages the conscious and
unconscious of the diviner. Whether or not a particular deck conforms to someone else's
"standard" should never be the guide to what one learns with or uses. The sole judge of
what makes for a useful divination deck is whether or not it works for the individual
diviner, and the only way to determine that is to actually study and use the deck. As

with any work of art, one often gets an immediate impression of "right" or "wrong" from
the images, and that impression is generally a better guide to the fitness of a deck for
use in divination, than whether any individual or group determines it to be within or
without the limits of their "standard." The process of divination involves a personal
relationship between the consciousness of the diviner and the unconscious, and there is
no place in it for the judgments and opinions of others.

Divination and Meditation

Divination is not a social activity; it is a form of meditation, as the term was used by
alchemists of centuries ago, and not as the term is popularly understood -- it has
nothing to do with attending classes, or sitting cross-legged on a cushion making funny
gestures with the hands. To quote Jung:
Ruland (1622) says of this: 'Meditation: the name of an Internal Talk of one
person with another who is invisible, as in the invocation of the Deity, or
communion with one's self, or with one's good angel.'
In the case of divination, the "Internal Talk" is the ongoing conversation with the
Unknown, via its presence as the Spirit of the Depths in the unconscious. It is not
surprising, given that the bicameral mind denies the existence of anything in the psyche
other than itself, that such a process would be met with ridicule and condemnation.
Divination, as with any kind of subjective knowledge or internal conversation, is both
individual and individuating, and thus speaks to a reality that has nothing to do with,
and more often than not is antagonistic to, collective norms and social behavior. The
bicameral mind understands any form of individuation as a threat to itself, preferring to
read what is in the newspapers, rather than acknowledge that there is more to
consciousness than itself, its precious "relationships," and the endless chatter about
such. Jung continues:
In general, meditation and contemplation have a bad reputation in the West.
They are regarded as a particularly reprehensible form of idleness or as
pathological narcissism. No one has time for self-knowledge or believes that it
could serve any sensible purpose. We believe exclusively in doing and do not
ask about the doer, who is judged only by achievements that have collective
value.
It is well to remember that what one sees as "society" has more to do with a certain
psychological type, than it does with any kind of objective or subjective reality. It stands
to reason that the psychological types that busy themselves with "relationships" will be
the ones on prominent display in the public view, for the Spirit of the Times thrives
amongst gossip and chatter. Those who are more in tune with the Spirit of the Depths

keep their voices mostly to themselves, for it is in the silence of internal contemplation
that the Spirit of the Depths speaks most clearly. What "everybody knows" and
"everybody believes" refers mostly to what extraverted psychological types know and
believe, and therefore the general social disapproval of divination is a logical
consequence of its perceived threat to the bicameral mind, and has nothing to do with
its authenticity, validity, or individual meaningfulness.
To carry this point a bit further, if one looks at the chatter in the popular media about
the Tarot, one might well come to the conclusion that divination has all but been
abandoned in favor of gossip and chatter about "relationships", and in the popular
media, this is probably true for the reasons already mentioned. The bicameral mind,
and its associated voice in the psyche, the Spirit of the Times, does not understand, and as
a matter of survival must necessarily deny the existence of, anything that does not fit is
perceived patterns of social behavior. This does not mean that those things do not exist
-- that there is no Unknown, no Force, and no possibility of access to them through
divination -- it merely means that the wiring of the brain does not see them, and that the
externally and socially oriented personality type does not believe in them, and sees
them as a threat. One might read something like the following, constructed from a
variety of sources: "While in times past people believed that the Tarot could predict the
future, we now understand that its purpose is to give us insights into our personalities
that help us to connect with the real world and enrich our everyday lives." This is pure
trash of the Spirit of the Times; this is not divination, this is listening to the wiring of the
brain, the equivalent of listening to bowel sounds through a stethoscope.
The war in the media, then, between the bicameral-minded "relationships" and
"everyday life" gurus and the mystics and dreamers simply reflects the war in the
psyche between the Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths. There is nothing more
to it than that; there is no objective truth to the correctness of one view or the other, it
can only be decided by individual choice. Since the voice of the Spirit of the Times has
become so predominant -- or appears to be so, given the nature of social chatter and its
source -- then how is one to tell, in a reading, which voice one is hearing? Since both are
ultimately based on unconscious processes, what sort of test could one apply to
determine whether one is merely hearing internalized social chatter, or one has really
connected with some Force outside of the social and physical world? How can one trust
an Oracle, if one does not know who is speaking through it?
In practice, it is easy to distinguish the two. Remember that "society" does not exist, it is
merely a mental image of social behavior created by the wiring of the brain. If you cut
yourself with something sharp, it hurts. Why? Because you exist. Now try to cut
"society" with something sharp. You can't. Why? Because there is nothing there to cut; it
does not exist, except as a figment of the mind.

A similar kind of "reality" check can be run against the Tarot. The Spirit of the Times
speaks in only two ways -- commands and criticisms -- and they are always directed at
you. Though more commonly coming as voices, due to the way the bicameral mind is
wired in the brain -- and it should be noted that many actually hear the images of the
Tarot as voices -- anything that compels obedience without question, either through the
form of a direct command, or a criticism that demands action without question, is
coming from the bicameral mind. The commands of the bicameral mind are always
direct and specific; they are always oriented toward doing something, even if that
something is "positive thinking", "clearing negativity", or some other such nonsense.
Another feature of the bicameral mind is that it often speaks in terms of "we" and "our",
as though it is vital that the individual understand that one exists only insofar as one is
a member of something else. Read any of the popular "divination" guides, and this ploy
is immediately obvious -- everything there is "we" this or "our" that, leaving no room for
individuals to think in and for themselves.
In contrast to the Spirit of the Times, whose messages are always objectively directed, and
seldom identifies from whom or whence they come, the Spirit of the Depths most often
speaks as "I", and is always happy to oblige in identifying its source, for it has nothing to
hide or to be ashamed of. It must be remembered, however, that as the Spirit of the
Depths has it origins in a truly alien world, its identification will also be roundabout, and
in the form of synchronicities, rather than objective statements. Consider the following
example, taken from the Wikipedia.org entry for Rose Kelly, wife of magician Aleister
Crowley:
On 16 March 1904, "in an avowedly frivolous attempt to impress his wife", Crowley
tried to "shew the Sylphs" to her using the Bornless Ritual. Although she could see
nothing, she did seem to enter into a light trance and repeatedly said, "They're
waiting for you!" After asking the god Thoth to clarify the matter and getting
Rose to identify the source of the message as Horus, Crowley took Rose to the
Boulaq Museum and asked her to point out Horus to him. She passed several
common images of the god and led Aleister straight to a painted wooden
funerary stele, the Stele of Revealing, from the Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt,
depicting Horus receiving a sacrifice from the deceased, a priest named Ankhaf-na-khonsu. Crowley was impressed by the fact that the museum had
numbered this piece 666, the number that he had identified with since
childhood.
It was indeed the priest who was speaking through his wife, and subsequently dictated
Crowley's famous Book of the Law, an interesting document not only for what it says,
but for numerous synchronicities it contains. Another example from the author's own
diaries:

I was speaking to her (the anima) about (what we had discussed several times)
and she said, "All right, I will take care of it myself, but I am not who you think I
am." When I asked if she would tell me who she is, she said, "Take the deck of
cards, count down 11, and look carefully at the tree on the card." I did that, and
could see nothing interesting about the tree. I studied its branches, looked for
anything unusual about its shape, but saw nothing. Then I moved by thumb, and
noticed that I had been covering up two hazel nuts. She said, "Well, it took you
long enough," and then departed. I asked myself what that could mean: Was I
to meet someone named Hazel? Someone with hazel eyes? Was she nuts? In
the old language hazel was Coll, for wisdom, and I explored all that could
mean, but in the end could come to no specific conclusions. A few nights later I
had a dream, in which I was attending some kind of party at which I was clearly
not welcome. When I was told to leave, a woman came up to me and said, "No,
you don't have to leave." The others left, and after talking with her, I asked her
name, to which she replied, "Diana." The next morning, the first thing that came
to mind was dhyana, a state of meditation which involves the union of subject
and object. Though there were obvious connotations to that, it didn't seem right
by itself. So I checked the Tables of Correspondence in 777, and found that
Diana corresponds to Card II, the High Priestess, which already set off a red flag,
for that is the card of the direct path from consciousness to the Unknown, and
the image in the psyche of the Unknown itself. This was confirmed when looking
further through the table, I discovered that the tree corresponding to that card is
the hazel. So it wasn't an anima spirit I had been talking with all along. It is also
clear that her first explanation was sufficient, though I did not make the
connection until the dream.
This is the way the Unknown answers questions -- through meaningful coincidences,
rather than objective references. The examples also show that understanding what the
Unknown has to say is not a passive show-and-tell. Divination is a participatory
experience: it necessarily involves the consciousness of the diviner, and one has to do a
certain amount of work to understand it. The examples illustrate how the selfconsuming process works, and why it is impossible to give a priori pre-canned meanings
to the cards. While the Spirit of the Depths is always willing to speak, its language is that
of the dream and the poet, and its meaning is revealed only through reflection and, on
occasion, a certain amount of study.
Divination is always participatory, and its meanings are, so to speak, encoded in a series
of synchronicities. It is also the case that divination is generally about wisdom,
understanding and perception, as opposed to being about behavior. Though divinations
often relate to matters of the Unknown and the relationship of consciousness to it, they
do also address external matters. When divinations deal with external events, they do
so more in terms of general trends and likely outcomes, rather than in terms of placing

blame and finding fault, as is the usual attitude of the Spirit of the Times.
It is one of the oldest rules in magick, stated in many ways and in different forms, that,
"You never know what you have until you question." Whether as voices or images, if the
response to the question is that you are defective in some way, then it is likely the wiring
of the brain that one is hearing. If the response is more like fleeting images seen through
the fog, or the sound of gentle piping from far-off groves that draws one into itself rather
than forcing one away, then it is more likely the voice of that which draws consciousness
to itself that one is hearing, rather than the voice of that which fears and loathes
anything beyond the "we" and "our" of its "everyday life."
While the Spirit of the Depths frequently speaks of its own accord through dreams,
fantasies and the imagination, the point of divination is to give consciousness some
control over the process. The voice of the Spirit of the Depths is most easily heard when
the barriers between conscious and unconscious minds are at their weakest, and this is
normally during dreams, and during the moments before and after falling asleep.
Divination could be thought of as producing dreams "on demand", in a context that
consciousness can understand, and, as is often the case, directed toward some specific
question or issue. Unlike dreams, where the focus is on what the unconscious wants to
say, the idea with divination is to coax the Spirit of the Depths to share its knowledge on
specific matters of interest to consciousness. It is not absolutely necessary that
divination be approached from the standpoint of asking a specific question -- it is
perfectly legitimate to simply inquire of the Spirit of the Depths what it might have to say
on its own. And, despite the diviner's best efforts, occasionally the Spirit of the Depths
speaks as it will, irrespective of whatever questions may be put to it. Nonetheless,
divination may be thought of as a directed process, bringing forth the contents of the
unconscious under some degree of conscious control or participation.
Tarot divination is similar in some ways to what Jung called active imagination. The basic
idea of active imagination is for the unconscious to express itself through some form of
creative activity -- painting, drawing, modeling, etc. Divination differs from this in that
it begins with a specific image with which consciousness already has some familiarity.
The unconscious then embellishes that image with additional meanings, which further
refine the conscious understanding of that image. This dialectic of the self-consuming
artifact continues until the image essentially dissolves into the imagination, and what
emerges from the process is a conscious awareness of unconscious knowledge. Add to
this the argument that through superposition, the unconscious may have some control
over which images are selected in a drawing, then the process should, in theory, be able
to produce a coherent vision or "story" that answers the question, or provides some
other insight into the world of the Unknown.
One essential component of the divination process is, therefore, lowering the barriers

between consciousness and unconscious. The critical faculties of consciousness must be

held at bay, at least temporarily, for the Spirit of the Depths to make itself heard. In many
forms of divination this is accomplished by the diviner going into some sort of trance,
induced either ritually and/or through the use of entheogens, chemical substances that,
literally, "call forth the god within." In the case of the Tarot, for the most part the selfconsuming dialectic takes the place of these methods, although many who use the Tarot
for this purpose find that some form of ritual relaxation can make the process work
more smoothly. It should go without saying, however, that divination done in this way
is generally a private matter, either alone or with a Questioner, and is not a public
spectacle. Keeping the bicameral mind at bay is an essential element of tuning in to the
Spirit of the Depths.
Although Tarot divination might be more accurately described as directed imagination,
one way of approaching the dialectical self-consuming process might be by using what
Jung suggests as one method of active imagination:
You choose a dream, or some other fantasy-image, and concentrate on it
simply by catching hold of it and looking at it. You then fix this image in the mind
by concentrating your attention. Usually, it will alter, as the mere fact of
contemplating it animates it. These alterations must be carefully noted down all
the time, for they reflect the psychic processes in the unconscious background,
which appear in the form of images consisting of conscious memory material. In
this way conscious and unconscious are united, just as a waterfall connects
above and below. A chain of fantasy ideas develops and gradually takes on a
dramatic character: the passive process becomes an action. In other words, you
dream with open eyes. At first it consists of projected figures, and these images
are observed like scenes in the theater. If the observer understands that his own
drama is being performed on this inner stage . . . he will notice as the actors
appear one by one and the plot thickens, that they all have some purposeful
relationship to his conscious situation, that he is being addressed by the
unconscious, and that it causes these fantasy images to appear before him. He
therefore feels compelled to take part in the play and, instead of just sitting in
the theater, really have it out with his alter ego.
In the case of Tarot divination, the "fantasy image" is replaced by the image of a drawn
card. Concentrating on the image may indeed cause it to alter or animate, but more
commonly results in a train of related ideas emerging into consciousness. These ideas
are then pursued, much as joining in the play, in an active engagement of consciousness
and unconscious. If, as has been argued, the images drawn are not random but in some
way reflect unconscious pre-cognition, then what will be revealed by this process will be
symbolically related to the object of the divination itself.

It should be noted that while the process divination can involve a long period of study
and analysis, once one acquires some experience with it, the self-consuming dialectic
can proceed very fast. While it is true that time spent in detailed contemplation of the
cards can result in a deeper understanding of them, and to some extent establish a
rapport between conscious and unconscious that facilitates their interpretations,
individual readings need not involve such a lengthy analysis. Certain cards, drawn at
certain times, can take on a meaning of numinous significance almost immediately, even
if, as often happens, the meaning that emerges may be very different from what one
expects from prior study. Upon reflection, the diviner may be able to untangle the
process of how that meaning emerged, and what the conscious and unconscious
components are, but the interpretive process itself often proceeds quickly.

The Tarot as Symbols

Essentially the problem of reading the Tarot can be thought of as "decrypting" messages
into consciousness that the Unknown has "encrypted" into the unconscious. Because the
fit between conscious and unconscious categories can never be exact -- otherwise there
would be no need for divination in the first place -- what is revealed by divination will
always be symbolic and metaphorical. It is then up to the diviner to derive meaning
from these symbolic images, hopefully in a way that reveals information from the
Unknown that is relevant to the question being asked, if there is one, and if there is no
specific question, that reveals information from the Unknown that may bear in some
way upon consciousness and its relation to the world in which it exists.
For symbols such as images in the Tarot to act as "decryption keys" in this way, they
must have some content that is meaningful to consciousness. Such meaningfulness must
embody the paradoxical quality of being sufficiently specific on the one hand that it
matters which cards are drawn, and that the image triggers a reasoning process by
which the diviner can begin to analyze the meaning of the card in a rational way, and on
the other hand, be sufficiently vague that the unconscious can add meanings that are
not directly obvious to consciousness. The Tarot meets these objectives through its
general structure, through the design of the artwork on the cards themselves, and
through its connections with some underlying interpretive scheme, or system of
meanings.
One of the most important difficulties in using an oracle such as the Tarot -- and one to
which the Tarot is particularly susceptible -- is the tendency to read its symbols as signs.
A sign differs from a symbol in that a sign actually does "wear its meaning on its
sleeve", and requires no interpretation to arrive at an understanding of its significance.
A stop sign on a roadway is an example -- it means only one thing, and any attempt to
add to or subtract from that meaning may be met with disaster. This is the main
problem with memorizing keywords, or lists of objectified meanings of the cards --

what one winds up hearing is not the Spirit of the Depths, but the voice of whoever came
up with the keywords and meanings in the first place, often mediated by the Spirit of the
Times. Worse, in their quest to make the Tarot "easier", many modern Tarot designers
incorporate illustrations that to some extent dictate or define the meanings of the cards;
some even include keywords on the cards themselves. While illustrations such as this
can feed into the self-consuming dialectic, they more often than not bypass it,
encouraging the reader to just accept the illustration as the objective meaning of the
card. This can result in a "divination" that is more a diatribe of the bicameral mind, than
an audience with the Spirit of the Depths. The essential difference between memorizing
things and figuring things out is that memorizing is more connected with accepting and
believing what others believe, while figuring things out on your own is an
individuating process. Divination is not about "learning lessons" or finding one's place
in social relationships; that the Tarot is put to such uses does not mean that is its only
use. Divination means peering into the Unknown, using the Force, flowing with the Tao,
-- one way or another, it is a form of mystical experience, and the only "relationship"
involved is that between the Unknown, the world of space and time, and the psyche of
the diviner that mediates between the two.
Which immediately raises the question that if divination is listening to the Spirit of the
Depths, then what about speaking to it? If it is possible to receive information about what
is going on in the Unknown, then what about the possibility of actually manipulating the
Unknown through a similar process, and perhaps manipulating objects in the world via
the Unknown (or Force, or Kraft)? This is indeed one aspect of ritual magick, and the
Tarot is often used in magick for just this purpose. Though a detailed discussion of the
process is beyond the scope of this essay, it is probably worth mentioning that, in accord
with the laws of physics as they are presently understood, it is impossible to observe
something without having some effect upon it, and this would include observing the
Unknown through the process of divination. "Your reading of this book is Recorded," as
one author put it, and while there is probably nothing to fear from divination itself -unless, of course, one fears learning the truth -- it is something that should always be
done with respect for both the Unknown, and those other beings that may be affected by
it.

Interpretive Systems
Whether used for divination or for magick, if the Tarot is to be read as a symbol and not
as a sign, then some sort of meaning needs to be in place to initiate the self-consuming
dialectic, without establishing any objective, a priori definitions or determinations. One
approach to resolving this apparent paradox is to associate the Tarot with some sort of
interpretive scheme, a system of assigning meanings that is sufficiently comprehensive to
include, if only imaginatively, as wide a range as is possible of subjects that can be
divined through the oracle, and yet is also sufficiently abstract and vague that the exact

meanings must be filled in by the self-consuming dialectic. Such a scheme provides the
initial orientation for the diviner's study of the card, and stimulates the self-consuming
dialectic from which the meaning of the card emerges.
Many such schemes have been proposed, including those based in numerology of one
kind or another, systems of astrological, psychological, and mythological
correspondences, various esoteric systems, systems of "traditional interpretations" of
one kind or another, and what appear to be random associations of keywords. The chief
difficulty with such systems is that the less systematic they are -- the more they rely on
memorizing, without any underlying theoretical basis -- the more they tend to become
objectified. In this case, the mind works more to fit the object of divination into the preassigned meaning of the card, rather than the other way around, and the focus thereby
shifts from divining the Spirit of the Depths to playing the wonder-game with the Spirit of
the Times, which quickly brings the interpretive dialectic to a halt. It is for this reason
that the less specific a system is, the more useful it is likely to be in terms of divination -the more the system consists of general concepts, as opposed to concrete definitions, the
more effective it is for divination. The unfortunate consequence of this is that for the
beginner, learning to read the cards with only a vague understanding of general
concepts can be more difficult and frustrating at first; but the reward is that once a
rapport is built between the mind of the diviner and the cards, the whole process
becomes automatic for the most part, and results are far more gratifying than consulting
an array of keyword lists.
Perhaps the best known interpretive scheme is that developed from the Cabala, an
ancient Hebrew philosophy that was adapted and modified to suit the needs of various
occult students and societies from the middle ages onward. The best known of these
societies is the Golden Dawn, which flourished during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and its particular interpretation of the Cabala has served as the basis for the
design and interpretation of many of the Tarot decks available today. To what extent
their version of the Cabala coheres with the actual Hebrew teachings is unknown, and
irrelevant for purposes of interpreting the Tarot. Its usefulness as a framework for Tarot
divination does not depend on historical accuracy, but instead on its ability to relate
general categories of meaning as depicted in Tarot imagery to specific intuitions and
contexts in the divination process.
It must be kept in mind that neither this scheme, nor any other, has any objective
validity whatsoever -- it is not the purpose of any interpretive scheme to accurately
reflect the structure of the world, or of the Unknown. It is a set of abstract and artificial
categories used by consciousness to comprehend things of which it can have no direct
awareness. Consciousness understands things through its ability to classify and
compare, and such methods are unusable when dealing with the eternal and infinite.
The interpretive scheme is, so to speak, a third person or intermediary between

conscious and unconscious, for the purpose of translating the language of one into that
language of the other. It has no "reality" in itself beyond that.
One may legitimately ask why the Cabala should be preferred as an interpretive
scheme, when other systems of numerology and interpretation are available. In the end,
the reasons come down to practicality: there is a greater amount of information, and a
greater diversity of interpretations for this system than for any other, clearing the way
for the diviner to both study, and at the same time imagine freely without the
constraints of any last and final authority or correctness. The more important reason
is the simple fact that the Golden Dawn interpretation of the Cabala has served as the
model for most modern Tarot decks, and their imagery more or less coheres with one
or another interpretation of that system. Of course the diviner is free to choose any
system, the main consideration being that it actually perform some useful function in
assisting the imagination in developing interpretations for the cards as they are read.
It might also be asked whether there is any justification for an interpretive scheme at all,
other than the contingent fact that most modern Tarot decks have been designed that
way. There are those who believe that a Tarot card means what it means by virtue of it
standing in for some other idea that the imagery of the card amounts to a picture-book
of a system of ideas external to the Tarot itself. Some maintain that the Tarot was
originally designed as just such a picture-book for one metaphysical system or another,
and that the proper understanding of the Tarot lies in developing an in-depth
understanding of the system of ideas it represents.
Scholars of the history of the cards have failed to discover any factual connection
between the Tarot and any ancient metaphysical or philosophical system. The popular
idea that the Tarot was developed as a means for preserving the teaching of the
Egyptian mysteries has not withstood serious examination, nor has any other supposed
connection between the cards and any other system including the Cabala survived
thorough investigation. While it is not clear exactly where, when, or for what purpose
either playing cards or Tarot cards were first developed, it does seem clear that they
were not produced to conceal or transmit some form of secret teaching.
What this means is that much of the modern Tarot is shot through with a pre-existing
symbolism of questionable origin, that tends to render it useless for divination unless
great care is taken to avoid reading its images as stand-ins for other ideas. This
observation would seem to argue for abandoning the idea of an interpretive scheme
altogether. In fact many Tarot authors argue that because of this problem, Tarot
divination is best accomplished with classical style decks precisely because they have
no symbolic imagery that reflects any underlying system of belief. The card must stand
on its own, and it must mean what it means solely through what the card itself suggests
to the diviner.

According to some who hold this view, the Tarot may actually be a self-contained
system, and it may be possible to derive the meanings of both the Major and Minor
Arcana without any reference to any external information. Some have worked out
correspondences between the images of the Major Arcana, and the suits, numbered
cards, and Court cards of the Minor Arcana. Various system have been proposed for
doing this, all of which avoid any external system of correspondences. Others claim that
the Tarot can be interpreted exclusively through what is sometimes called optical
analogy, which simply means that the arrangement of the illustrations on the cards,
their colors, the decorations on the cards, the expressions and direction of the Court
cards, and so forth, directly suggest their meanings. The advantage of this "optical
analogy" system is that the card derives its meaning solely from what is there on the
card, interpreted in the context of the question being asked if there is one, and in
relation to the cards that surround it. No other system of meanings, or other a priori
knowledge, is required.
There is a great deal of merit to this argument, for it focuses attention upon the card as
the source of its meaning, as opposed to learning some complex system or sets of
keywords. This is what has been argued for in this essay all along that the proper
focus of attention during divination is the image on the card and what it draws forth
from the unconscious, and not any pre-assigned meaning or keyword that may have
become attached to it. Unfortunately, this idea of optical analogy is not as
straightforward as it may at first seem, and even the images of classical style decks
may carry with them a certain amount of assumed meaning that undermines the intent
of this method.
As a first example, consider the Two of Cups. In many classical decks, the image is
simply that of two cups, standing upright, with various decorations around them. The
meaning is not difficult to determine by optical analogy cups, when standing
upright, are often filled with something, and when present in a matched pair suggest a
fullness of partnership. So, in the context of a question regarding romance, deducing the
meaning of Love for this card is straightforward. Similarly, cups upside down
generally have spilled their contents, so the appearance of this card inverted might
indicate that there is no love, or that whatever love there was is now emptied out.
A more difficult case would be the appearance of an eight or ten of wands or swords.
The first problem is that there is little to differentiate on a visual basis a six, eight or ten
of either of these suits. It might be very difficult to tell them apart unless one actually
counts them (or cheats and looks at the number), and even if one does that, it may be
even more difficult to tell, by optical analogy alone, what the difference between them
might be, since they all basically look the same. While it is not so much of a problem
that symmetrical cards cannot be read as upright or inverted they look the same both

ways, and therefore simply are not read as upright or reversed a more serious problem
is that the meanings of the suits themselves are ambiguous without reference to ideas
outside of the Tarot itself.
Now consider the suit of swords itself. In ancient times, swords were weapons, and one
might logically conclude that the suit of swords therefore refers to battles and conflicts.
But, as one author put it, most of our common battles take place on paper with the
intellect, and therefore the suit of swords has come to be associated with the mind, and
more specifically its intellectual aspects, and not just with conflict. There is a rather
large ideological payload connected with this interpretation, however. This way of
inferring a set of meanings for this suit relies on a great deal more than the imagery
itself -- there is no independent reason why swords could not just as easily refer to
cooking implements or gardening tools. The same sort of problem arises in divining
meanings for the Court cards. The assignments that are often made King, Queen,
Knight and Page standing in for adult man, adult woman, teenager and child depend
upon a conceptual framework of human relations that may no longer be, and in truth
perhaps never was, universally valid.
Each reader brings to the Tarot his or her own history, beliefs, background and
expectations, and it is only because of that fact that reading the Tarot for divination is
possible at all. Even when reading a card by optical analogy, the reader is bringing his
or her own ideas to the interpretation. Some readers are Pagans, some Wiccans, some
Buddhists, some Christians, some Atheists; some are idealists, some pragmatists, some
materialists, some may have a background in the sciences while others do not, and so
on. Each will see and understand the image through the lens of their own background
and beliefs. The same image may mean different things to different diviners, partly due
to the context of the reading, but also in part because it is the mind of the reader that
gives the card its meaning, and no two readers have the same mind.
The interpretation of the Tarot is subjective and not objective one does not read a Tarot
card as one would read a clock or a fuel gauge, for if one did that, one would be reading
it as a sign. The whole idea of interpretation and self-consuming artifacts opens a very
large can of worms in the field of epistemology, the study of how one comes to know
things. The point to take home from this is that there is no such thing as reading the
Tarot in-itself, and there is no such thing as a presuppositionless interpretation; for the
Tarot to apply to things in the world, it has to connect with the world in some way, and
that way is through the mind of the diviner. For any image to have a meaning to a
diviner, there will be much more in play than just the image itself. This being the case,
then the best way to understand how Tarot cards come to mean what they mean is to
clarify and, if possible, logically systematize the ideas that go into making a card mean
what it means.

Since the interpretation of the Tarot is subjective, then there is, necessarily, always some
form of interpretive scheme, or set of ideas through which the images on the cards are
understood. While the idea of reading the Tarot by optical analogy, or by some similar
system that alleges independence from any underlying metaphysics or beliefs may be
instructive in many ways, it remains an ideal that can probably never be achieved in
practice. It is nonetheless possible to extract the wisdom from this ideal, and to learn its
lessons, without consigning much of the modern Tarot to the flames.
The first lesson is that a card has no meaning on its own the meaning derives from the
mind of the reader who brings to it a history and a set of beliefs; from the circumstances
of the reading, which can come from the context of a question being asked as well from
the cards that surround it; and lastly from the self-consuming dialectic between
conscious and unconscious. It therefore makes no sense to pre-suppose some fixed
meaning for each card; instead, card meanings are necessarily vague and general, the
specifics emerging only when actually interpreted. It follows from this that lists of
keywords, upright and reversed meanings, detailed analyses of all possible meanings,
and lengthly descriptions of how each card fits into a metaphysical scheme may actually
be counterproductive.
What is useful is to have some general idea of what a card indicates, that can be refined
and clarified in the context of the reading. Whether one uses some form of numerology,
Pythagorean or Euclidean geometry, the Cabala or some derivative thereof, or even the
optical analogy suggested by the design of the card, the idea is not to rigidly apply
that meaning to the card, but rather to use that information as one factor in
understanding what each card brings to the totality of the reading itself. Even when a
card's designer claims a specific meaning for a card, that meaning is only one factor, and
maybe not the most important one, in what the card actually brings to the big picture.
Experienced diviners often tell beginners, Throw away the book and read the cards,
and while that may be a bit more severe than is really necessary, it does place the
emphasis where it belongs on the cards and not on any system.
This leads to the second lesson, which is that the image on the card is relevant to its
interpretation. If the image isn't a sign, or a stand-in for some pre-assigned meaning,
then it is the image that triggers the divination process. That is what the whole optical
analogy method is about using the image, and its details, to divine the meaning of
the card. For the reasons already mentioned, this process isn't as simple as that, and it
becomes even more complex with modern, artistic or illustrated decks that have
scenes for all of the cards.
The downside to this type of deck is that the imagery comes with a set of symbols and
artistic cues that may pre-load it with specific meanings and directions. If, according to
the optical analogy method, the diviner is to take a hint for the interpretation of the

card from the structure of its image, and the image is designed to convey a certain
meaning through what it shows, then it follows that the design of the deck will to a
great extent constrain how divinations that are done with the deck will proceed. As an
example, consider The Lovers card: the Adam-and-Eve symbolism in the Rider-Waite
deck carries a very different imaginary payload from the pathways symbolism of the
Wirth deck, the alchemical symbolism of the Thoth deck, and the rather odd, whateverit-may-be symbolism of the 1JJ deck. If one doesn't read according to a pre-assigned set
of meanings, then the results of reading what appears to be the same card will be very
different for different decks.
If the optical analogy argument has any merit, then it means that what at first appears
to be the same card in these different decks in fact is not the same card at all just
because it carries the same number, does not mean it is the same card with the same
meaning. It therefore matters a great deal which deck one uses, and this underscores the
argument that each diviner must select a deck whose imagery is compatible with his or
her beliefs and expectations. The religious symbolism in the Rider-Waite deck may be
downright offensive to many Pagans, just as many of the current dark or Gothic
Tarots probably won't appeal to white witches. While it is a fact of chaos physics that
initial conditions do not determine eventual outcomes, it is also a fact of psychology that
beliefs and impressions do condition the range of possible meanings, and attempting to
learn divination with a deck whose imagery is fundamentally opposed to the views of
the diviner will most likely result in aspiring diviners aspiring to something else. This is
especially a problem when certain decks, or deck styles, come to be regarded as
standards, to which those first learning the Tarot are directed. There is no such thing
as a standard Tarot deck, there is only a range of decks that conforms to each
individual's viewpoint. Attempting to force a standard on others is therefore
tantamount to forcing one's world view down someone else's throat.
The background, beliefs and expectations of each diviner defines his or her standard.
It really is not all that difficult to learn to read the Tarot, if one approaches it with the
view that it is simply an extension, via a form of art, of one's own mind into the
Unknown. There are no pre-defined meanings or complex systems that have to be
learned in great detail, any more than one needs a step-by-step walk-through to
navigate from one part of a village to another. More commonly, one relies on a map that
shows places and pathways, and one then devises one's own methodology to get from
one point to another. A useful interpretive scheme should be no more nor less than a
map, and should be taken no more seriously than as a general guide.
The third lesson from the optical analogy argument is that card meanings are always
in a context. By itself, a card means nothing; the meaning derives from the
circumstances under which it is read. Those circumstances include the question being
asked, if there is one, how the card is placed in the layout and its surrounding cards, the

image itself, and the point of view of the diviner. Because the point of view of the
diviner matters, there is a place for an interpretive scheme in divining with the Tarot.
Whether a simple geometric or numerological scheme, the fine points of the image
itself, or a complex metaphysical philosophy, a point of view from which the Tarot is
approached is a necessary and indispensable part of the divination process.

III. The Tarot and its Interpretation

General Characteristics of the Cabala as an Interpretive Scheme
It is not the purpose of this essay to examine the Cabala for its own sake, but rather to
understand how it can be used to classify ideas and insights that emerge during Tarot
divination. The descriptions that follow are short and incomplete; that is in part
intentional, for the point is to aid the imagination in its use of the Tarot, and not to
restrict the diviner's imagination to pre-determined definitions. It is in no way claimed
or intended that what follows is an accurate exposition or exegesis of any particular
version of the Cabala as discussed by any organization or author; it is, instead, an
interpretation and application of ideas from various sources. Just as the Tarot is a living
thing in the sense that it grows and adjusts to the needs of the individual reader, so the
Cabala is modified by its students to suit their own insights and purposes.
The accompanying diagram entitled "The Tree of Life" is a general schematic of the
Cabala as it applies to the Tarot. Its chief characteristics are ten circles, variously called
Lights, Spheres, or Sephiroth, which are interconnected by 22 Paths. It is also divided
horizontally into four rows called "Worlds", and vertically into three columns or
"Pillars". In this interpretive scheme, the numbered cards of the Minor Arcana are
assigned to the Lights according to their numbers -- aces at the top, down to tens at the
bottom -- and the cards of the Major Arcana are assigned to the pathways connecting
those Lights. The Court Cards can be thought of as roughly corresponding to the Four
Worlds.

The Philosophical Elements

One aspect of the Cabala that is not immediately obvious, but plays a major role in the
interpretation of the Tarot, is its relationship to the alchemical idea of Elements. The
basic elements are Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, which represent qualities of objects and
energies. While each of these has its material counterparts, the reference is actually to
the abstract concept that is, only partially and imperfectly, represented by the physical
phenomenon. Events and objects in the world can be thought of as combinations of
these abstract elements, and the way in which things in the world happen can be seen as
progressions of actions and influences by these general concepts.
These philosophical elements are woven into the structure of the Cabala in several ways.
As far as the Tarot is concerned, there are actually four Trees of Life, each one
representing one of the basic elements. Each of these trees is a "World", and contains a
complete Tree of Life diagram. Hence there is a Fire World, Water World, Air World and
Earth World. The suits of the Minor Arcana are traditionally referenced to the elements,

so in the Cabala, each suit represents one of these elemental Worlds. The numbered
cards represent the progression of each of these elemental concepts, from abstract idea
to material object or effect, in relation to their effects on both the outside world and on
the mind of the diviner. Usually, the suit of Wands represents Fire, Cups represents
Water, Swords represents Air, and Disks (or Pentacles) represents Earth. The most
commonly found substitution in this arrangement is to switch Wands and Swords, so
the Swords represent Fire. There are logical arguments to both arrangements, but the
illustrations on the cards themselves usually settle the question of which suit
corresponds to which element.
There is often mention of an additional element Spirit -- to which the Major Arcana,
and sometimes the Aces, refer. Spirit is an unformed elemental, meaning that it has no
specific thing in the physical world to which it corresponds, other than perhaps human
consciousness itself. Spirit, along with the other four elementals, completes the
elemental Pentagram, a symbol used in magick and occasionally in divination, that
describes the balancing of elemental forces. On the Tree of Life, there are actually three
additional levels above the Tree itself, and it is to these that the element of Spirit
corresponds.
Another aspect of the Tree of Life is that each Tree itself can be broken into Four Worlds,
each containing one or more Lights, and corresponding to one of the elements. And,
lastly, some of the Lights themselves refer directly to elemental concepts. So, when one
is reading a card in a layout, there are many different aspects to each card than can be
considered. If it is Minor Arcana card, one can consider the elemental aspect of its suit,
one can consider the Light to which it refers by number, one can consider which of the
worlds on the individual Tree in which it is placed, and on top of this, and perhaps most
importantly, how these elemental influences interact with the cards around them.
Now this surely seems an incomprehensible and hopelessly muddled mess, and it is, if
and only if one takes the scheme as objective reality. It turns out there is really no
difficulty with it at all, when one keeps in mind the purpose of this whole scheme -- to
"seed" the imagination with ideas that can be applied as necessary during the
divination process. What these elemental references or "correspondences" mean during
a reading is a matter of interpretation, as is which relationship is the most significant in
determining the meaning of the cards. This is especially important in considering the
meanings and effects of surrounding cards, for some elemental combinations strengthen
meanings, while others weaken or even reverse them.

Attributes of the Elements

Element Characteristics

World

Suit

Strengthens Weakens

Fire

Creativity, intensity, swiftness, short lived.

Gets things moving, can burn through obstacles, but
can burn itself out or spread out of control. Rules
ideas, impulses, and the will.

Archetypal:
ideas, energy.

Wands
Fire, Air
(Swords)

Water,
Earth

Water

Reflective, receptive, transformative.

Receives the energy of Fire, moderates and
transforms it. Can be nurturing, but also smothering.
Rarely starts movement on its own. Rules passions,
reflections, emotions.

Creative:
actions, things
taking shape.

Cups

Water,
Earth

Fire, Air

Air

Uplifting, expansive, even explosive.

Results from the action of Fire on Water.
Upward rushing, sustained movement.
Rules the mind and intellect, but can also be ruthless
and destructive without limit.

Formative:
effects, things in
the mind.

Swords
(Wands)

Fire, Air

Water,
Earth

Earth

Solidification, stability, endurance.

The physical consequences of ideas and actions.
Seldom moves, but when it does, can be implacable
as an earthquake. Rules physical objects and living
things, also protection and perseverance.

Material:
Disks,
Water,
results, also
Pentacles Earth
degeneration, but
also regeneration.

Fire, Air

Spirit

Pure ideas and ideals, raw energy unharnessed. In

itself is invisible and unknown, shows itself only
through its effects.
Rules the energy that drives thoughts and actions.

Pure ideas and

Major
energy, no form or Arcana
purpose in itself.

All

All

There is one other concept in relation to the Cabala that needs mention here, and that is
the idea of balance. Balance, in this context, means that potentially opposing or
contradictory forces are acting in harmony with each other, rather than fighting each
other; it also means that there is no excess of one type of energy or influence that is not
held in check by another. On the Tree of Life, those Lights that are found on the Middle
Pillar, specifically numbers 1, 6, 9 and 10, are said to be balanced, while the others often
involve forces acting against one another destructively. In the case of the elementals,
Water balances Fire in the sense that either mitigates the effects of the other, turning
potentially destructive energy toward constructive ends. Similarly, Earth balances Air.
Fire and Air are said to be "active" elements -- they set things in motion by themselves,
while Water and Earth are considered "passive", and require stimulation by one of the
active elements to get things moving. It is also said that in a reading, while Water and
Fire can balance each other, they can also negate or contradict each other, nullifying,
delaying, or even reversing their effects. The same is true for Earth and Air. Fire and

Air, however, are friendly to one another, and each can intensify the effects of the other,
as can Water and Earth. Whether a card of one element compliments or contradicts a
card of another element really can only be determined during the reading itself, and
depends greatly on the general trend of the reading, and the surrounding cards.

The Major Arcana

Imagine the possibility that all events in the Universe -- everything that happens,
everything that exists, every object and every thought -- are connected together in some
way. Scientists in the 19th century were perplexed by the discovery of such connections,
and gave them names like "vital force" and "entelechy"; Jung called them "acausal
connecting principles", and in modern science, these connections are known by names
such as "mode locking" and "entrainment." But it is in reality an old idea: the ancient
doctrine of "As Above, So Below" refers, at least in part, to the observation that under
certain conditions, disparate things in the world behave as though they are reflections of
some state of being, force or power, in which they are all united in a greater whole. This
idea was known to the ancients as "participation", which, interestingly enough, has
reappeared in modern physics as the concept of a participatory cosmos.
This force or power cannot be seen directly because it is not a physical object, or an
event itself. It is a condition for the possibility of events, and for the existence of objects
and ideas, and without it nothing can exist or happen. Its presence can, however, be
detected in experiments, and in the observation of events and natural phenomena. Its
hand can be seen in computer-generated analyses in an abstract world called state-space,
where this force reveals itself through images called attractors; those attractors have the
property of being fractals, meaning they exist in neither two nor three dimensions, but
have the qualities of both. Fractals reveal more detail the more closely they are studied,
and many consider the images of the Tarot to be fractal for that reason.
The idea of such a force that permeates and interconnects events, objects and ideas is a
concept that is in itself absurd its existence can never be proven nor directly
experienced, and yet nothing can exist or happen without it. This Force, power, or Kraft,
is the Unknown that appears in visions of mystical experience, and that speaks through
the unconscious as the Spirit of the Depths. It is the Unknown that is detected and
analyzed through the process of divination, and reveals itself through the way it drives
the diviner's imagination, primarily through the images of the Major Arcana.
The images of the Major Arcana are "disturbances in the Force." They are images of the
acausal principles that, like delicate wispy tendrils, connect objects in the world with
their reflections in the Unknown. When one looks at such a card during a divination,
one is peering through the veil that separates the world of consciousness from the world
of the infinite and the eternal; one is gazing at a reflection of the world in a mirror that

can only be seen through the unconscious. When one looks into this mirror, the first
thing one sees is one's own self, but it is not the self of the ordinary world one sees -- it
is the representation of that self in another world. When one looks deeper, that image
vanishes in a whirlwind of shifting space and time, a fusion of all that has ever been and
ever will be. It is to find order in that whirlwind, and at first to penetrate the veil of
consciousness and the reflection of the self, that one uses the Tarot.
What sort of "disturbances in the force" do the cards of the Major Arcana actually
indicate? It is not possible to give any objective, pre-defined interpretation to what this
actually means in any specific reading or situation. However, it almost always means a
change of some sort. That kind of change might best be described as enantiodromia, the
nasty habit of things in the universe to suddenly and unexpectedly switch from being
one thing to being their mirror-image opposites. This is often seen in physics, where
particles will switch from one state to another, or appear to trade places with one
another. In chemistry, certain compounds will flip their structure from one way to
another, which can profoundly affect their behavior in reactions. Jung used the term to
describe unexpected shifts in personality and behavior, due to the fact that the
unconscious often contains mirror-image traits that break through the persona at
unexpected times: the conservative politician who gets found with an underage
prostitute, the liberal who unexpectedly utters a racist comment, and so forth. The
principle of enantiodromia is closely connected with the idea of complementarity and
synchronicity, and it can work both for and against. Certain cards in the Major Arcana -Death, Devil, The Tower, The Hanged Man, and The Fool, for example -- are obvious
indicators of this effect, while others -- Justice and Temperance, for example -- are
somewhat more subtle about it. Whether obvious or not, these sudden shifts between
mirror-image states are the primary focus of the Major Arcana.
There can be no pre-assigned meanings in this world beyond the veil, no pre-formed
ideas or pre-determined situations, for everything there is formless. One cannot touch
one's reflection in a mirror, but one can manipulate it, and one can see things in it that
are otherwise hidden. Since one cannot know the meanings before hand, then one is
perhaps best served by asking -- unless barriers have been erected, the Spirit of the Depths
is always willing to answer, though understanding that answer may test the limits of the
imagination, and, on occasion, the limits of fortitude.
One must always question, if one is to receive answers. Sometimes those questions begin
with the purpose of the divination itself, while at other times the images themselves
suggest what should be asked. What is it in the world, that this image in the Unknown
is a reflection of? What Force or Kraft moves the world from beyond the veil, and what,
if any, is its purpose? Why has the Unknown chosen this image through which to reveal
itself, and what part, if any, is the diviner or questioner chosen, or perhaps destined, to
play in its design? And maybe most unsettling of all, to what degree is the diviner, or

Questioner, actually the Force in him or herself?

It is to find meaning in these images, and answers to these questions, that one engages
the self-consuming dialect. When one looks into the mirror of the Unknown, what one
sees there may be fantastic and unbelievable. Because these images are fractal, they are
refractory to any kind of final reductive analysis -- they cannot be reduced to
definitions, keywords, or catch phrases -- but this does not mean that they are
meaningless. On the contrary, their meanings are expansive, becoming more detailed
and revealing as they are studied to a greater depth. What is important about these
images is that they are patterns, and though the images themselves may be strange and
bizarre, they reveal patterns of events and situations that can lead to a greater
understanding of how and why things happen the way they do, and what course they
may take in the future.
It is for this reason that any attempt to reduce the interpretation of the Major Arcana to
any interpretive scheme, or set of definitions or concepts, necessarily falsifies the very
thing that it represents. The images themselves guide, but do not direct, the mind of the
diviner toward the reflections in the Unknown of which they are images, but it is the
reflection of the diviner upon those images that must guide the interpretation. Imposing
the categories of the physical world upon the Unknown will be about as useful as
imposing a cookie-cutter on the surface of the ocean.
This makes it especially difficult for novices, who are often told to begin their study of
the Tarot with the Major Arcana, and proceed later to their study of the Minor Arcana.
This is a bit like saying, "Learn calculus first, then move on to addition and subtraction
later." The analogy is perhaps a better one than it at first seems, for just as calculus is a
mathematics of change, so the Major Arcana are the harbingers of changes in the wind,
and for that reason are often more interesting to students. The advice remains sound
nonetheless, for it is that quality of being interesting that often first draws the Spirit of the
Depths forth, and despite the initial bewilderment, may yet entice the learner deeper into
its mysteries.
If keywords and definitions cannot be given, then how is one to proceed? The answer is
in the images themselves -- the images of the Major Arcana have the paradoxical quality
of being both familiar, and alien at the same time. They tug at ideas rooted in history,
mythology, literature and the arts, and perhaps in the sciences as well. At the same time,
they have an intangible and enigmatic quality to them. Death, for example: one knows
what that means, and yet, also one does not. Does it mean the absolute end, or is it
really an absolute beginning? Does the existence of consciousness, of individuality, of a
memory, of a situation, of the wind and the stars, continue after they are gone, and if so
in what form? When one looks through the veil of space-time and sees this image in the
Unknown, is it a threat, a warning, a curse, or a promise of liberation? Some believe

that the images of the Major Arcana have their origins in the traveling shows of the
Middle Ages. If so, the what sort of mysteries, moralities, philosophies, and beliefs hide
behind their reflections in the eternal? Countless people from ages past lived and died
with -- and in some cases from -- their beliefs about these images in the unconscious;
can one be so sure that one's modern perspective is any different or any better? Millions
have looked into the unconscious and seen images such as these; could they be looking
back through them, looking into your own soul?
Whatever else one might say about this, it should be apparent from this brief example
that assigning a list of keywords or trite sayings cannot approach the richness of
meaning that can be brought forth simply by asking. Asking, and letting the imagination
wander through the image itself, as though wandering through an alien landscape.
When one crosses the veil into the Unknown, there is no limit to what one might find
there, and an objection to this method could well be raised that because of that, no final
answer can ever be given. That, of course, is absolutely correct -- there is no finality, by
definition, in the infinite and eternal -- but final answers are seldom what is wanted; if
a specific question has been asked, then once the self-consuming dialectic has yielded a
sufficient answer, that is usually enough.
This method may seem familiar to some, for divination, as it is discussed here, has a
great deal in common with the magickal practice of Astral Projection. The cards of the
Major Arcana are often used for just this purpose -- as doorways or gateways into the
Astral world. The Astral is itself very much like a reflection in a mirror, and although
what one sees there is seldom real in itself, what it is a reflection of can be very real. For
this reason it may be advisable, for those so inclined, to prepare with some form of
magickal protection or purification prior to carrying out an operation of this sort. Such
preparation can help to silence the tendency of the Spirit of the Times to interject its
annoying commentary, and can help to exclude the intrusion of extraneous energies
reflected in images from the Unknown that can distract, or otherwise disturb, the
divination process. Most importantly, these preparations can reduce the tendency of
consciousness to personalize what it sees in the Unknown: this is the tendency of
consciousness to see itself as the object of the Unknown, and to believe that the
Unknown is doing this to, or because of, me. The eternal and the infinite, the Force, the
Kraft, and whatever else is found there do not do what they do to you, for you, about
you, or against you; the wind does not blow because of you, and as the Oracle of
Julianus says, "The flight of birds was not created for your benefit." The Unknown does
what it does because that is what it does; even though it is not there because of you, it
most certainly can affect you. It is essential to keep that distinction clear, because if it is
lost, then all sorts of confusion, illusion, and delusion flood in from the personal
unconscious -- those parts of the unconscious discovered by Freud, that contain fears,
repressions, and so forth, and have nothing to do with the collective unconscious. This
can create so much noise in consciousness that it can drown out the voice of the Spirit of

the Depths altogether, or worse, open the gates to the Spirit of the Times -- where one
thought one was listening to the voice of the Unknown, one is in fact hearing merely the
noise of one's own brain anatomy. Though it is beyond the scope of this discussion to
detail the many detailed methods of deploying such protection, even the simplest of
affirmations or concentration exercises can usually put these sources of noise to rest.
While no specific a priori meanings for the Major Arcana cards can be given, it may be
useful to consider their placement on the Tree of Life diagram, and their role in the
Cabalistic system. The cards of the Major Arcana are assigned to the Paths that
interconnect the various Lights. In general, the Lights represent classes of ideas and
concepts; they are the categories in this system that are used to classify and differentiate
ideas and experience. The Paths are movements or transformations, whether in objects
themselves or one's understanding of them, from one category to another. One has an
idea for an invention, for example, that goes through various stages of development
before it becomes an actual physical object. The way one looks at a particular problem or
situation might change as one considers its various aspects. Things in the world change,
and as they do, the effects they have on others also changes. And so on. In this system,
as is consistent with the above discussion, Major Arcana cards generally indicate
changes or shifts of some kind.
The specific assignments of cards to paths is based on occult tradition, explained by
esoteric reasons and theories that often seem to have no basis outside of their own
closed systems. Unless one is a serious student of the Cabala, or is using the Tarot to
study a particular group's interpretation of it, which card goes where, and even whether
the cards represent Paths or not, is therefore somewhat arbitrary. What is shown on the
diagram should be taken as a suggested interpretation, with the student encouraged to
try whatever substitutions seem appropriate, and then study the consequences of those
substitutions by experiment. In fact, all Lights and Pathways interconnect; the diagram
is there simply to suggest starting points for interpretation, and not to define endpoints
or restrict possibilities.
While, for all the reasons given above, no specific or exhaustive set of interpretations can
be given for the Major Arcana, a collection of ideas that may serve as a starting point for
reflection is included in the Supplement at the end of this essay. These are only
suggestions; because the Major Arcana represent what are ultimately impersonal and, in
and of themselves, non-directed forces, they must be interpreted as they apply in each
individual reading.

The Minor Arcana -- Numbered Cards

While the cards of the Major Arcana in general represent impersonal forces or
reflections in the Unknown, the cards of the Minor Arcana tend to be more specific -- if

the Major Arcana are "disturbances int he Force", then the cards of the Minor Arcana are
the results of those disturbances, and their effects can be very specific and direct.
Because the interpretation of the Major Arcana is, for the most part, introspective, the
interpretive scheme does not play a major role in the development of their meaning. For
the Minor Arcana, however, the interpretation is somewhat more contextual, as much
being influenced by, as they influence, actual events and objects in the world. This is not
to say that they do not have their unconscious aspects, but, as the interpretation of the
Major Arcana leans more toward the "Self" aspects of consciousness, so the Minor
Arcana are more involved with the "Ego" aspects of consciousness, and its connections
with the outside world.
For purposes of discussion, the Minor Arcana may be divided into two subsets -- the
numbered cards, also called "pips", and the court cards, also called "dignitaries." As the
Major Arcana are indicative of changes or forces, the pips generally are specifications of
those changes -- actual objects or situations affected by those forces. The court cards, on
the other hand, may be personalizations of those changes -- ways they affect people as
opposed to objects and situations -- or personifications of forces, meaning actual persons
acting as agents of the forces represented by the Major Arcana. It should also be
mentioned that, as personifications, agents may act of their own accord, which may alter
the meaning of the divination beyond what is apparent from any Major Arcana cards
that might be present. Similarly, objects and situations represented by the pip cards may
have their own objectives and directions, and while they do not overpower the forces of
the Major Arcana -- Major Arcana cards are also called "trumps" for a reason -- they do
alter and modify those forces. Whatever the forces indicated by the Major Arcana may
be in a divination, their effects may be for better or worse, depending upon the
surrounding cards.
The details of the interpretive scheme thus become more important in understanding
the significance of the Minor Arcana in a divination. In the Cabalistic system, the
numbered cards, beginning with the aces and continuing to the tens, are assigned to the
corresponding Lights on the Tree of Life. Each Light represents an interpretive category
of ideas, events, situations, and sometimes persons or objects, or characteristics of
persons or objects. As one moves from ace to ten, the categories represented by the
Lights move from the more general to the more specific. Aces tend to represent raw
energies, general possibilities, and unformed ideas, whereas the tens usually represent
specific situations, results, and generally endpoints of the effects of forces.
It should also be kept in mind that each suit really has its own Tree of Life, so as far as
the Tarot is concerned, there are actually forty Lights. As already mentioned, each suit
represents one of the philosophical elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth. So each
Light is seen, in the Tarot, through the lens of a specific elemental force. This greatly
affects the understanding of the Light; and the fact that the elements may be cooperative

or uncooperative with each other must also be taken into account. Thus, the two of
cups and the two of disks may have more in common with each other than the twos of
wands and swords.
But what, exactly, are the Lights? They may be thought of as a coalescence, or a
gathering together, of related concepts into a single point. It is not unlike the theory of
planetary formation -- it is thought that planets circling around a star form as a
gathering of space-dust into discrete locations, much as dust-bunnies form under
furniture. In the minds of occult philosophers, the understanding of the world also
coalesces into discrete categories that make them representable by oracles such as the
Tarot. Along with the ideas in the mind go the objects of those ideas -- specific actions,
behaviors, points of view, attitudes, and the physical persons and objects with which
they are associated. So the Tree of Life, on this view, is a diagrammatic representation
of everything the mind can comprehend. The Lights are, in other words, categories by
which consciousness classifies its understanding of experience. If the Lights are
categories of consciousness, and the Archetypes are categories of the unconscious, then
the purpose of divination is essentially to translate between the two, or "fit" one set of
categories to the other.
In some versions of this system, there are associations between the Lights and the
astrological planets, as well as between the Paths and the signs of the Zodiac. As the
Lights are grouped together into four Worlds or Planes, the Lights might also be
thought of as conjunctions of forces, where Paths meet together, and with elemental
forces. Yet another aspect of the Lights is their association with Pythagorean
numerology, various deities and other mythological creatures, and numerous other
ideas. As with the Major Arcana, these associations, if taken seriously, can hopelessly
muddle the interpretation of the cards. That is not their purpose; the purpose of all of
this is to give the mind of the diviner something to chew on, so to speak -- additional
material to fuel the self-consuming dialectic through which the unconscious expresses
itself via the card's imagery.
Since the meaning of the Minor Arcana is somewhat more specific than the Major
Arcana, its interpretation is more "guided", and more dependent upon the ideas that the
diviner brings to the reading. It may therefore be of benefit to consider at least some of
the possible range of ideas that have been traditionally associated with the Lights and
the cards. In addition to these suggestions, Tarot decks -- and particularly the
"illustrated" types -- often come with a certain amount of suggestion pre-loaded into
their imagery, which adds yet another dimension to what the diviner may consider
during a reading. The following discussion is, therefore intended only as one of many
possible starting points, from which a diviner might develop an understanding of the
cards. It must be remembered that as these Lights are categories, by themselves they
have no content -- they are like empty filing cabinets, used by the mind to classify and

organize impressions that arise during the divination process.

A first approximation of the significance of the Lights is:
The Archetypal World - Pure Ideas.
1 - The Aces: Root energy, undifferentiated force, possibilities but nothing actual, initial
ideas or beginnings. Aces behave much like Major Arcana cards.
2 - The Twos: Division, duality, can be cooperation or antagonism. Appearance of
definite ideas (and their opposites).
3 - The Threes: Ideas become specific and directed toward some goal, first point of
something actually happening; directions, purposefulness.
The Creative World - Ideas Becoming Reality.
4 -The Fours: Solidity, the first real appearance of ideas taking form. Ideas restrained or
stabilized by their solidification into things; things appearing to come to rest, being
deliberated or considered.
5 - The Fives: Application of force, instability, intensity. Can be destabilizing, but also
overcoming obstacles.
6 - The Sixes: Dynamic equilibrium, the center of balance and stability. Enduring
through change and adaptation.
The Formative World - Ideas and Consciousness.
7 - The Sevens: Emotions, fantasies, wishfulness. Creative imagination.
8 - The Eights: Intellect, reason, analytical faculties. Criticism, analysis.
9 - The Nines: The Astral World, dreams, visions, wishes.
The Material World - Consciousness in the World.
10 - The Tens: Physical and material world, results, end of cycle. Fullness, but often to
the point of stagnation and loss of potential. Sometimes imminent change -- that which
cannot adapt will be destroyed.
It is critically important that the diviner keep in mind that these concepts are general

guides, and not pre-assigned meanings. There is no cause-and-effect relationship

between the world and the cards; a given card does not -- and cannot possibly, in any
terms that cohere with any understanding of the rules of physics -- define or objectively
represent any situation or person. They are mere cues for the self-consuming dialectic of
interpretation. One could consider, for example, that one way of looking at a card is a
meeting point between two categories -- the Lights as reflected in the number of the
card, and the Elemental force as reflected in its suit. The Four of Wands might therefore
be thought of as the conjunction of the creative force of Fire with the Light of Mercy and
all that it means, and the Seven of Cups might be the result of Water forces acting in the
realm of fantasy and imagination. The "meanings" given below are, therefore, simply
examples of what these conjunctions might suggest.

The Archetypal World -- the Aces, Twos and Threes

This is the most abstract level of the Tree of Life; the ideas found here tend to be more
general and less well formed. They often refer more to possibilities than to actual
things. Because they are associated with unformed ideas, there is some connection with
the element of Fire, which means that the Wands are particularly strong here. It should
also be considered that, because this is a world of possibilities, the cards here may be
more forward-looking than others; in other words, these cards may be more indicative
of future events, or things taking shape that may affect the future, than applying to the
present or the past.
Because the Archetypal World is associated with the element of Fire, the cards to which
it applies also share in those qualities. Fire is expressive and energizing, though it is not
always selective or entirely purposive. It lends energy, and can act as an accelerant for
the cards it influences. It can be hasty, and maybe even reckless and overpowering, but
it always moves things along. So, as with the Wands in general, when the Aces, twos
and threes appear, things are happening, though it may sometimes be difficult to tell
exactly what direction they are moving in.
Kether - The Crown - the Aces - Card Titles: Wands: Fire, Cups: Water, Swords: Air,
Disks: Earth. This is the point of origin of all ideas and forces. It represents beginnings,
but nothing specific -- it is like the idea that one should do something, but it is unclear
what. In the Tarot, the aces represent the "seeds" of the elemental forces. and the
beginnings of the movement of elemental energy. As such, they are much like Major
Arcana cards. They are especially effective at dignifying -- empowering, enriching, and
energizing -- cards placed adjacent to them.
Chokmah - Wisdom - the Twos - Card Titles: Dominion, Love, Peace, Change. This is the
first point at which one can detect elemental energy for what it is. It is the "one divided
against itself for love", the point of duality, which can mean cooperation or opposition,

depending on dignity. Here are cards of beginnings, in a definite direction, but not
necessarily unchangeable. The Twos therefore suggest the action of elemental energy in
more of an onrush than a carefully directed stream. The titles of the cards -- Dominion,
Love, Peace, and Change -- mostly reflect the generalized actions of elemental energies;
they are more indicative of possibilities for development, rather than specific outcomes,
just as Wisdom, by itself, creates possibilities but in itself remains aloof. Dominion can
suggest control, but it can also mean a situation of opposing, equally balanced wills,
while Love, being in the suit of water, generally implies romance, but because it lies in
the World of Fire, also implies the erotic. The Sword is often called Peace Restored, and
while in itself there never was a loss of peace, it can encourage one to "step back" from a
situation; however, it can also mean irreconcilably opposed ideas in a state of precarious
balance. The Change card may also be called Harmony, but here again, it does not imply
that harmony was ever lost -- change, by itself, can bring a certain kind of mixing that
harmonizes.
Binah - Understanding - the Threes - Card Titles: Virtue or Established Strength,
Abundance, Sorrow, Works. The Threes show the first appearance of definite direction
or purpose. There is a stability and direction, the idea now has a foothold in the world,
though it is still at the archetypal level and as yet has no specific form. An Idea which
has moved to the level of Understanding is now capable of proceeding forward, so this
is the Light of explosive energy -- of the fertilized egg, now bursting with the energy
that has been stored up for its growth, but not yet having taken any definite shape or
form. Virtue reflects on the character of Fire at this level; the card is sometimes also
called Established Strength, suggesting the idea of a definite position having been taken,
or definite steps for a beginning. Abundance, sometimes also called Friendship, reflects
the idea of Love made real and concrete. Sorrow at this level generally does not refer to
grief over any specific situation, but is more of a general melancholy. Works suggests
that definite steps have been taken, though results may not yet be apparent. As a brief
aside, the Three of Swords is often depicted as a heart pierced by three swords. This
design actually pre-dates the Golden Dawn Cabala-derived decks, first showing up in
an Italian deck printed in the late 1500's that was one of the first to have a fully
illustrated Minor Arcana. Even so, the imagery seems appropriate, for this is a card of
the emotions subdued by the intellect. Often decisions must be made that set aside the
feelings in favor of what seems a rationally better choice -- a decision which can carry
with it the most damnable consequences, for what appears to be "reason" may be merely
the demons of Hod hungry for a sacrifice.

The Creative World -- the Fours, Fives, and Sixes

The Lights of the Creative World receive the energy of the Archetypal World, and give it
form and direction. This is the realm of actions, and of ideas becoming real through
action, though not exclusively physical actions. The appearance in a reading of the

cards in this World points to more specific directions, and to situations that may be
changed or modified, but not altogether restructured or withdrawn. Here Water is
strongest, and the Cups have the edge over the other elements in these Lights.
The Creative World's association with Water brings to its domain a sense of reflection
and thoughtfulness. What may appear as slowness may in reality be the need for careful
consideration before action is taken. This is not to say that the cards of the Creative
World are passive, an attribute often mistakenly applied to the Water influence, for here
can be found some of the most violent energies. Those energies may be applied for good
or for ill, and they may be helpful or incredibly destructive, but they are not applied
without having been thought through first.
Chesed - Mercy - the Fours - Card Titles: Completion or Perfected Work, Luxury or
Blended Pleasure, Truce or Rest from Strife, Power: While this Light indicates a moving
forward, it also brings a certain peace and calmness to things. After the explosive
generation of the Threes, things have settled into a more or less stable pattern, which
may be for better or worse. Bad things can happen here -- Mercy can be applied
outright wrongly -- but in general situations divined within this Light have a way of
working themselves out. Chesed is the Wisdom of the Twos reflected in thoughts and
actions; one thinks of wisdom, tempered by the calm and steadiness of Jupiter here.
There is solidity, but also adjustment. In the Wands, the Four is Completion, also called
Perfected Work; the ideal state of the Three has now set itself up in a stable and solid
edifice. The Cup is called Luxury, and also Blended Pleasure, meaning that pure
emotion has received a dose of reality. It has moved from the realm of ideal into being
something real, and while some of its charm may have been lost, it may yet evolve into a
lasting joy, or cut itself off without further loss; in some decks, this card is considered
"boredom," or sometimes the relief therefrom. Now the Sword is variously called Truce
or Rest from Strife, and while it can mean an end to hostilities but not necessarily
animosity, it can also indicate the forming of alliances, or even the keeping of vigil.
Among the Disks the four is Power, and may show a material situation which is under
control -- maybe a little too much control, depending on dignity -- but will need
periodic adjustment to keep it going.
Geburrah - Severity - the Fives - Card Titles: Strife, Disappointment or Loss of Pleasure,
Defeat, Worry or Material Trouble. Considered by some to be among the worst cards in
the deck, the Fives simply reflect the application of brute force to a situation. That is not
necessarily always a bad thing, but because the Fives lie off the center of the Tree, it can
get out of hand. Here is the influence of Mars, and though it can appear evil, it is
sometimes the necessary kick to get things moving, or to clear out obstacles. The Fives
balance the Fours -- where the Fours can become complacent and even proud, the Fives
will knock them off their high horse. The Five of Wands is Strife, and while it can mean
conflict or a test of some kind, it is also the strength to withstand it. The Cup card is

Disappointment or Loss of Pleasure, and as the name implies, this is the card of the
broken heart. Even so, being in the Creative World, Water is especially strong here, and
while the heart may bleed for what has been lost, it also finds the strength to do what
needs to be done. Defeat is what it is, though without further consideration it is not
clear whose defeat, but it also means there is finally an end to it; while Worry, the Earth
card, can hang on tenaciously. Sometimes the Earth card is also called Material Trouble,
and the worry might not be entirely imaginary. It might also be enlightening to realize
that in another system, the Five of Disks means "Lover," which in itself can have
multiple nuances.
Tiphareth - Beauty - the Sixes - Card Titles: Victory, Pleasure, Science or Earned Success,
Success or Material Success. Having emerged, albeit perhaps scarred, from the terror of
the Fives, Beauty appears as the brightest of the Lights. It occupies the position of
Perfect Balance in the Tree of Life. Here all energies have come into harmonious
balance, and what might be called a "dynamic stability" -- that which can endure
without stagnation by virtue of its ability to adapt -- has firmly established itself. Unless
really badly dignified they are always a good omen -- and even when badly dignified,
Sixes can often trump or overpower the badly-dignifying cards due to their balanced
position. The Wand is Victory; it has won the battle of the Fives hands down, and has
established itself in the perfect kingdom. The Cup is Pleasure, the fairy-tale wedding,
the perfect and enduring balance of all that is satisfying; being in the Creative World,
where Water is particularly strong, this is generally considered the best card in the deck.
Another interpretation of this card involves past memories or reminiscences, but these
usually carry with them a degree of joy, tempered with some sadness. The names given
to the Sword card here vary greatly, from Science to Earned Success, but they all imply
the intellect in its most glorious and perfected state. The Sword is sometimes taken to
mean movement or voyage, but it can also mean escape under cover of night. The Earth
card is Success, and here it means what it says, though an enduring success sometimes
entails some adjustment -- one can never be truly free, for example, until all others are
free as well; none can ever be truly wealthy until that wealth enriches others. All this
being said, in connection with this Light, one might keep in mind that in another system
of meaning assignments given by Papus, the Sixes are considered the worst cards -- the
"Triumph of Obstacles". This stands as a stern reminder that, as the Sixes are very much
the "Wish Cards", one should be careful of what one wishes for, for in Tiphareth, one
just might get it, and all that it brings with it.

The Formative World -- the Sevens, Eights and Nines

The Formative World is also called the Astral World, for here is where the mind reaches
beyond the physical, into the realm of angels, spirits, and the imagination. The trouble
with this part of the Tree is that the energies that were originally from the elements have
largely been replaced by those originating from within the mind. There is a detachment

from the original ideal, and while the Lights of the Formative World can be the
beginnings of a new direction, they can also be a descent into loss, stagnation and
degeneration. Air is strongest here, and here the Swords cut their deepest, not only into
events themselves, but into the ability of the mind to sort them out. The upraised Sword
can be courage, the mind soaring to new heights, but the Sword thrust downward can
be the destruction of whatever lies in its path. What were originally noble ideas can
become figments of the mind, objects of obsession, fanaticism, misguided intentions,
and self-gratifying attitudes. There is some hope for the Nines, as they reflect, and can
reflect upon, the Light of the Sixes in an imaginative way, but the Sevens and Eights can
be hopeless, unless great care is taken to balance their energies.
Now while the association of the Formative World with the element of Air brings to it
an energetic quality not unlike that of Fire, it also introduces the potential for an element
of dishonesty. The Fire and Water elementals have qualities of authenticity and
genuineness that Air does not always have. Air is calculating, and if the calculation calls
for an element of deception, then here is where it will be applied. Fire and Water will
never sacrifice their basic principles, but Air can be all too willing to do so for fame and
power. Thus, particularly in the unbalanced cards of this World, there exists the
potential for treachery, falsification and outright lies. The Sevens and Eights can bring
new directions and insights, but they can also be the bearers of knives ready for unwary
backs.
Netzach Victory the Sevens - Card Titles: Valor, Debauch or Illusory Success, Futility
or Unstable Effort, Failure or Success Unfulfilled. These cards often have bad reputation
that is not always deserved. While Netzach can be the realm of illusory
accomplishments, fanatical crusading and blind faith -- the emotions running away with
the mind, as though the brain has drowned in its own beliefs -- it can also be the source
of the fantasies, hopes and daydreams out of which new perspectives and ideas can
emerge. In the Wands, Seven is Valor, which seems noble enough, yet it can be a
warning. It may mean going forward in a hopeless cause, and while it may be inspiring,
it generally ends in failure, or worse, for here are also phantasms, imagined
persecutions, and delirious crusades of righteousness it is burning people at the stake
to save their souls. The Cup is variously called Debauch, or Illusory Success. It can be a
head-in-the-clouds fantasy that can inspire and delight, but it can also quickly
degenerate into doing something for-itself, and not for the goal involved. This card can
be The Picture of Dorian Gray all efforts having given themselves over to
degeneration, the whole project has failed, and any successes here are mere phantoms.
The Air card is Futility, also called Unstable Effort, and here where Air is strongest: it
continues to hammer away with approaches that are useless or destructive. It is a card
of intellect applied to hopeless or pointless ends; one thinks here of the child madscientist building a moon rocket from scrap parts found in the garage. It can also be a
profoundly evil card, in that it can mean treachery, deceit and backstabbing -- all traits

of those who believe that there can be no Wrong when one acts in the name of Right.
The Earth card is Failure, synonymous with Success Unfulfilled, and it means what it
says the original idea is lost, all progress has failed to produce results. Perhaps its
saving grace is that there is no more energy to waste. The Seven of Disks is sometimes
drawn in the likeness of planting seeds, or of harvesting, which is in line with the
Golden Dawn's idea that the Sevens can represent a powerful, transcending force whose
results depend upon actions taken. That may or may not be, but in any case, nothing has
actually resulted from one's efforts it is the card of unkept promises and
disappointments, and of much work or effort that yields little or no result. More to the
point, it is the card of Vaporware of the project that has received so much fanfare
and publicity, but itself never actually happened.
Hod Splendor the Eights - Card Titles: Swiftness, Indolence or Abandoned Success,
Interference or Shortened Force, Prudence. If Netzach is the drowning of the mind in its
own delusions, then Hod is the incineration of it in its own pride. Here is runaway
rationalizing, serving no purpose other than aggrandizing itself this is a disease to
which philosophers are particularly susceptible. For in Hod, what masquerades as
reason are unstated premises, circular argumentation and pettifogging analysis,
technical vocabulary descending into mindless gibberish, and finally recalcitrant
skepticism that cuts everything to pieces, leaving nothing save the philosopher who pats
himself on the head and says, What a good boy am I! Where Netzach led to illusion
and delusion, the demons of Hod leave behind only a wasteland, for here lie
materialism, reductionism, and deflationary metaphysical theories whose only splendor
lies in their having saved themselves from destruction by embodying nothing but
vacuous rationalization. The Wand is called Swiftness, as we would expect from Fire
being fanned by Air, and there is also the idea of Mercury, being the dispatcher of
messages. It can imply a degree of recklessness, and of details and consequences
overlooked in the name of speed. The Cup is called Indolence, or Abandoned Success,
and here are idealism, desire and wishfulness cut to pieces -- it is fighting the
Revolution only to wind up under yet another dictator, or worse, not fighting it at all
because of in-fighting. Crowley's example is also illustrative: it represents the party for
which elaborate preparations have been made, but the host forgot to invite the guests.
The Sword is Interference or Shortened Force, but it is a much worse card than it
sounds, for here are the noblest of efforts, cut off by obstacles, criticism and disbelief. It
is sometimes depicted as imprisonment, and it may mean that, or more likely, having
been imprisoned by unfettered criticism and degradation. It can also mean outright bad
luck, or interference from unexpected places. In the Disks it is not so bad, for the card is
called Prudence, and it may sometimes be that doing nothing is the best action to take,
or at least waiting until events and influences are clearer. However, as with the Seven,
the Eight of Disks is sometimes considered to be the card of hard work or technical
craftsmanship. But this card is a warning that hard work may well not amount to
anything -- it is the card of extended effort coming to nothing, of prison labor, and of

repetitive work that has no end or purpose. As the Golden Dawn puts it, it is a little
success for the time being, but not leading to much result apart from the thing itself,
or as the song goes, Grind your fingers to the bone, What do you get? Bony fingers!
Yesod Foundation the Nines - Card Titles: Strength, Happiness or Material
Happiness, Cruelty or Despair, Gain or Material Gain. In the Nines, the elemental
energies play their final hand, showing themselves in pure form. It returns to the
balance of the Middle Pillar, and takes some energy from the Sixes. One struggles to see
the perfection of the Sixes, much as one struggles to see the thing depicted in a work of
art. But what is there is the image, enhanced by the mind into an ideal state. The Nines
are the realm of the Moon, and here imagination and illusion play with energy to show
hopes of what might be. The Moon is also the harbinger of change, and in the Nines is
seen the fact that change and stability reinforce each other. Nothing lasts forever, except
for that which can change and adapt. The Wand is called Strength, or even Great
Strength, and here is the last and final burst of energy to cross the finish line. But it can
also be solid protection, and it is sometimes drawn as an interweaving of solid bars. The
Cup is Happiness, or Material Happiness, and is itself a reflection of the Six of Cups. It
is reality imbued with perfection by the mind, and denotes a certain amount of good
luck. Sometimes the Nine of Cups is called the Wish Card, but its wish is all too often
fantastic and unrealistic it is wishing for something that might ultimately bring great
suffering. The Wish of the Sixes is more balanced and realistic, and it is instructive to
note that the path from the Nines to the Sixes is watched over by the Temperance card
for a reason. On the other hand, the Sword is Cruelty, sometimes along with Despair,
and is probably the worst card in the deck. Here the Swords have cut to their deepest,
they have robbed the mind of all hope it is the realization, as Crowley says, that
nothing can lead anywhere. It is damnation in its most final sense. While the Cup is
the realization of one's highest hopes, and the Sword the realization of one's worst fears,
the Earth card is Gain, and even Material Gain the fruit of one's labors, the realization
of all one's efforts. It carries with it the feeling that all was worth it, as it foretells a
continuing satisfaction. As the moon waxes and wanes, however, the results achieved
may come and go due to factors outside of one's control.

The Material World

Here at last is the end of the entire process set in motion by the energy of the elementals.
The energy has burned itself out, and this is what remains. There is no planetary effect
here outside of the Earth itself. While it would appear that there is but one Light in this
World, that is not quite true, for in the Cabala, once something appears settled, one
finds it breaking itself up and starting anew. From Malkuth the four elementals again
rush forth, and the whole process begins itself again. Moreover, Malkuth is divided
within itself, and thereby gives rise to the Court Cards.

In the minds of some, the association of the Material World with the Elemental of Earth
brings a quality of dullness and stupidity, but that is a rather narrow and shortsighted
view. Those things can be true of the Earth influence, but more often there appears a
sense of solidity and endurance. Like Air, the Earth influence can waver on its basic
principles, but unlike Air, it can often be persuaded to do what is right over its own
personal gain and it can most easily be persuaded to do so with coin. Earth can offer
protection, strength and refuge; it can slow down the flames, block the winds and
channel floods, and thus tends to moderate the effects of other influences.
Malkuth - Kingdom - the Tens - Card Titles: Oppression, Satiety or Perpetual Success,
Ruin, Wealth. Here are the end results of the elemental energies which, having
expended themselves, leave only residue behind. While the Nines offer some flexibility
and adaptability, the Tens have no such features, and unassisted may slide into sloth and
stagnation. But the stagnation may be short lived, for like the Phoenix, from the ashes
arise a new flame, and the Tens often signal the end a situation whose time has come,
and the imminent reappearance of the energies of the Aces. In this sense, the Tens can
be the calm before the storm. The Ten of Wands is called Oppression, but what is meant
here is not so much the active oppression of a people by a dictator (a thing more
appropriate to the Fives), but rather the burden of a situation that has lost all of its life.
The glamor is gone, the vitality is drained, and one is left to ask, "Is this all there is?"
One might think that if the Nine of Wands is "protection", then the Ten has become
"national security", with its surveillance, searches, drug tests, arrests, and prisons. In the
Cups it is Satiety, or Perpetual Success, and while that might not seem so bad, it can
mean having eaten to the point of indigestion. The Ten of Cups can be a good thing
pushed too far. The Sword is Ruin, and as Crowley so aptly puts it, it is a lesson that
politicians ought to learn: that if you fight on long enough, everything is lost. The Earth
card is Wealth and material happiness, but unless care is taken, it can descend into
obsession and gluttony -- it can become money for money's sake, like starving to death
with a fortune stashed under the mattress.
In spite of all of this, it must also be kept in mind that just when one thinks everything is
finished, a completely new situation may explode into reality without warning. Thus,
the Ten of Wands can mean a Change of Direction, the Ten of Cups can mean Change of
Heart, the Ten of Swords can mean Change in the Wind, and the Ten of Coins can mean
Change of Fortune. Which meanings apply will depend, to some extent, on the
surrounding cards, but also on the deck in use, as illustrated decks may force one
meaning or another, while classical decks leave the matter for the diviner to decide.

The Minor Arcana

Card

Wands

Cups

Swords

Disks

Light

Planet

World

Ace

Fire

Water

Air

Earth

Crown

Stars

Archetypal

Dominion

Love

Peace,
Peace
Restored

Change,
Harmonious
Change

Wisdom

Neptune "

Virtue,
Established
Strength

Abundance

Sorrow

Work,
Material
Works

Understanding

Saturn

"

Completion,
Perfected Work

Luxury,
Blended
Pleasure

Truce, Rest
from Strife

Power,
Earthly
Power

Mercy

Jupiter

Creative

Strife

Disappointment, Defeat
Loss in Pleasure

Worry,
Material
Trouble

Severity

Mars

"

Victory

Pleasure

Science,
Earned
Success

Success,
Material
Success

Beauty

Sun

"

Valor

Debauch,
Illusionary
Success

Futility,
Unstable
Effort

Failure,
Success
Unfulfilled

Victory

Venus

Formative

Swiftness

Indolence,
Abandoned
Success

Interference, Prudence
Shortened
Force

Splendor

Mercury "

Strength,
Great Strength

Happiness,
Material
Happiness

Cruelty,
Despair

Gain,
Material
Gain

Foundation

Moon

"

10

Oppression

Satiety,
Perpetual
Success

Ruin

Wealth

Kingdom

Earth

Material

Knight

Fire-Fire

Fire-Water

Fire-Air

Fire-Earth

Fire

Summer Archetypal

Queen

Water-Fire

Water-Water

Water-Air

Water-Earth

Water

Fall

Creative

Prince

Air-Fire

Air-Water

Air-Air

Air-Earth

Air

Spring

Formative

Earth-Water

Earth-Air

Earth-Earth

Earth

Winter

Material

Princess Earth-Fire

Minor Arcana -- The Court Cards or Dignitaries

Perhaps more than any other cards in the Tarot, the Court cards, also called Dignitaries,
have been subjected to the widest variety of meanings, and often cause the diviner the
most difficulty in interpretation. This should come as no surprise since they depict, and
often represent, conscious persons, the most difficult of all things to divine. They have
been taken to represent the physical characteristics of actual persons, general
personality types, specific personality characteristics, occupations, social classes,
influences of various persons or personality types, etc. One should keep in mind that as
symbols, the cards of the Tarot are not information in themselves. They are intelligences
-- revealers of information -- and are very much living things in the sense that they
grow, adapt and change as the diviner's understanding of them evolves. Because of their
imagery, the Court cards tend to manifest this "aliveness" more than the other cards,
taking on their own personalities and peculiarities, often stubbornly so. For that reason
it is virtually impossible to give a set of a priori meanings to the Court cards, just as it is
impossible, without invoking outright prejudice, to give specific "meanings" or assign
specific characteristics to persons based on external qualities. One could no more expect
it to be always true that the Knight of Wands is a "flash in the pan", than one could
expect all blonds to be stupid or all people with eyeglasses to be smart.
Nonetheless, one looks for some guidance, and in the traditional scheme of the Cabala,
the Court cards are most often considered from the standpoint of representing
combinations of elemental forces, and the consequences of those combinations. Thus
one has the Airy part of Fire, the Watery part of Air, and so on. This view of the Courts
as a concourse of forces gives the diviner a great deal of freedom in interpretation, as
what is suggested by "The Airy part of Fire" can only be understood in the context of the
divination itself. Unfortunately this can obscure their most obvious role -- representing
actual persons, either as beings in themselves, or as agents of the Unknown.
As to which court cards represent which elemental, there are differences between decks
that have led to much confusion. Just as some decks assign fire to wands and air to
swords, and others reverse this, a similar confusion surrounds the assignment of
elements to ranks. In the traditional "classical" decks, the Court is made up on King,
Queen, Knight and Page or Valet. In this arrangement, Kings and Queens balance each
other as Fire and Water, and Knights and Pages balance as Air and Earth. Some
modifications to the Golden Dawn pattern changed this, and the Court became Knight,
Queen, Prince and Princess, with Knights now taking on the role of Fire. Other decks
modify this further, by returning to the original King, Queen, Knight and Page
structure, but clearly illustrating the Knight as a Fire character, thus creating yet further
confusion. From the theoretical side, it is a hopeless mess, but fortunately, from the
practical side it is much less of a problem. If the deck is of the illustrated or abstract

type, the designer or artist will usually indicate by means of the illustration how this is
to be read: a King sitting on a throne of Fire is obvious, as is a Knight flying through the
air on horseback. The general rule would be: read as according to what the deck
suggests to one's own individual interpretation, while keeping in mind that Court cards
have personalities of their own, and may, in a reading, behave in ways that befuddle
whatever ideas the diviner may have about them.
There are too many possible interpretations for the Court cards -- as noted, everything
from physical and personality characteristics to abstract astrological and elemental
correspondences -- to attempt any kind of tabulation of their ranges of meaning. As
with the Major Arcana, it is suggested that instead of relying on keywords and preassigned meanings, the diviner should rely on the method of asking questions. One
might consider just what sort of role the figure would play in a drama, or in an actual
royal court, and why such a person might show up at this time and place, and how that
might relate to the surrounding cards.
Since Plato's Symposium, philosophers have been fascinated by the idea of banquets,
in which the participants eat, drink, and then make speeches. One might also think of
the Mad Hatter's tea party as an example of how this might not always go as planned.
When a Court card appears in a reading, perhaps that individual is rising to give a
speech, and maybe in this case the best thing to do is to just let them speak.. This is not a
silly as it at first sounds -- in his works on analysis, Jung suggested that when all else
fails, one should just ask the unconscious what it wants. There being little logic to either
the traditional or theoretical interpretations of the Courts, one might just as well start
out with this method, in effect asking, "Who are you and what do you want?" One is
then directly addressing the unconscious and, perhaps through is image, the Unknown
itself. And it just might answer back.

The Knights (or Kings in Classical style decks)

The Knights/Kings are associated with the element of Fire, and thus generally represent
sudden, rapid action or impulse -- or at least the capability of acting that way. They rule
the Archetypal World, and so represent unformed energy -- in practice this often means
that by themselves, the Knights bring energy to things, but seldom actually accomplish
anything on their own, other than to stir things up. They are also associated with the
Light of Wisdom, and therefore with beginnings in an ideal state. This can show up as
passionate and enthusiastic devotion or action, but it may not be long-lived. Being Fire
cards, Knights are especially energized by Fire and Air, and a Knight surrounded by
Fire cards is a dangerous creature indeed.
The Knight of Wands: Fiery part of Fire. Quick to act, brings great energy, can get
things moving and overcome obstacles. But can also "start fires" everywhere, and be

short-lived.
Knight of Cups: Fiery part of Water. Passionate and gallant, but as before, not very
persistent. Can turn sour and persecute those who do not "believe".
Knight of Swords: Fiery part of Air. A brilliant flash, brave, strong, problem solver with
great ideas. But may leave behind a mess for others to clean up. In the form of the
classical King, he can be a great teacher and thinker.
Knight of Disks: Fiery part of Earth. Strongest of protectors, can move mountains, but
can also become one: may be stubborn and even stupid, or may only appear that way.

The Queens
The Queens represent the element of Water, and though generally regarded as passive,
they are not always so, any more than a tsunami can be considered "passive". They
solidify and stabilize energy, and also exhibit the qualities of "enthronement" and
"majesty". They add the quality of endurance to the Knight's energy -- an angered
Knight will pass quickly, but a Queen can wait patiently to strike at the worst possible
time. The Queens are also associated with the Light of Understanding, and thus are
receivers and fertilizers of ideas and energies. They also rule the Creative World, and
give direction, meaning and form to ideas. As they are receivers of energy, they can also
transmute those energies -- they can alter situations for the better, or for the worse.
Queen of Wands: Watery part of Fire. Can be alluring, enchanting, seductive, brilliant,
and diplomatic. But can turn angry and vicious, for no apparent reasons.
Queen of Cups: Watery part of Water. Here is the depth of emotion, dreaminess, psychic
ability, and sensitivity. The this Queen can bring a great depth of meaning and
understanding to what passes her way, but she can also twist and degrade.
Queen of Swords: Watery part of Air. Intensely perceptive, can clarify and interpret. But
is also an intense individualist, and can turn deceitful and vengeful if wronged. Note
that in one deck she becomes Lady Macbeth, and thus may not foretell the best of
dreams, or awakenings.
Queen of Disks: Watery part of Earth. The "Earth Mother", nurturing, caring, patient
and affectionate. But can be stupid, dull, and entirely mechanical in doing things.

The Princes (or Knights in Classical-style decks)

The Princes represent the Element of Air, and also have connections with the Light of

Beauty, and with the Formative World. Consequently, they share in the active nature of
the Knights, but also bring the more continuing strength of Tiphareth. Where the
Knights are lightning, the Princes are the thunder and wind -- they have the strength of
a storm, and the ability to endure. But they are not the causes of action, they are more
the results of the Knights and Queens acting together. They bring an expansion of
effects and a broadening of horizons, and can make great consequences of little things.
They often do not start things, but have the strength to persevere to the end. Ruling the
Formative World, they also share in the affects and effects of the mind, which may be for
better or worse -- they may analyze and think things through, but they can get carried
away, to the point of almost demonic possession, by the ideas and delusions they
harbor.
Prince of Wands: Airy part of Fire. A firestorm -- great rushing of energy and power, can
see things through to the end, but can also become destructive and single-minded. May
"crusade" for causes in which he does not believe, and can be impulsive. Often
emotionless.
Prince of Cups: Airy part of Water. Can be artistic, but usually secretive, with a calm
facade that hides the most intense of passions. May act without conscience or concern
for consequences. Usually mistrusted, as he will use others for his own aims.
Prince of Swords: Airy part of Air. As one might expect of the intellect unaffected by
other elements, here is a mass of ideas with little regard for practicality -- he may be an
"absent-minded professor". But also utterly ruthless if he sees a logic in it. May carry
idealism to the point of detached cruelty, seeing others as mere ideas.
Prince of Disks: Airy part of Earth. This is the intellect brought to bear on practical
problems, and so is the best of managers and workers, capable of adapting as well as
forming and following detailed plans. But as he is consumed in the idea, he may, like
the other Air dignitaries, lose sight of consequences and effects. One might think of new
industrial processes that are more efficient, but produce greater pollution. So in this
card, there is not much outward difference between well- and ill-dignified as far as the
card and what/who it represents are concerned; the effect is more on the reaction of
others around him.

The Princesses, Pages or Valets

The Princesses represent the element of Earth, and are connected with the Light of the
Kingdom, and the Material World. One might think from this that they must be rather
dull characters, but this is not the case, for just as among the Tens, the Princesses lie at
the brink of transformation and rebirth. As Crowley says, the Princesses "are those
numerous 'elemental' people whom we recognize by their lack of all sense of

responsibility." That may or may not be, but the Princesses certainly show the original
elemental qualities moving through the material world, as though strangers in a foreign
land. In the old decks the Princesses were shown as Valets or Messengers, and they
often take on the role of delivering news, though all too often the Messenger gets
blamed for the message. Just as the Tens can signal unexpected changes, the Princesses
or Valets can also signal imminent change, though usually as this relates to some piece
of information, or a person through whom such information is obtained.
Princess of Wands: Earthy part of Fire. Energetic, enthusiastic and individualistic, but
lacking in patience and temperament. Can therefore become explosive, and completely
self-centered. In a sense represents the "fuel" of fire -- that which is consumed by the
flames. If unbalanced, can become downright vicious.
Princess of Cups: Earthy part of Water. The very personification of romance -- maybe
romanticism is the better word -- living in a world of dreaminess and rapture. Might be
though of as selfish and uncaring, but this is more jealousy of her, than her actual
attributes. The perfect "dream girl".
Princess of Swords: Earthy part of Air. Bringing Air down to Earth, she can be the ideal
inventor and innovator, infinitely clever and resourceful. She can also be the perfect
negotiator, and loves to settle arguments and controversies. But can also apply these
same traits to evil ends, and while being an efficient manager, both firm and aggressive,
she can be stern and revengeful, and can bring things to total collapse with her
controlling nature.
Princess of Disks: Earthy part of Earth. While it would seem that this should be the
bottom of the barrel, in reality it is the entire Tree of Life ready to explode into a new
reality. The Princess is therefore unpredictable, and the most mysterious of all the
Dignitaries. She appears to do nothing, but conceals within her all possibilities for
everything. There is a saying among firefighters, "Expect the unexpected", and this is
the foremost characteristic of this Princess. In the guise of the Page or Valet, this card
can also symbolize the delivery of goods.

The Tarot and the Days of the Year

There are many systems for assigning dates to the cards, and there is no logical
connection between the different systems. Some, like the Golden Dawn system, are
based upon correspondences between the Cabala and the traditional astrological Zodiac
signs. Others are based upon correspondences between the suits and the seasons of the
year, and there are other methods as well. The most logical method is to use
correspondences between the seasons and the suits, but there is no consistency between
authors as to which season is assigned to which suit.

In the Golden Dawn system, each card of the Minor Arcana rules a decan, or 1/3 of a
Zodiacal sign; there is also a planet associated with that decan. In addition, the Court
cards rule three decans, and therefore also rule three of the numbered cards. The
Princesses, along with the Aces, are assigned to a quadrant over the poles, which
comes down to meaning a season, commencing with a Solstice or Equinox. By rule is
meant that these cards will be especially influential at these times, or may denote these
actual times in a reading.
One reason for considering the assignment of dates to cards is that it may aid in
choosing a significator, a card which represents the Questioner, or some other specific
person. Depending upon the layout chosen for reading the cards, the significator may
indicate which cards, or aspects of the reading, are most influential. One way of
assigning a significator involves choosing a card based on the Questioner's birth-date.

The Dates According to the Golden Dawn

Card

Wands

Cups

Swords

Disks

Ace

Summer Jun 21

Autumn Sep 21 Winter Dec 21

Spring Mar 21

Mars
Aries 0-10
Mar 21 Mar 30

Venus
Can 0-10
Jun 21 Jul 1

Moon
Lib 0-10
Sep 23 Oct 2

Jupiter
Cap 0-10
Dec 22 Dec 30

Sun
Aries 10-20
Mar 31 Apr 10

Mercury
Can 10-20
Jul 2 Jul 11

Saturn
Lib 10-20
Oct 3 Oct 12

Mars
Cap 10-20
Dec 31- Jan 9

Venus
Aries 20-30
Apr 11 Apr 20

Moon
Can 20-30
Jul 12 Jul 21

Jupiter
Lib 20-30
Oct 13 Oct 22

Sun
Cap 20-30
Jan 10 Jan 19

Saturn
Leo 0-10
Jul 22 Aug 1

Mars
Sco 0-10
Oct 23 Nov 1

Venus
Aqu 0-10
Jan 20 Jan 29

Mercury
Taurus 0-10
Apr 21 Apr 30

Jupiter
Leo 10-20
Aug 2 Aug 11

Sun
Sco 10-20
Nov 2 Nov 12

Mercury
Aqu 10-20
Jan 30 Feb 8

Moon
Taurus 10-20
May 1 May 10

Mars
Leo 20-30
Aug 12 Aug 22

Venus
Moon
Sco 20-30
Aqu 20-30
Nov 13 Nov 22 Feb 9 Feb 18

Mercury
Sag 0-10
Nov 23 Dec 2

Saturn
Pis 0-10
Feb 19 Feb 28

Jupiter
Sun
Gem 0-10
Virgo 0-10
May 21 May 30 Aug 23 Sep 1

Moon
Sag 10-20
Dec 3 Dec 12

Jupiter
Pis 10-20
Mar 1 Mar 10

Mars
Gem 10-20
Jun 1 Jun 10

10

Saturn
Sag 20-30
Dec 13 Dec 20

Mars
Sun
Pis 20-30
Gem 20-30
Mar 11 Mar 20 Jun 11 Jun 20

Mercury
Virgo 20-30
Sep 12 Sep 22

Feb 9 Mar 10
Rules C8 C9 S7

Aug 12 Sep 11
Rules D8 D9 W7

Knight / Nov 13 Dec 12

King
Rules W8 W9 C7
Queen

May 11 Jun 10
Rules S8 S9 D7

Saturn
Taurus 20-30
May 11 May 20

Venus
Virgo 10-20
Sep 2 Sep 11

Mar 11 Apr 20
Jun 11 Jul 11
Sep 12 Oct 12 Dec 13 Jan 9
Rules W2 W3 C10 Rules C2 C3 S10 Rules S2 S3 D10 Rules D2 D3 W10

Prince / Jul 12 Aug 11

Knight Rules W5 W6 C4

Oct 13 Nov 12 Jan 10 Feb 8

Rules C5 C6 S4 Rules S5 S6 D4

Princess Jun 22 Sep 22

Rules W1,
Summer

Sep 23 Dec 21
Rules C1,
Autumn

Apr May 10
Rules D5 D6 W4

Dec 22 Mar 20 Mar 21 Jun 21

Rules S1,
Rules D1,
Winter
Spring

IIII. Interpretive Methods

Tarot cards take on meaning by virtue of their being interpreted. On their own, they
have no meaning, they are simply ink on cardboard. They become meaningful when
they engage the mind in the self-consuming dialectic -- when the unconscious imbues
them with meaning by imagining ideas suggested by the imagery. Through this
process, the unconscious associates the images with reflections in the Unknown of
events, ideas, and persons of which consciousness has no direct awareness. In this way
consciousness is able to extend itself beyond the limits of the physical senses into
regions of time and space otherwise inaccessible.

Layouts
To assist the diviner in associating ideas and meanings with the cards actually drawn,
structured layouts or spreads of cards are used that connect cards drawn in a certain
order with specific categories of meaning. Cards placed in certain positions of the layout
might be associated with events in the past, conscious or unconscious motivations,
hopes, fears, dreams, possible events and circumstances in the future, and so on. The
actual layout is purely artificial there is of course no a priori reason why a certain card
should be associated with the future and not the past, and so on. The connection is
made in the mind, and through repeated use of specific layouts, the association of
meaning with location in the layout becomes unconscious and automatic.
The layout used is, therefore, purely at the discretion of the diviner, and takes on its
meaning because the diviner imbues it with that meaning, and for no other reason.
Diviners often experiment with different layouts, as some will be more effective for one
person than for another. An individual diviner may also use several different layouts
that emphasize different meanings, selecting the layout based upon what type of insight
is sought. Just as in the choice of a deck itself, the layout used for reading the cards is a
matter of personal choice for each diviner.
Consequently, there are innumerable different layouts. Entire books of suggested
layouts have been published, and it can safely be said that every layout works for
somebody at some time, but no layout works for everybody all of the time. Layouts
range in complexity from just one or a few cards, to spreads that use every card in the
deck. In addition, some diviners will work with only the Major Arcana, or the Major
Arcana plus the Aces, or other combinations of Major and Minor Arcana as the diviner
feels is appropriate. This may limits the choice of layout, and affect the techniques used
for reading it.
It is useful to consider the differences between those layouts in which each card signifies

a specific meaning, and those in which multiple cards contribute to each class of ideas.
Some layouts have one card for past events, one card for obstacles, one card for future
events, and so on, while other layouts use multiple cards. Each has its advantages and
drawbacks.
Probably the best known layout, at least among novice diviners, is the so-called "Celtic
Cross", a ten-card spread in which each card takes a specific meaning. The advantages
to a layout like this are that it is easy to learn, quick to perform, and gives up its answers
directly. Many diviners, especially while learning the Tarot, use this kind of layout
because of its simplicity and convenience. The difficulty is that layouts that demand that
one card predict the future, for example, may restrict the ability of the oracle yield a
robust answer, or worse, may descend into generalities that appear profound but really
mean nothing. Divining future influences that "will follow the path already taken" says
nothing that isn't obvious, and "The future depends on your choices" is trivial to the
point of being just plain stupid. This sort of thing can be "divined" by watching
television or reading internet gossip; divination plays no part in it.
To be of any value the oracle must tell us something useful, and to do so often requires
distinguishing fine shades of meaning and sorting out multiple influences and effects,
which a single card may not be able to do. Layouts like this put much more of the
burden of divination on the diviner to discover and interpret meanings with little
assistance from the cards, and the divination usually winds up taking on more of the
character of the diviner, and less of the cards themselves. This is not to say that such
layouts cannot work or should not be used, but it does need to be pointed out that their
effective use is not so easy as it seems.
For the same reasons why the cards should be read as symbols and not as signs or
keywords, many prefer layouts in which the emphasis is placed more on the
relationships between the cards, than upon any one card signifying any specific
meaning. This greatly facilitates reading by dignification -- the development of meanings
based upon the relationships between cards -- and usually employs more complex
layouts, requiring a larger number of cards, and far more time for interpretation.
Layouts with a larger number of cards may also be more effective at prompting and
answering questions, as opposed to single-card placements that tend to blurt out oneliners. The effort is justified by the deeper insights the method affords, and also by the
observation that the more one uses this method, the deeper ones understanding of the
cards becomes.
Along these lines, one might ask whether just laying out the cards in a pattern with no
specific meanings assigned to specific positions might be worthwhile. Other oracles,
such as the Lenormand cards, are often read this way. Related to this question is the
practice of laying out additional cards to clarify meanings. In the method taught by

Phillipe Camoin, for example, the layout begins with a fairly simple draw of cards, but
then additional cards are added to clarify meanings, solve "problems", and serve as
targets for the gaze of court card figures. This can result in a layout that grows in
complex and unusual ways. A layout that grows in response to the diviner's
interpretation of the cards might be termed "progressive", as opposed to a "static" layout
like the Celtic Cross, in which the number and position of the cards is fixed beforehand.
The chief difficulty in reading the Tarot "Lenormand" style is the sheer number of cards
involved: a Lenormand deck has 36 cards, whereas a Tarot deck will have 78, or in some
cases, more. Many diviners find it difficult to develop focus or orientation when
confronted by this number of cards all at once. While less complex progressive style
layouts can also get large and messy, many find that they afford greater opportunity for
interpretation than static layouts, and are especially effective when read with some form
of dignification. Progressive layouts can become very time consuming to interpret, but
as with reading by dignification in general, they allow the diviner's understanding of
the cards, and what they represent, to evolve, and they also afford the cards more of an
opportunity to "speak as they will", rather than rigidly conforming to the diviner's
expectations.

Divination Failures
Tarot divination is possible only because there exist processes in the world and in the
psyche that reach beyond the limits of classical physics, and its rule-governed notions of
cause and effect. But it is important to realize is that by invoking an understanding of
the world that reaches beyond the limits of necessity, one has entered a realm of
uncertainty and relativity. If the connections between cause and effect are relative and
not absolute, then those connections are not perfect, and are subject to a certain amount
of variability. In simple mathematics, which is governed by the rules of logic, 1 + 1 = 2,
and it always does unless one changes the logic of the system. In physics, however, the
rules are empirical and not logical, and as a consequence, 1 + 1 might not equal 2, but
may only approximate it, and in any given instance could be equal to something very
different than what is expected.
Since reading the Tarot is a physical process and not entirely a logical one, it is subject to
the same conditions of relativity and uncertainty. This means that the connections
between events are not absolute, but behave according to statistical rules. The
connections between causes and effects, between actions and results, and even between
ideas and meanings, are, as Jung said, only relatively true they are not inflexible and
infallible, and they have none of the qualities of necessity that one finds in mathematics.
A certain result will not always follow from a certain action, and the same thing done
under the same circumstances does not always produce the same result. Even in the
best of cases, results only follow within statistical limits.

What this means for reading the Tarot is that even for the most experienced diviners,
some attempts at laying out the cards will produce results that are uninterpretable
they appear to be nothing but nonsense. This does not indicate a fault of the diviner,
nor a fault of the oracle. It is simply a consequence of the fact that the principles that
allow the Tarot to work at all, will occasionally produce results that are nothing more
than statistical noise. In truth, this happens more often than most diviners would like
to admit, as it seems, at first, to reflect badly on the oracle. But, like scientific
experiments that must be repeated many times in order to establish a statistically valid
distribution of outcomes, divinations that depend upon the same principles as those
experiments should be expected to also produce variable results. Add to this the
subjective element of interpretation, and it should be more surprising that divination
ever works at all, let alone that it doesn't work perfectly all of the time.
It is up to the diviner to determine whether a given divination attempt is valid or not,
and this often depends more upon subtle psychological cues than objective results. For
reasons already discussed, a divination that goes "right" often has an unmistakable aura
or numinosity a feeling of otherness, or other worldliness, sometimes even
described as an alien presence." Even those that don't carry this numinosity with them
may nonetheless be useful, if the result coalesces into some sort of identifiable story or
meaning. On the other hand, many layouts will simply be confusing, empty, and little
more than disconnected gibberish. An aspiring diviner should not be discouraged by
these apparent "failures"; a divination that appears to be nothing but static or noise
probably is just that. This is simply a consequence of the fact that the processes that
allow the Tarot to work at all are inherently "noisy", and their lack of cooperation in any
specific instance should not be cause for alarm or despair.
Some diviners recommend that to minimize these problems, a preliminary exercise of
some sort should be preformed prior to the divination itself. Relaxations, meditations,
ceremonial rituals, purifications, burning incense, listening to music, fasting, and for
some, the use of entheogenic drugs have all been suggested as ways of helping the mind
focus on the divination process. There is little doubt that such preparations can be
helpful in aiding concentration, but each diviner must determine what preparations, if
any, work the best. Nonetheless, no matter how prepared, focused or well trained the
mind is, there will still be statistical variability in the divination process that can only be
avoided by doing something other than divination.
There is a very close relationship between divination and dreaming. As already
mentioned, conscious and unconscious communicate most effectively when the barriers
between them are at their weakest, and under normal conditions, this happens during
dreaming, and also in the moments before falling asleep and waking. During this time,
the bicameral mind is at its quietest, because the processes of external perception it

needs to operate are essentially shut down. It is at this time that the Spirit of the Depths
can speak with the least interference. Thus the logic of various meditative and
relaxation practices, which serve to limit sensory input and/or perception. This also, in
part, explains the effectiveness of various entheogenic substances -- they essentially
lower the barriers between conscious and unconscious by activating those brain
processes that enable conscious to perceive processes in the unconscious directly.
In connection with the problem of "noise", there will be occasions in which no matter
how many times the cards are shuffled and spread, it becomes apparent that the
divination just will not work. Whether this is due to a "disturbance in the Force", a
disturbance in the psyche, or some other, probably unidentifiable reason, there will be
situations and circumstances under which divination is not possible. The diviner must
work out for him or her self the conditions under which the operation should be
abandoned. The Golden Dawn, for example, recommends that on the third failure, no
further attempts should be made in the matter. For reasons that one may never know,
"the stars are not right", and further attempts are just a waste of time.
On the other hand, the inability of a diviner to obtain answers to some questions can be
intentional. It was already mentioned in passing that the Spirit of the Depths is generally
willing to speak, unless barriers of some sort have been erected. It is possible for those
knowledgeable in such matters to deny access to certain kinds of information over
which they have control. It is beyond the scope of this essay to go into the details, but
magickal protections and other operations can effectively block the diviner's access to
certain subjects. While it may in theory be possible to breech such protections or
barriers, it is not advisable for anyone not knowledgeable in these areas to attempt it, for
such barriers are often guarded. At the very least, attempting to break through such a
seal will almost certainly incur the wrath of the wizard who placed it, and this is not
something an aspiring diviner will want to wind up in the middle of.
Finally, one should consider the circumstances under which one is willing to do
divination at all. Divination is not a trivial thing, and the information it reveals can be
upsetting, embarrassing, and even frightening. It is, therefore, not suitable for casual
social situations, or even for some Questioners who really do not want to know. There
are always those party-goers who think it to be a parlor game, and will demand a
reading on this topic or that, often one of romance or other personal matters, before an
audience in various states of intoxication. Under these conditions, the oracle will
usually oblige, with extreme prejudice. Unless the diviner harbors a deep and personal
disliking for such Questioners, it is best to refuse, or to ask for a more private session at
another time. On the other hand, it can be truly gratifying to see the obnoxious
loudmouth get what is deserved, especially when it is what was asked for.

Divining for Answers or Insights

Things revealed in a divination are not necessarily what they appear to be. The process
of divination is complex, involving many acausal connections between the world, the
psyche, and the Unknown, and those connections are subject to influences that are not
always obvious to the diviner. Consequently, if one seeks an answer to some specific
question, very often a clear story will emerge, and the diviner will feel that the
divination is valid, but what is received may be relevant to something entirely different
from what was asked. There can be many reasons for this: there may be aspects of the
question of which the diviner, or questioner if there is one, is not aware or does not
acknowledge; the question as asked may be unspecific or may not be the real point of
the matter; or there may be other matters in the unconscious that are more important
than the question being asked.
It can be a very hard lesson to learn, that the world does not revolve around any
individual person, nor their problems, nor their perceived problems. When one peers
into the state-space in which oracles like the Tarot operate, one is engaging the forces
that shape the Universe and its fate, changes and destiny, as well as the lives of those
who live within it. As already discussed, the Unknown does not do what it does
because of you, or for you, or against you it does what it does because that is what it
does, and for no other reason. Though it is not about you, it certainly affects you, and it
is those affects that are revealed through divination. Bearing in mind that there is much
more to the unconscious than the contents of any individual's personal psychology,
there may be more pressing matters in it than whatever one feels at any given moment.
The Tarot, and particularly the Major Arcana, are concerned with the big picture, and
sometimes there are bigger issues than the fight someone had with their partner. The
Major Arcana are also called trumps for a reason, and beyond their role in tarocchi
games, they often indicate disturbances or imbalances of transpersonal significance. For
that reason, when a coherent story emerges during a divination, especially when
coupled with a numinous aura, that story should probably be taken seriously, and any
other matters, at least for the moment, set aside.
Along these same lines, while it is certainly true that the Tarot can be used for divining
answers to specific questions, there is absolutely no reason why it cannot be used in a
more general sense of plumbing the depths of the collective unconscious for its own
sake. Just as one can appreciate the stars without searching for a specific constellation,
so one can take the results of divination as it comes, without any preconceived priorities
or directions, letting the oracle speak as it will, with an open mind and a willingness to
take whatever it gives. In practice, this means laying out the cards, and simply studying
for whatever story or direction emerges on its own. While this type of divination is often
done in connection with seasonal celebrations or other such events, it can also be the
best way of learning to read the oracle in the first place, by simply placing the cards in
whatever layout the diviner chooses, and looking for whatever story takes shape. In this

way, one learns to pay attention to the cards, as opposed to paying attention to one's
own beliefs and assumptions.
Similarly, if one is going to engage in open-ended, non-directed divination of this sort,
there is also no reason why divination must be done for, or in the presence of, a
Questioner. Some feel that one should not "divine for one's own self", but there seems
little logic to this belief, if one is willing to truly keep an open mind, and to accept the
mental discipline to concentrate on the cards as opposed to one's own opinions. The
collective unconscious is just that -- a transpersonal entity with its roots in the eternal
and infinite, and there is a great deal more there than one's own personal business. It is
true that in the mirror of the Unknown, one can see a reflection of one's self, but that
reflection is a caricature and not necessarily the total picture, and it is not the only
picture that is to be seen there. Still, it is important that if one is to engage in divination
at all, that care be taken that it does not descend into psychoanalysis. The procedures
used in divination are very much like, and in some cases only slight modifications of,
procedures used in psychoanalysis, but the purposes are different. If one does not take
care, it is all too easy to allow the contents of one's personal unconscious, trumpeted by
the Spirit of the Times, to play its hand in a reading. If one listens for the voice of the
Spirit of the Depths, and instead hears a rash of gossip, criticism and advice, then one is
hearing the voice of the anatomy of the brain, and some sort of clearing is definitely in
order. The personal unconscious is not the collective unconscious, and the difference
between the voices of the Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths will be
immediately obvious to anyone who has heard them.

Reading by Dignification
Because the Tarot consists of a limited number of images, it cannot express every
possible combination of forces, actions, personalities, and situations that are represented
in the Unknown. Divining effectively will therefore involve distinguishing fine shades
of meaning in the images that are displayed, and developing additional meanings
beyond what the images themselves can display. To assist in this process, diviners
commonly use one or more techniques that effectively multiply the meanings that can
be derived from the images themselves.
One of the simplest ways of getting additional meanings from the cards is to shuffle and
deal the cards in such a way that some of the cards will appear upside-down or, as
diviners say, "reversed." Depending upon how one interprets such "reversals," this can
effectively double the number of available categories, or else add fine shades of
meaning. Reversed cards often are considered to have opposite, antagonistic, delayed or
obstructed meanings. In some cases, such as decks derived from the Ettiella system -not really much of a "system", more just memorized lists of keywords -- completely
different meanings are assigned to reversed cards. Further, in some methods of reading,

such as Phillipe Camoin's method of laying out the cards, the method requires, and will
not work without, reversed cards.
There are arguments both for and against reading with reversed cards. In favor of the
method, it must be said that unless one takes great care, to the point of outright
fussiness, in shuffling and dealing the cards, it is difficult to keep them from reversing.
Many layouts, particularly those in which specific meanings are pre-assigned to certain
positions, seem to give more robust results when read with reversals. Many decks are
designed with double images, or double sets of symbols or keywords, to facilitate
reading reversals, or even images that appear differently when reversed.
On the other hand, it can be said that many decks seem to be designed in such a way as
to make reading reversed cards awkward, if not completely impossible. Some diviners
find that, especially in the case of fully illustrated decks, it is difficult to establish a
rapport, or carry out any kind of self-consuming dialect, with images that are upside
down and therefore difficult to perceive clearly -- it becomes more of an obstacle than an
aid. In addition to problems with the illustrated style, with many of the classical style
decks it can be difficult to tell -- unless one cheats by adding additional markings to the
cards -- whether a card is upside down or not. But most telling is the observation that by
assigning different meanings to right-side-up and upside-down cards, one is basically
reading by keywords and not by interpretation, in the sense of considering the cards to
be self-consuming artifacts. Distinguishing different meanings for normal and reversed
cards presupposes assigned meanings in the first place, which can effectively halt the
process of divination as it is being considered here.
Another way of expanding the divinatory capacity of the oracle is to read the cards
using dignification, a system of modifying meanings according to nearby and
surrounding cards. The idea behind dignification is that cards placed in a layout for
reading influence each other more or less depending upon how close they are to each
other, and how the forces they represent affect each other. Dignification can be used
with any deck, irrespective of design; it might be worth mentioning that the Golden
Dawn system, on which many modern decks are to some extent based, was never
intended to be used with reversals, but specifically intended for use with dignification.
While there are several ways to consider the influences of the cards upon each other,
including the zodiacal and planetary assignments of the cards, the gender of the figure
on the card if there is one, the colors on the card, and so on, primary importance is often
given to the elemental representation of the card. Fire and Air, being "active" elements,
are usually thought of as reinforcing each other, as are the "passive" elements of Water
and Earth. The active and passive elements are usually considered hostile or
antagonistic they may delay, weaken, negate or even reverse the effects of a given card.
This is especially true if a card of one elemental is surrounded by cards of another a

fire card surrounded by water cards get doused, a fire card surrounded by air cards gets
blown into a frenzy, and a sword surrounded by earth cards gets buried. Sometimes
Wands and Disks are also considered friendly, as are Swords and Water, but this is not
always the case. In addition, "unfriendly" cards often do reinforce each other -- a two of
Cups influenced by a Fire card might mean a passionate encounter. There is no hard
and fast rule for this; the exact way in which members of a card group relate is left to the
diviner's own intuition and understanding. This is the real advantage of this method, as
it gives the cards a greater opportunity to work on the diviner's imagination, and it
gives the diviner an opportunity to study complex relationships and distinguish fine
shades of meaning.
The interplay of elemental influences reaches its crescendo in the Court cards, which are
themselves interplays of elemental energies. Of course the Court cards may indicate
actual persons, and their thoughts, actions, intentions, and so on; this is especially true
if a specific question has been asked, and the arrangement of the cards suggests the
activity of a specific person. One might think that a Princess with Cup cards nearby is
more interested in the dreamy aspects of a relationship, whereas surrounded by Fire
cards she might be looking for intensity, and surrounded by Swords might be looking to
move on. But the Court cards can also indicate elemental influences independent of
actual persons, or perhaps the influence of persons that are not, and may never be,
directly known. An Eight of Swords influenced by a Knight of Wands could, for
example, mean a nasty comment from a passer-by, or a derogatory letter that is sent
unsigned.
Another interesting relationship between the cards is what Phillipe Camoin calls "The
Law of Regarding", by which he means taking note of the direction in which the figure
on the card, if there is one, is facing. In this method, the card placed in the direction the
figure is looking has special meaning -- one might say it is the object of the figure's gaze,
and may reveal additional information about the situation or its possibilities. A Queen
of Swords flanked by Fire cards, looking in the direction of the Two of Cups, would be
an ill omen for a romance or for pretty much anything else, and would be hard to
undo except, maybe, by XVI The Blasted Tower (which in this case might actually be
read as The Blessed Tower). In the event that there is no adjacent card in the relevant
direction, in this method one is supposed to draw a card and place it there.
Camoin's method of reading also uses reversed cards, which, according to his "Law of
Solutions", are considered "problems". The solution to the problem is found by placing
another card above, or if that is not possible adjacent to, the reversed card. The new card
suggests the solution, and once the problem and solution are understood, the reversed
card is then turned upright. Of course there is the possibility that the "solution" might
itself be a "problem" that will need another solution, or may also involve a figure whose
direction must be considered. This method of reading the cards may therefore progress

from a relatively simple layout to a very complex structure involving many cards.
In addition to the elemental influences, it is also important to take into account the
numbers on the cards involved -- cards with a lower number can dramatically influence,
or even overpower, cards of a higher number. The eight of swords may introduce an
element of unease, but realistically has no power to undo a two of cups, unless
accompanied by a collaborating Major such as XV -- gossip can never undo true love,
unless it is done on television. Also, the balanced cards -- aces, sixes, nines and tens -will exert more influence upon the meaning of the layout than the unbalanced cards.
Sixes are among the most powerful of cards, and while they can be strongly influenced
by twos and threes, they can really only be overpowered by aces, or by other cards
supported by the Major Arcana. Groupings of twos, fours and sevens, or threes, fives,
and eights, suggest strongly unbalanced forces, and warn of dangerous outcomes.
Nines and tens, while by themselves may give the impression of catastrophe or ecstasy,
may be little more than "paper tigers" in the presence of lower numbered cards.
Cards of a lower number tend also to be forward-looking. As decreasing numbers
generally represent less well formed ideas as opposed to established physical
conditions, they may be more indicative of future events and possibilities. In view of
this, in a particular grouping of cards, it may be said that however they are placed and
in whatever order, the lower numbered cards usually take precedence as far as the
future is concerned, over those of higher numerical value. This is a very rough
generalization, and does not always apply. In reading the cards, often an idea or a
pattern of meaning may appear that contradicts these general rules. In this case, the
cards are the ultimate authority, and one should never give precedence to general
interpretive guidelines over what that cards themselves are saying.
Yet another aspect of dignification is considering the order in which the cards are
drawn. This can be of more or less importance depending upon the type of layout
chosen for the reading, but very often the cards that precede or follow a card can
influence its meaning in different ways. The Chariot followed by The Devil, for example,
could mean imminent bad news, while the other way around could mean escape from a
bad situation. Some layouts rely on cards placed in groups rather than as individuals,
and when read this way, the first card of a group may represent the main idea, modified
by the second and third, and to a lesser degree by any subsequently placed cards. Cards
to the left may indicate influences from the past, and cards to the right may indicate
influences from, or effects upon, the future, depending upon the details of the layout.
Cards that are immediately adjacent can modify or even overpower one another,
whereas cards that are more than two or three spaces away have little or no effect,
unless they form a definite pattern or trend. In connection with these ideas, another
interesting aspect of Camoin's method is the special significance of The Fool -- when it
appears in a layout, it indicates the present in time; those cards that lie ahead of The

Fool's path are in the future, while those behind his direction of travel are in the past.
One can study and practice the method of dignification with a simple layout, such as
placing three or more cards at a time, with no particular question or subject in mind.
The diviner then tries to decide which card is the strongest, what the overall influences
are, how the cards influence each other, and what, if any, overall meaning emerges.
Consideration can be given to the various attributions of the Tree of Life, the elemental
influences, and the effects of, and upon, the Major Arcana and the Court cards if
present. This can actually be done as a game with others, and while it does amount to
"playing the Wonder Game" with the Tarot, it is a useful exercise for increasing the
understanding of the various influences, and for sharpening one's skill at interpreting.
In reading by dignification, it will often be found that the cards arrange themselves into
a definite pattern of meaning that can best be expressed as a "story". Such a story may or
may not be an accurate history or prediction; its purpose is to clarify meanings, and to
open the imagination to the forces represented by the cards. This method can be applied
to any of several layouts, but is often used by simply laying out cards, one after another,
until the story seems complete. This procedure can actually be used just for the purpose
of composing stories, and can be made into a game in which several players take turns
drawing a card, and adding to the story.
One of the most difficult problems to overcome in learning to read the cards is the
tendency to interpret the cards as beads on a string assigning a particular and
discrete meaning to each individual card, and then attempting to string them together
into a coherent pattern. The sheer volume of information available on card meanings
unfortunately aids and abets this error; it is difficult to put aside the lists of keywords,
correspondences, and so forth, but that is what must be done. The book learning must
be allowed to work at an unconscious level even though the diviner may not be
directly aware of it, the knowledge that has been accumulated will assert itself in the
self-consuming dialectic, if it is given the freedom to do so. The cards must be
interpreted as a whole, and in terms of their overall effect upon each other, and not as a
series of keywords or unrelated concepts. One way of avoiding this problem of dwelling
on the mental list of keywords is to glance only for a second at each card, and try to
understand them as a pattern rather than as individual entities. The story-telling
method can assist in this process by focusing the diviner's attention on the pattern of the
reading as a whole.
What is most important to keep in mind when using the Tarot for divination is that
there are no rigid rules for reading, nor are there firmly assigned meanings to any of the
cards. Each reading takes on a life of its own, and the diviner must be ready to respond
to the behavior of the cards with intuition and rational judgment. It is also worth
recording the results of divinations; the availability of digital cameras makes keeping a

record of the experiment a simple thing to do. Very often ideas will come to the diviner
at a later time, and a record or photograph of the layout can be useful for understanding
these insights.

Reading with Significators

As already mentioned in connection with assigning dates to specific cards, some
diviners prefer to choose a significator a card that may represent the Questioner if there
is one, a person the Questioner is interested in, a specific situation if one is being
addressed, a particular date, or some other reason. The significator may be pulled from
the deck before it is shuffled, and some diviners go so far as to pull several significators
and lay them out in a brief story representing the question being asked. If the question
concerns a romance, the diviner might choose a card for the Questioner, a card to
represent the romance, and a card that represents the object of the Questioner's
affection. The divination would then proceed by laying out additional cards adjacent to
the significators to divine the influences acting upon them.
There are many methods of choosing a significator. Some methods use the physical
characteristics of the person or persons involved there are many lists of characteristics
of the various Court cards, and there is no logic between them. The significator may be
chosen by the individual's birth date or some other astrological consideration, based
upon the Questioner's personality traits, or it may be chosen based upon what the
Questioner is asking about. Some diviners have the Questioner choose a significator
from among the Court cards without any instruction.
The logic in favor of using significators is twofold it serves to focus the attention of the
diviner on a specific person or matter, and it at least in theory may seed the deck in
much the same way as cloud-seeding for rain works. Diviners who do this claim that it
reduces the noise and number of failed divinations.
The logic against using significators in this way is that it removes from the deck the
most important cards in the divination, and prevents the oracle from addressing the
very issue that is under examination. Some argue that one of the most important aspects
of a divination is where, in the layout, the cards representing the persons or situations
of interest appear. If the divination is regarding a romance, whether the relevant cards
appear in the past, present, or future, is important information that will be lost if the
cards are removed prior to reading. In addition, the ability to read influences on those
cards may also be lost, depending upon the details of the layout.
It is up to each diviner to work out by experience whether or not this practice is of
value. Rather than pulling out one or more cards prior to shuffling, less severe methods
might be searching the deck for the significator, and then drawing the cards from that

point onward, or else laying out the cards and regarding the divination as successful if
and only if the significator appears in the layout. Some layouts involve dividing the
entire pack into stacks of cards, and choosing the stack to be used based upon where the
significator is found.

Drawing and Counting

Another factor to consider in laying out the cards is how the cards should be drawn
from the deck. While this might seem simple enough -- just dealing the required
number of cards off the top of the deck, one for each position in the layout -- there are
other methods that may yield more useful results. One such method involves counting a
certain number of cards to be drawn based upon the number of the previous card
drawn. Particularly when used with small, static style layouts, this can result in a small
pack of cards drawn at each position, which can be read for additional insights.
The method of counting presented here is a modification of the Golden Dawn
technique. The cards are shuffled and cut. The diviner then looks at the bottom card;
this becomes the "key" card, which determines how many cards should be dealt off the
top of the deck for the first draw. If the key card is a four, for example, then one counts
four cards off the top of the deck, and then turns this pack over and places it in the first
position of the layout, so that the fourth card down is now face up, with the remaining
cards underneath it. One then uses that face up card as the "key" to count down to the
card for the next position, and so on until the layout is complete.
The rules for counting by this method are as follows:
The Fool -- count 22 cards.
Rest of the Major Arcana -- count the number on the card, 1 through 21.
Aces -- count 11 cards.
Rest of the Numbered Minor Arcana -- count the number on the card, 2 through 10.
Court Cards, except Valet, Page or Princess -- count 4 cards.
Valet, Page or Princess -- count 7 cards.
The "official" Golden Dawn rules say to count the Major Arcana according to whether
the card represents a zodiacal sign, planetary sign, etc., but since many cards are not
marked in this way, the simpler rule has been chosen here.

If one wants to further interpret the individual packs, one can either just lay the cards
out, or else perform a similar counting operation. In this case, one counts starting with
the face-up card as the first card.
One difficulty that can arise with this method is that if one is using a layout with many
cards, or even in a simple layout if one happens to be unlucky, one can run out of cards
before all of the cards are placed. Among the alternatives for dealing with this are to
consider the divination to stop at the point cards run out, or else to consider the
divination to have failed, and reshuffle. Another alternative is to use a "reduction"
system that reduces the number of cards to a smaller value. One such reduction system
calls for reducing all numbers above 10 by adding their digits together, thus 17 becomes
1 + 7 = 8, 22 becomes 2 + 2 = 4, and so on. This can reduce the number of cards counted
to a more manageable number.
There are many other schemes and rules for counting cards for a draw, and the diviner
is free to choose among them, according to whatever makes the most sense. It seems
that counting, as opposed to simply drawing, does seem to increase the effectiveness
and clarity of some layouts, while it also seems to muddle others. Like reading with
reversals or significators, this is an area where each diviner must experiment to
determine which method works the best.

V. Divination Examples
The 5-Card Wirth Cross Layout
This is a modified version of the layout described by Oswald Wirth in his book, The
Tarot of the Magicians, which is the English translation of the original French Le Tarot
des Imagiers du Moyen Age, important both for its detailed and theoretical
information about the cards themselves, and because of its influence on many
subsequent authors, including those in the Golden Dawn tradition such as Waite and
Crowley.
The original layout was intended for use with the Major Arcana only; this version, and
the instructions that accompany it, are adapted for use with a complete deck. The layout
described here is intended for use with drawing the cards by counting. Although the
original layout does not call for reversed cards, it is up to the diviner whether to use
them or not. Wirth's original instructions do, however, call for dignification by the order
in which the cards are drawn.

Procedure: The cards are shuffled and cut, as the diviner thinks suitable. The bottom
card of the deck becomes the "key" card, and cards are counted from the top of the deck
according to whatever counting method the diviner prefers. The first card thus drawn is
placed in the center of the layout. Wirth suggests that one way of interpreting this layout
is as though it were a legal proceeding or court trial. The first card thus becomes "The
Charges", or the matter before the court. It is a statement of what the reading is about; if
the reading is in response to an asked question, this first card should be in accord with
it, else the divination should be restarted or abandoned.
Using this first card as the new "key", the next card is drawn; this is the "Defense," or
what is acting for the Questioner, or in favor of situation. Using this card as the next
counting "key", the third card is drawn; this is the "Prosecution," or what is acting
against the Questioner or situation. Counting again as before, the fourth card is drawn,
which is the "Judge", the factors and circumstances that will decide the matter. The
Judge may consider the evidence and decide the issue, weighing the merits of both sides
as in a criminal case, or may attempt a negotiation between the opposing sides, as in a
civil case. Counting again, the fifth card is the "Jury" or the "Verdict", the immediate
outcome either in favor of or against the Questioner. This card may indicate events for
the near future.
The final card is chosen by a different procedure. One adds up all of the values for cards
1 through 5. That number is then counted down through the remaining cards to yield
the Synthesis or "Sentence"; this is what ones has to live with in the long run, or the long
term result or overall meaning, which does not necessarily apply to the immediate
situation exclusively. Note that it will more than likely be necessary to use some form of
"reducing" so as not to run out of cards in this last step.
Once all the cards are placed, there will be small packs of cards at each position; these
may be examined for further clarification or insights; the cards in the pack can be
"counted" down from the top according to the same formula. In this particular layout, it
is important to pay attention to the order in which the cards are drawn; since the
arrangement of the cards does not really facilitate dignification by surrounding cards,
dignification by order drawn to some extent takes its place. It is also suggested that
because of its central position, the Synthesis card may further influence, clarify, or
otherwise affect the interpretation of the surrounding cards to some extent.
In some versions of this layout, Card 2 is read as The Present or Near Past, and Card 3
is read as The Near Future. Card 4 may refer to the Questioner's thoughts, but more
generally is a balancing between the past and the future a way of harmonizing cards 1
and 2, or of deciding between them if a solution is not possible. Card 5 may be read as
the Outcome, while Card 6 gives the overall meaning or general trend of the situation.

The Mountain of Madness

While not a highly structured or detailed layout, The Mountain has nonetheless proven
itself effective for predictions and the study of unknown forces. It is somewhat more
oriented toward the "fortune telling" side of divination, in its mystical and perhaps
magickal aspects, than it is toward the "finding things out" or analytical aspect of it, for
which the Wirth Cross is better adapted. The layout is named after the H. P. Lovecraft
tale of the same name whose protagonist finds what he is looking for, although he is
ultimately driven mad by it. Proceed as ye will, but beware all ye who enter here . . .
It is up to the diviner whether to place all the cards at once, or to do so one at a time,
interpreting each as it is placed. A suggested way of placing the cards that has been
found effective is to lay them all out face down, and then turn them up one row at a
time. On the other hand, this method is well suited to -- and was designed for -- reading
by dignification, and placing all the cards face up will greatly facilitate this process. This
particular layout is especially well suited to reading by "telling stories". It was originally
intended for use by direct drawing, as opposed to drawing by counting, though a
"reduced" counting method may give satisfactory results.

The Realm of the Earth

The Earth is the ground from which all life springs, and the foundation upon which
everything rests. Here are those things in the past and the near present, both seen and
unseen, that form the world as it is and as it is known, and here the Pages and
Princesses rule, and the suit of Disks is strongest. It may show a progression of events
or ideas, as with the progression of the seasons through dormancy, fruition, maturation,
and decline, though even at the end of this succession, what has been set in motion may
yet remain. But beware: it is from the ground that the "leader stroke" of a lightning bolt
first emerges: in itself weak, yet drawing down immense power from above.

The Realm of the Sun

It is from the light of the Sun that the Earth receives its life, and so the Sun reveals that
which is in the present, and the passage of time in general. Here rule the Powers of Air,
whether known as Princes or Knights, and the suit of Swords is strongest. Daybreak
shows that which now stirs to life, reaching its frenzied movement in the heat of
Midday. As the Sun fades, calm is restored, and in the shadows of the Eventide, though
the Earth prepares for its nightly rest, that which has arisen in the Day still stands
proudly. The Sun is the symbol of Consciousness, and although planted firmly in the
world of Space and Time, it looks above and beyond to its Source for its Wisdom.

The Realm of the Moon

From the darkness arise things unseen, and in the light of the Moon, all appears as
unreal. Yet what emerges here may become real, for here is the world of what may soon
come to be. The Queens rule here, and that which lurks hidden in the Cups rises to be
counted. Here may be found a Dark Moon, haunted by the Creatures of the Night.
Though what hides in the shadows awaits the unwary, and fear may wax strong, it may
yet be the path to release and liberation. There may also be a Bright Moon, whose
waxing light gives unearthly life to that which may be. It is the Lantern of Hope for
those who as yet have had no chance, for that which cannot bloom by Day may yet
flower in the Night. The Moon is Great Seal of the Unconscious, in whose ghostly light
and shadows lurk the Archetypes, images as reflections in a pool of Water, of That
which can never be known to minds that live in the world of space and time. Yet they
are forever enticing and enchanting those minds to seek what lies beyond their limits,
for it is They who at first drew those minds up from the lifeless matter of the world, and
it is They who are destined to escort those minds into the Unknown that lies Beyond.

The Realm of the Stars

The Sun is but one of many Stars, and it is from the stars that all energies and forms

arise. This is the Source from which all emerges -- the Force and the Cause that move
without touching, and the Unknown from which all that passes receives its energy and
direction. Here rules the Fire of the Court, whether shown as Kings or Knights, and
Wands are here the strongest. This is the Beginning from which all things emerge, and
the final End toward which all things proceed. Learn well from what is revealed, for
herein is shown the image of That which is beyond all Time and Space, and here are
found both the Will and the Destiny of all that is, or ever will be.

The Field of Force

This layout adapts the model of consciousness presented in Chapter 1 of this essay to a
form suitable for reading by dignification. Its main purpose is to provide a cloud-map of
the psyche and various factors that affect consciousness.

Spirit of the Times: this is an image in the psyche of the outside world, reflected in the
physical and physiological processes of the brain. This includes social behavior,
physiological instincts, and the physical senses, and especially the bicameral mind. In a
reading, this may indicate outside events in the world over which one has no control,
and of which one may have no conscious awareness.
Ego: As the term is used here, this refers to "objective reality", or the view of the outside
world as it is perceived by consciousness, and through which consciousness expresses
itself in the world. In a reading, this may refer to both the way the outside world affects,
and is affected by, the consciousness of the individual.
Center of Awareness: Consciousness, the faculty of the psyche that is aware of itself, and
aware of the outside world. It is the center of thought and the point from which willed
behavior originates. Where objective and subjective, and matter and spirit, meet. In a
reading, this may refer to thoughts, ideas, decisions, and actions.
Self: As used here, this refers to the seat of "subjective reality" in the psyche, the
awareness of one's self as an individual, and the awareness of the inner and
transpersonal world. In a reading this generally means dreams, fantasies, hidden or
secret hopes and desires, spiritual insights, and so forth.
Spirit of the Depths: This is the image in the psyche of the transpersonal unconscious, as
revealed through archetypal images. The transpersonal unconscious is the Unknown,
Force, Kraft, or Eternal-Infinite -- a form of reality that is different from the physical
world, and is the object of mystical experience; also the Entelechy, or universal
consciousness. In a reading this generally indicates unseen energies, synchronicities, or
progressions of events driven by the Force or Kraft that shape and form the psyche of
the individual, and may also affect the world in ways that appear mysterious.
These meanings are only approximate; the picture of consciousness generated by this
layout should be thought of as more of an indistinct cloud of interactions, rather than a
set of specific facts and descriptions. Its usefulness comes from the general picture it
presents, and not from specific meanings attached to specific cards and positions. Just as
consciousness is a system of varied, intertwined and often indeterminable connections
and influences, so this layout should be thought of as a fuzzy and approximate
representation at best. No individual belief, thought, feeling, dream, and so forth has
any real meaning in and of itself; its meaning derives from how it relates to the other
aspects of consciousness. Similarly, no card in the layout, by itself, signifies anything
objectively significant; the meanings are entirely subjective, and dependent upon their
interactions with other aspects of the psyche, and the cards that represent them.

The 22 Card Progressive Layout

This is an example of a progressive layout that begins with three cards, and continues
through several operations until a total of 22 cards have been placed. Interpretations are
carried out at each stage, and subsequent card placements may build upon or clarify
already established meanings, or may even involve re-interpreting various cards in the
light of new information. This layout combines the features of several different wellknown layouts, and is best used with the entire deck.

The First Operation: The Question

The cards are shuffled and cut as appropriate, and three cards are drawn and placed as
shown. The interpretations are suggestions; each card may have its own meaning, they
may all combine together to produce an overall interpretation, or a "story" may emerge.
The placement of the cards is intended to facilitate reading by dignification, and the
diviner should pay close attention to the combinations of elemental forces, the
significance of any Court or Major Arcana cards, whether cards are friendly or
antagonistic, and so on.
What matters most at this stage is that the basis of the divination should be firmly
established. If a specific question has been asked, or there is a specific subject under
study, these cards should address that issue clearly. If no specific question has been
asked, then some clear meaning or question should emerge from these first three cards.
If there is no meaning or question that can be determined from them, or if the meaning
is completely foreign to the matter under study, then the divination has failed, and the
cards should be reshuffled and drawn again; on the third failure, the divination should
be abandoned.

The Second Operation: The Celtic Cross

Three more cards are drawn and placed as above. Notice that the basic "Celtic Cross"
has now been set up, although the order and meanings assigned may differ from some
other versions of the Celtic Cross. Cards 2 and 3 generally refer to actual events, while 4
and 6 refer to more abstract influences. Card 5 may indicate obstacles in going from 2 to
3, and/or from 4 to 6. It may also indicate something about the question or situation
that remains, for now, unknown. Card 4 may refer to events or circumstances that are
unknown or have been overlooked; depending upon the matter in question, it may also
refer to the unconscious mind. Likewise, card 6 may be a card of present or near future
events, or it may refer to the conscious mind, and what is being thought of regarding
the situation under study.
The difficulty with the Celtic Cross, as already mentioned, is that it does not lend itself
well to reading by dignification. This can be remedied by laying out the remaining four
cards from the standard Celtic Cross layout, as shown in the next operation.

The Third Operation: The Maltese Cross

Placing the cards in this way affords an excellent opportunity to study the effects of
dignification. The meanings are roughly consistent with the standard Celtic Cross
layout, although the order may be somewhat different. Card 7, normally thought of as
"The Question or Questioner", combines the effects of past events (2) and what is known
(6), and thus logically refers to what the questioner might want to know, if a question is
actually being asked. Card 2, the events of the past, can now be placed in perspective in
terms of what one remembers, or chooses to remember (7), and what has been forgotten
or intentionally overlooked (8). And so forth, around the entire square.
One should also pay attention to any obviously dominating influences, such as
grouping of elements, groupings of cards specific to one of the Lights or Four Worlds,
and so on. The direction of the divination should be clearly understood at this point,
and if a story has emerged, that is much for the better.

The Fourth Operation: The 22-Card Layout

This is the final layout, and it combines features of the Celtic Cross with the 15-card
layout recommended for the Thoth cards. The focus of the reading shifts from
individual cards with specific meanings to meanings that emerge from groups of cards,
and attention is given to the relationships between cards within a group, and
relationships between groups as a whole. Groups may influence each other depending
upon overall dignity, as well as according to the dignity of the individual cards
themselves.
Cards 9, 4, and 20 refer to events and situations that are likely beyond control, either by
the Questioner if there is one, or beyond intervention if this is a general reading. Cards
8, 13, and 19 are more concerned with events on the "inside" -- within the mind of the
Questioner, or more generally thoughts and opinions, and also what may be driving
people. If, for example, the reading is focusing more on politics, these cards may be a
"public opinion poll", though more likely will suggest what is actually motivating the
opinions expressed. These may also refer to unknown events, unknown circumstances
or as yet unknown persons involved.

Cards 3, 15, and 21 usually show events, or trends in events, in the future. These could
be thought of as "pathway" cards that lead from the situations below to the predictive
cards above. Similarly, cards 2, 12, and 18 are "action" cards; they may be a pathway or
suggested actions leading from the cards below to the cards above. But note carefully
that one such "action" may be a reinterpretation of the past -- looking at things in the
past in a slightly different way can lead to a far different future in some cases, and those
who learn from history may not be condemned to repeat it.
The cards of the upper row are the future cards, and usually indicate two different
possible scenarios. Cards 10, 16, and 22 show the future as it is likely to be if things run
their natural course -- that is, if the events of 3, 15, and 21 come to pass. The alternative
future scenario is given by cards 7, 11, and 17 -- these are the likely "results" of cards 2,
12, and 18.
What this layout adds to the usual "Thoth" layout is the Middle Pillar cards, the cards of
the original Celtic Cross. These might be thought of as "linking" cards that connect the
two sides. As noted on the diagram, the farther to the right hand side one goes, the
more one is at the mercy of fate -- things that the individual cannot change. On the
other hand, the farther to the left one moves, the less connected with the outside world
one becomes, and while it is true that in this way one can mold the world into what one
wants it to be, the smaller and smaller that world actually becomes, until it becomes
only in the mind. The middle path -- far more difficult than either extreme -- is to find
the balance between the two sides. This means, at the lowest level, understanding the
relationship between outside events and hidden events, thoughts and motivations;
understanding the relationship between the events and situations of the past, present
and future; and finally understanding how to bridge the future as it might be, and the
future as one wants it to be. It is in this Middle Pillar that the Diviner and/or the
Questioner may be most effective at influencing outcomes and results.
There is a very close connection between this layout and the Tree of Life. It is important
to be aware of these connections, because certain cards appearing in certain positions
may be regarded as more powerful and influential, as shown in the following chart.

The 22-Card Layout and the Tree of Life

Light/Sephiroth

Cards in Layout Ruling Cards

World

1 - Crown

6, 7, 10

Aces, Major Arcana

Archetypal - Fire

2 - Wisdom

10, 16, 22

2s, Knights, Wands

"

3 - Understanding 7, 11, 17

3s, Queens, Cups

"

4 - Mercy

3, 15, 21

4s

Creative - Water

5 - Severity

2, 12, 18

5s

"

6 - Beauty

1, 2, 3, 4, 6

6s, Princes, Swords

"

7 - Victory

9, 14, 20

7s

Formative - Air

8 - Splendor

8, 13, 19

8s

"

9 - Foundation

4, 8, 9

9s

"

10 - Kingdom

The Questioner 10s, Princesses, Disks Material - Earth

Notice that the Light of Beauty is connected with several cards; while card 1 is the
primary card corresponding to this Light, it receives influences from, and should be
ready by dignification along with, the cards that surround it. Putting the pieces
together, what it means is that, for example, Knights (or Kings in a Classical style deck),
Wands, and 2s appearing in the upper right hand side among cards 10, 16, and 22, will
be especially influential -- the Wands doubly so, as this group is connected with the
Archetypal World.
The Kingdom, while not directly represented in this layout, is actually represented by
the Questioner, if there is one, and the physical World if there is not. The Disks in
general, and the Princesses in particular, may show actual events in the Questioner's
past, or how and where the Questioner fits in to the scheme of the layout. They may
also show points at which the Questioner may act to influence outcomes. In the event
there is no Questioner, the Earth cards may be more indicative of physical events and
influences, as opposed to more abstract influences from other cards. The significator, if
there is one, may represent the Kingdom and the Questioner, and their influences upon
the specific aspect of the divination where it appears.
Less obvious, but still present, are the connections between the Lights made by the
Major Arcana. Major Arcana cards always represent the influence of the Unknown, but
will be especially significant if they appear in a Light with which they are connected in

the Tree. Also notice that there are "overlap" cards in the table -- for example, card 10
applies both to the Crown and to Wisdom. This indicates a path; a Major Arcana card
appearing in one of those "overlap" positions is a clear indication of energy moving
between Lights, and especially so if it happens to be the card appropriate to that path.
There is one card that needs special attention, and that is card 5, the card of obstacles. It
has not been listed in the table above, but it does have a place on the Tree of Life.
Looking at the diagram of the Tree, it appears that there is a missing Light -- there is an
obvious "hole" in the Tree, between Lights 2 and 3, and Lights 4 and 5. There actually is
a Light that goes there -- or was, at one time. In the tradition of the Cabala, when the
World was created, there existed first the Fourfold Name, the Tetragrammaton. This
was composed of four letters, corresponding to the original four Lights: 1, 2, 3, and the
missing one. During the creation of the World (or after the Fall from the Garden,
depending on the version of the story) the fourth Light fell from the Tetragrammaton
and broke apart, giving rise to the remaining Lights, and leaving a hole in its place. That
hole is called Daath, and is also called "The Abyss". In organizations that teach and
follow various aspects of the Cabala, passing through the Abyss, from Light 4 to Light 3,
is an especially difficult initiation, and one cannot do so without a certain part of one's
being suffering destruction. One in fact dies, according to some traditions, and is
"reborn" in the Archetypal World. It is to this missing Light, and the Abyss that lies in
its place, that card 5 corresponds. Caveat divinator.
One other aspect of this layout that may be considered is the reference of the three rows
of cards to three levels within the psyche. The lower level may refer to the personal
unconscious, a collection of unconscious processes that arise within, and refer
specifically to, the individual. These would include processes originating in the
physiology of the brain or body of which consciousness has little or no awareness -hunger, for example, that has not reached a level so as to be noticeable by consciousness,
various body sensations, breathing, and other such functions. For the purposes of
divination, this level can refer to things that happen with causes that have not yet been
discovered. Desires and motivations, hidden from conscious view through repression
or other means, might be revealed here, or at least their influences noted.
Much of the information that comes into the psyche never reaches the level of
consciousness. Most of what is seen by the eyes and heard by the ears is discarded, or
else processed and stored without conscious awareness. This also includes many
thoughts, motivations, and even rational decisions -- it frequently happens that a
difficult problem is solved in one's sleep, or after work on it has been suspended, and
the answer then appears later, as if out of nowhere. This is the result of unconscious
activity in the mind, whose results only later become conscious. Unfortunately, much of
what people do, think and believe is also based upon things held in the personal
unconscious, and only comes to light in behaviors that appear to have purely irrational

causes.
This level of the reading refers not only to the mind, but to events in the world that
appear to happen as the result of unseen causes. The behaviors of countries, for
example, often appears to just "happen" -- wars have started, been fought and ended, for
no apparent reason. There are of course causes for those events, but they are hidden
from ordinary view. It is within this level of the layout that the causes of those events
may be discovered.
The middle row is the level of consciousness -- of awareness, and also of the will, and
the ability to choose and act, or to refrain from doing so. The Four Magickal Powers -- to
Know, to Will, to Dare, and to keep Silent -- are wielded from from consciousness, and
the influences of those Powers may be seen in the cards of this row.
The upper level is the world of the transpersonal, or collective unconscious. Just as the
personal unconscious is where mind meets body, so this is the level where mind meets
Spirit. Here are found the archetypal images of the Unknown, and here is where the
hand of the Unknown is shown in the cards. The future is not a fixed or pre-determined
state of being; within the Unknown are unlimited possibilities, and the cards of this
level are images of the world as it may yet become, reflected in the mirror of the
Unknown.

VI. Conclusion
Beliefs do not happen by accident; what one believes in is a choice one makes, a
conscious choice that to some extent defines who and what one is as an individual. An
informed choice requires an awareness of alternatives, and the discovery of those
alternatives is not always a pleasant thing. The realization that what one has accepted as
true may, after all, not be true at all, or may only be one of many possible truths, may
cause some to withdraw from the choice in despair, or else simply shut the mind to
anything not already entrenched there. Yet for others, it may be a source of euphoria -the discovery that there is indeed a whole new world that lies beyond the limits of
conventional and accepted "wisdom" comes to them like a breaking of chains and the
breaking of the sun through a dense, dark mental fog.
In the Age of Endarkenment, conventional "wisdom" holds that there are no such things
as the Unknown, the Force or Kraft, the Archetypes, or even the individual. There are no
dreams beyond the physiology of the brain, and "no one who matters" believes in
witchcraft or magick. They are all figments of sick and deluded imagination, a disease
of which humanity needs to be cured. The "cure" is to believe in its god of "society", its
worship of science, and its "truths" of materialism and determinism, and to enforce
those beliefs and the values that accompany them with ridicule, ostracism, and
ultimately "medication" for those who reject them. Odd, isn't it, that those who
proclaim religion to be a disease, are the first to embrace its most central dogma: that
the unpardonable sin is the refusal to believe.
We shall never be cured of religion, for as long as we believe in "we." As long as one
accepts as "reality" the Zeitgeist of things that do not exist, then one will continue to
address fantastic beings in fantastic language, and the reality of the world will continue
to languish. Real, existing individuals will suffer and die in the shadows of deflationary
philosophies that turn a blind eye to the consequences of their own beliefs and actions.
Wars are not waged by "witches and sorcerers," but by nation-states whose only reality
is in lines drawn on paper, and it is not the Unknown or its Archetypes that drive the
victims of harassment to suicide or murder, but the very bicameral mind that is
championed as the savior of the human race.
The bicameral mind operates in the brain much like an addiction; it uses the same
neurological pathways to compel obedience, and instill fear of change and intolerance of
difference. It is a purely irrational entity, expressing itself through feelings of repulsion
and disgust at anything and anyone it sees as non-conforming, through absurd and
logically vacuous beliefs like "family values", and finally through persecution hysteria.
The persecution, hatred and violence directed at individuals by so-called civilized
society seems irrational and psychotic because it is just that, the result of non-reasoning

physiological processes erupting into behavior with no conscious control. That behavior
is shocking, but it should be sobering to remember that it is only different in degree,
and not in kind, from the academics' pronouncement that "no one who matters" believes
in witchcraft, or anything else that contravenes the dogma of materialism.
Addiction is irrational, and it behaves irrationally. The only way to stop it is, ultimately,
with the force of an iron will. The bicameral mind, and all that it infuses into thought
and behavior, is no more reasonable, or subject to logical argument and persuasion,
than is opiate addiction. It can only be stopped by refusing to surrender to it, and the
first step toward that refusal is understanding that the option to refuse is there. That is
the role of the dream; not the dream reduced to brain anatomy and chemistry, but the
dream as the intrusion into the psyche of something from beyond the brain itself. No
matter how hard the physiology of the brain struggles, sooner or later it must sleep, and
in its absence the very processes that made consciousness possible in the first place rise
to reclaim their rightful place in the psyche.
The future of human consciousness, if there is to be one, is in its inwardness, and not in
the world of objectivity and social chatter that fills the Age of Endarkenment. Why?
Read the newspapers. The future there is no future at all. Reducing dreams to body
functions and imagination to "chemical imbalance" simply denies the possibility of a
world that is any different from what it is -- it is the bicameral mind in panic mode,
increasingly unable to deny or escape the horror of the reality it has created. Walden 2,
Professor Skinner's world of materialistic and atheistic idealism, is not going to happen;
the world created by those beliefs is in the newspapers. The world, enveloped by the
Age of Endarkenment, probably cannot be saved, and maybe should not be. But
consciousness may yet be able to save itself.
What one believes is a choice one makes. One can accept or refuse, one can question or
ignore, but in the end, one must choose. The choice is clear enough: Read the
newspapers. If you like what you read there, then continue on with what you think and
do. Continue to believe that "relationships" are real, continue to gossip about "we" this
and "our" that, and continue to seek the solutions to the world's problems in the beliefs
and behaviors that caused them. Continue to go with the world in the way that the
world is going.
If, on the other hand, you don't like what you read there, then choose to believe
something different. The solutions to the problems of the world won't be found in the
"objective" world that caused them, nor in the ways of outward thinking that put them
there in the first place. The solution begins with inwardness, that aspect of
consciousness that sees its own image in dreams, fantasies, and in oracles like the Tarot.
For in the Tarot are the images of the world as it could be, if the path of inwardness
were to be chosen.

It is not necessary to believe in anything in order to understand divination. The less one
believes, the less prejudice and bias will cloud the picture. It is more important to
question and to listen, than to believe ahead of time what one will or will not see or hear.
It is necessary only to be still; for in stillness there is nothing for the physiology of the
brain to connect with, nothing for it to judge or deny. It is in the stillness of sleep, or the
consciously chosen stillness of the diviner's gaze, that the Spirit of the Depths rises to be
heard. Evolution has already put into place everything that is necessary for divination
to work; one need believe in nothing, all one needs to do is let those abilities operate
without hindrance. The Spirit of the Depths will speak, if only one will allow one's self to
listen.

Postscript
Some Thoughts on Using Psychoanalysis as the Basis for a Theory of
Consciousness
If one is to take the notion of divination seriously -- that it represents some sort of
intuition of a reality beyond what is observable by the physical senses -- then one must
reject materialism, objectivism, determinism, and the whole host of other isms that are
part and parcel of the "modern scientific world view". If one does so, then the logical
place to look for a theory of consciousness that accounts for the possibility of divination
is within the subjective experience of consciousness itself. Instead of focusing on
objectively measurable behavior phenomena that likely have more to do with the
biology of the brain than with consciousness, one looks to those aspects of
consciousness that appear within the psyche of the individual, and relate more to
perceptions and the subjective impressions produced by mental experience. This is what
makes divination such an appealing topic for a philosopher of consciousness: it would
seem that divination involves both the perception of objective experience -- reading the
cards, dreaming the fire, and so forth -- and at the same time relies entirely upon
subjective factors for its significance and meaning. Divination thus bridges the gap
between the rather obvious fact that the brain and its perceptual mechanisms have
something to do with consciousness, while at the same time eliminating the likelihood
that those mechanisms -- and they alone -- just are consciousness.
Right away the objection might be raised that since the "modern scientific" view is
incompatible with divination, then it is divination, and all that it implies -- the
Unknown, the Kraft, the Spirit of the Depths, and all things related to them -- that should
be rejected. Those things, according to this argument, are just no longer a part of the
modern way of looking at things. Some versions of the "modern" view such as
behaviorism argue that there is no such thing as consciousness or individuality, and that
these are mental illusions to facilitate social behavior, put in place largely through
language use; other versions contend that consciousness is a property of the brain and
its physical processes, and whether there is any such thing as the Unknown or not, there
is no way for consciousness to interact with it since it is a phenomenon, or
epiphenomenon, of physical matter alone.
It is certainly the case that the "modern" view, no matter which version of it one chooses,
is utterly incompatible with the notion of divination; that is, in fact, the whole point of
the argument in Chapter 1 -- that divination and everything that goes along with it is
incompatible with the "modern" world view. But it is also the point of that argument
that it is the modern view, and not divination, which should be rejected. And one

reason for rejecting it is that the "modern scientific world view" is anything but
scientific.
The "modern" view rejects the idea of divination because divination implies the
existence of, and efficacy upon consciousness of, the Unknown -- a form of existence
that is incompatible with materialism, determinism, and the whole litany of other isms
that form the "modern" view's core. Without the Unknown (or Force, or Kraft) the
transpersonal unconscious degenerates into the "subconscious" -- what lies in the
psyche outside of conscious awareness moves from the realm of infinite possibility to a
mental trashcan of subliminal, forgotten and repressed environmental and biological
stimuli -- and without the transpersonal unconscious, consciousness degenerates into
the bicameral mind. Once that happens, the whole Hegelian phantasm of irreality
floods the psyche: individuals degenerate into "society" and "relationships", the soul
degenerates into "DNA", dreams degenerate into neurological noise, and divination
degenerates into "counseling". The highest aspirations of humanity collapse into
mindless chattering, social conformity, and physiological instinct, and with that, the
promise of evolution is lost in physical and psychological stagnation, corruption,
pollution, and eventual annihilation at the hands of the very forces that brought forth
consciousness in the first place, and against which the "modern" world view has turned
its back.
This is, of course, entirely speculative, but neither more nor less so than its logical
opposites of materialism and socially-constructed personalities. Facts by themselves
cannot decide the issue, for as Hume pointed out, empirical observation cannot cross
the gap toward logical deduction without subjective augmentation, meaning that
objective phenomena cannot, by themselves, prove or disprove ultimate truths about
what exists and what does not. The matter can only be decided by an act of will on the
part of the individual -- what William James called "the will to believe," or, in another
vocabulary, what Kierkegaard called the "leap of faith." Either way, it is a temporary and
willful suspension of the critical faculties that establishes an objective correlation of a
subjective state -- it makes the world appear as though what one believes is true. This
applies as much to beliefs about what exists as it does to beliefs about what does not
exist. To extrapolate from physics to metaphysics -- from observations of what appears
to exist to speculations about what must and must not exist -- one must inject a bit of
one's own self into the equation; as Kierkegaard said, to find the truth, one must become
the truth. It also means that, necessarily and inescapably, to move from the observations
of science to a "scientific world view", one must break the very rules on which science is
itself founded -- one must introduce irreproducible, unobservable, and idiosyncratic
factors to cook observations into philosophical cookies and cream. The "scientific world
view" therefore is not, and can never be, any more "scientific" than the views which
oppose it.

Now psychoanalysis, as it was originally developed, was intended to be a scientific

approach to understanding the psyche, including both consciousness, and those aspects
of the psyche that lie outside of conscious awareness, yet exert influence over the
operation and contents of consciousness itself. The different theorists who studied it -Freud, Adler, Jung, and others -- each followed this idea in different ways, coming to
different conclusions about the nature of the psyche and how it works. It has been said
by some that because of this, psychoanalysis is inherently unscientific -- that it involves
theorizing beyond mere systematizing observations, and that accusation may well the
true. But if it is, then the Big Bang theory, quantum electrodynamics, pretty much all of
cosmology, and even evolution itself, are also unscientific, as they too involve an
element of speculation beyond what is directly observable.
What makes the "unscientific" accusation unfounded, however, is that all of these,
including psychoanalysis, yield predictions that are subject to verification by
observation -- the theories make predictions that can be tested, and the testing of those
predictions makes or breaks the theory. And it just so happens that divination is one of
those tests that lends verification to Jung's idea of the unconscious. It is no argument
against divination, and the theories upon which it is founded, that they are
"unscientific" because divination does not work perfectly for everyone who tries it all of
the time -- it is no more possible for everyone to do divination than it is for everyone to
do experiments in quantum physics or cosmology. One has to have certain knowledge
and skills, and a great deal more, to carry out those tests, and even then the results are
often more of a statistical nature than of a simple yes/no outcome.
So, while the "scientific world view" rests upon unprovable and untestable metaphysical
speculations, psychoanalysis itself appears to be in good company with the other more
theoretical branches of the sciences. Though the core of Jungian psychology -- primarily
the idea of the collective, or transpersonal unconscious -- may be essentially speculative,
it is nonetheless a testable hypothesis; and while, by definition, no physically designed
experiment could ever prove or disprove the existence of the Unknown, the results of
divination experiments are consistent with it, and that about as "scientific" as one can
get without adding profoundly "unscientific" restrictions to the method.
The problem with believing something that is self-contradictory and self-undermining
like the "modern scientific world view" goes beyond the philosopher's distaste for
logical inconsistency; the problem is that it can have serious and dangerous
consequences, that may not be apparent or even intelligible to those who hold those
beliefs. The way one looks at things, particularly if it is illogical and therefore based
more on unconscious motivations than on reason, can blind one to the effects that
unconsciously motivated behaviors can produce. If one's unconscious has been reduced
to the bicameral mind, then all one sees as reality are abstractions like "society" and
"relationships", and the harm done to existing individuals by blindly following "the

greater good" in the name of those abstractions may go completely unnoticed until it is
too late. To put it bluntly, the "modern scientific world view" may be sowing the seeds of
the destruction of human consciousness, and along with it, the survivability of the
human race.
That is a bold claim to say the least, but the evidence for it is mounting. The existence
and effects of human-caused climate change can no longer be rationally denied, yet the
world seems immersed in a state of complete denial of the facts and their implications.
The reason for this denial is that solving the problems of climate change will require
fundamental changes to the way human beings live that will inescapably alter the basic
structure of human society, and that is something the bicameral mind will never
understand, let alone tolerate. While ecological Rome burns, the bicameral mind plays
its fiddle, losing itself in unrestrained social chatter and obsession with banning this
and outlawing that, as though these things will purify humanity for its coming
extinction. What the social chatter and invasion of privacy really do is to eliminate the
introspective space between the Ego and the Self-- they destroy the inner privacy that
consciousness needs in order to exist at all. Once consciousness is lost in the web of
chatter and invasiveness, there is no standpoint from which to question or analyze the
consequences of "normal" social behavior. While some might blame science for these
things, more likely the blame resides in a world view that prioritizes the abstract and
the objective, over the actual and the subjective insight that would, in a moment, reveal
that something is terribly wrong with the way the world conducts itself.
The damage that is being wrought in the world on a massive scale reflects itself in the
damage wrought on each individual on a personal scale. The "scientific" view that it is
behavior, and behavior alone, that is the substance of mental activity, combined with the
belief that behavior is causally determined by the biology of the brain, has led to the
unrestrained use of psychotropic medications to fit behavior to social norms and goals,
with no regard for what this might be doing to the consciousness of the individual.
Indeed, for the "scientific" view, consciousness, individuality, introspection, and
perceptual qualia -- the mental impressions made by the senses -- are themselves mere
figments of behavior, images created by the brain to facilitate social function. It stands to
reason under this view, that if behavior is inappropriate -- one does not function
because of depression, anxiety, attention disorder, or other "illness" or mis-fitting to
social norms that one is "diagnosed" with -- then it is an appropriate response to treat
those conditions with medications that restore "normal" function.
Only now is research beginning to show what the effects of those "medications" might
be; only after millions have been subjected to this kind of "treatment" is it becoming
apparent that irreversible damage may be occurring to the victims of such "cures". Even
after only one dose of "medication", current research suggests, the structure and
function of the brain may fundamentally altered. Altered in what way? It has already

been pointed out that the effect of many of these "medications" is to shut down, or
perhaps even damage, neurological pathways that are activated by "psychedelic" drugs.
I have argued elsewhere that the origin of human consciousness may itself lie in
primitive humans' contact with naturally occurring psychoactives, and that blocking
those neurological pathways may impair the ability of the brain to support
consciousness. If that is the case, then these "treatments" -- which, if the conclusions of
current research are confirmed, are effectively "chemical lobotomies" -- may actually be
reversing millennia of human evolution, and the survival advantages that came with it.
While there is no experimentally demonstrable or logically supportable truth to the
belief that consciousness and the brain are one in the same thing, it is demonstrable that
damaging the brain can alter or suppress its ability to support consciousness and the
mental faculties that go along with it.
If it was bold to claim that the "scientific world view" imperils the survival of humanity
through ecological disaster, then the somewhat bolder claim, that the "scientific world
view" has established a medical paradigm that threatens the existence of consciousness,
seems also justified. The chemical "recameralization" of the mind strips the psyche of its
ability to envision and respond to the problems created by "society", and the whole
"modern scientific world view" becomes a one-two knockout punch as far as the future
of humanity is concerned. So it comes down to this: If the question is why one should
take divination seriously when the "modern scientific world view" says there is no such
thing, then one might want to begin to answer that question by asking just what that
"modern" view is, where it comes from, and where it might be going. Since that view
seems to be leading humanity to a situation that might be catastrophic, then maybe
some alternative views should be considered while the catastrophe is still avoidable.
The view of consciousness presented here, developed out of Jung's psychoanalytic
theory, is one such alternative. By taking divination seriously, one necessarily rejects out
of hand the idea that human beings are mere blobs of DNA floating in a social sea. By
rejecting the notion that reality is purely objective, an entire new reality -- the world of
the subjective -- is opened for both examination and participation. With subjectivity
comes the privacy for introspection that consciousness must have to survive. And if the
evolutionary argument -- speculative though it may be -- has any grain of truth in it, it
may mean that rejecting the "modern scientific world view" opens the door to one or
many possible futures, over and against a world view that virtually insures there will be
no future at all.
There are, nonetheless certain pitfalls in appealing to psychoanalysis as the starting
point for a theory of consciousness. One of the more obvious problems in doing so is
that psychoanalysis comes with its own set of world views that can affect, or maybe a
better word is "skew", the theory of consciousness that arises from it. These limitations
emerge from the origin of psychoanalysis in the European medical community of the

late 19th and early 20th centuries, which brought with it a world view that might now
be considered outdated and no longer supportable. That statement is a gross
oversimplification, but nonetheless allows for the characterization of some basic
elements of the theory that need review in light of progress in scientific theory since
that time.
The first point to address focuses on the relationship of gender to psychology, and
specifically considers the notion that the unconscious manifests itself in men as a female
anima, and in women as a male animus, which bring different sets of characteristics to
bear in the psyche that results in "typical" behavior for each of the sexes. The theory
here is that the unconscious appears in a form that is complementary to consciousness,
and brings into the psyche a complementary, and often contradictory, set of drives. At a
surface level, this means that for men, the unconscious manifests itself as a seductive
female image that leads them to all kinds of unscrupulous behavior, while in women it
tends to tame their inherently immoral instincts with a heavy hand of masculine
authority.
In the first place, the idea that men and women have certain personality traits inherent
in their biological sex is probably, at this point in the understanding of genetics, just
plain laughable. DNA, and the functional genetic units that it forms, serve as
instructions for the synthesis of proteins, and nothing more. Though to some extent
genes make you what you are -- an organism with typical human characteristics -- they
do not make you who you are. Phenotype, the expression of genetic characteristics in an
organism, is not a direct one-to-one correspondence with genotype, which basically
comes down to the structure of one's DNA. There are many factors that intervene in the
space between the structure of DNA, and how that structure is expressed in a living
human being. Factors such as the activity of other genes, the environment, and maybe
even psychological factors, whether conscious or otherwise, may affect the outcome of
how a given genetic structure manifests itself in a living body. One need go no further
than acquaintance with identical twins to realize this: identical twins, who in theory
started from identical genetic structure, are identical as adults at a gross physical level
only, and are psychologically never identical persons.
If the relationship between genotype and phenotype is uncertain and conditional, then
so much less certain is the relationship between genotype, phenotype, and what we
might call psychotype -- the set of personality traits that are unique to each individual.
The structure of the brain itself is at best only conditionally related to the underlying
genetic code, the precise "wiring" being more strongly influenced by the statistics of cell
death and survival during embryogenesis, and the relationship between activity in
neural pathways and synaptic development that may carry on throughout life. What
this means, in a nutshell, is that the way the brain is put together has at least as much to
do with "chance" events during development, and what the brain is actually used for

during life, as it has to do with any pre-determined genetic instructions.

It is only hopeful speculation on the part of materialists that there exists any correlation
between brain structure and behavior, as there is no evidence that supports the idea that
physical "brain states" and psychological "mind states" are either identical or causally
related. Synchronistically related, perhaps, but this already means breaking ranks with
the materialist view. Since divination is being taken seriously, then even less certain is
any relationship between brain states and perception or introspection. This is to say that
while the brain supports consciousness and all of its associated functions, it is not
identical with consciousness and its related phenomena.
This means that the underlying assumption made by early psychoanalysts -- that gender
is an absolute category that extends through body, mind, personality, behavior and
perception is simply not supportable in the light of current knowledge. The unconscious
may, in fact, appear in many guises: it may appear to women, as well as men, the form
of a triple goddess; it may appear as a wise man guide of one type or another; it may
take on animal form, the form of one's own reflection as in a mirror, or any other of
many possibilities. Some might argue that the basis of religion, at least in its mystical
and introspective senses, lies in just such unconscious imagery, and this is supported by
the theory that at the basis of the unconscious is mystical experience, a direct intuition
of an entirely different reality that what is seen by the senses. Be that as it may, it is
probably safe to say at this point that the whole idea of gender in psychoanalysis as it
was originally articulated is a bit suspect, but need be no cause for alarm because the
essential core of the theory -- that of the intuition into consciousness of the Unknown
via archetypal imagery -- need not be jeopardized by the cultural and unsupportable
biases of its founders.
Another major problem in the application of psychoanalytic theory to the
understanding of consciousness comes from the assumption made by its founders, that
"society" and social behavior were the ultimate purpose, or telos, of consciousness. It
was thought at the time -- and no doubt still is by many -- that the whole point of
consciousness was to adapt basic biological drives to a social environment. Physiologists
often refer to the "Four F's" -- Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Fornicating -- as the basic
instinctual drives that motivate behavior. As doctors from a medical background, the
founders of psychoanalysis accepted this idea in one form or another, and sought to
understand consciousness as a mechanism for adapting those drives to socially
acceptable modes of expression. The the Ego, or center of consciousness in this theory,
becomes a battleground between the Id, or presence in the psyche of various biological
instincts, and the Superego, the influence of social restrictions that keep people from
behaving in ways that destroy one another. Thus view that "society" is the goal toward
which evolution proceeds, and the telos or final purpose of consciousness itself.

In fairness it must be said that these early theorists, while working at the forefont of
science and theory at the time, simply did not have certain ideas and theories available
to them that now exist. Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory only appeared in the
1970's, and that theory, and the various elaborations since then upon it, argue that social
behavior is not primarily psychological, but may ultimately be biological in origin.
While Jaynes' theory itself remains controversial, the logic that social behavior may be
"wired" in the brain in ways similar to the "Four F's" seems sound, and has some
profound implications for the way psychoanalytic theory is viewed. The "Four F's" need
to be supplemented with some additions -- perhaps Family, Friends, and Facebook
would be good candidates -- and this means that social behavior is no more or less a
basic biological drive as any of the others. There is, on this view, no introspective
distancing between biological and social drive, and thus no need for consciousness to
exist or intervene between the two.
Indeed this was Jaynes' theory all along -- that entire civilizations existed in the absence
of consciousness, and that the reasons for the evolution of consciousness were to fill
some other need. That specific need -- to anticipate and respond to contingent events
that the bicameral mind cannot conceptualize -- has already been discussed, as has the
idea that the "other" thing that lifted consciousness out of the bicameral mind and its
world of now seven or more "F's" was the Unknown. If this is true, it means that the
underlying basis of psychoanalytic theory used for understanding the structure of
consciousness is no longer valid, at least not in its original form. This was the reason for
presenting the theory of consciousness discussed in Chapter 1 -- that what takes the
place of Freud's original tripartite theory of Id, Ego, and Superego, is now better
understood in terms of physiological unconscious (the social and biological drives of the
bicameral mind), the Ego as the psychological interface between consciousness and the
physical world, the Self as the psychological interface between consciousness and
transpersonal unconscious, and the transpersonal unconscious or Unknown itself. Thus
there is no telos or ultimate purpose of consciousness in itself; consciousness exists as an
existential manifestation of the interface between the Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of
the Depths, or to put it in simpler but more easily misconstrued terms, at the boundary
between World and Spirit.
Consciousness, the mental faculty that is the seat of awareness of itself and of the world
around it, therefore embodies a basic paradox. It must be a meeting of two orders, as
Stace called them, two forms of reality that cannot mix, but can touch one another
through the medium of consciousness. It is the embodiment of what Kierkegaard called
the Absolute Paradox, and this is as much as saying that the basic structure of
consciousness is the same as the basic structure of mystical experience. Rather then
viewing consciousness as a battleground between the evils of biology and the
(supposed) goodness of society, consciousness might instead be thought of as a
cooperative effort between two orders for the benefit of both.

It should come as no surprise, then, that divination would be regarded as a type-case

for the elucidation of consciousness itself, for divination, as it has been defined in this
essay, is what consciousness both is and does. The Tarot thus becomes much more than
ink on cards -- it is a series of mirrors in which consciousness sees aspects of itself, and a
series of gateways through which it can encounter the forces out of which it arose. The
Tarot is not about what one should or should not do, it is not about "relationships" or
"lessons", it is not about "choices" or "responsibilities", and it is not about belaboring
one's supposed faults and shortcomings, or dragging one's intimate business into the
public spotlight. The Tarot is about what consciousness is, it is about what makes each
conscious being a unique individual, and it is about where that individual is going and
what he or she can become. It is about infinite possibility, and about the possibility of
the infinitely impossible.

VII. Suggested Readings

Crowley, Aleister. The Book of Thoth -- Egyptian Tarot. York Beach: 1974. First published
in 1944. Although specifically written for Crowley's Thoth Tarot, the discussions are
useful background for learning to interpret cards irrespective of what deck is used.
Primary source for the Cabala as an interpretive scheme.
Golden Dawn. Book T -- The Tarot, in Regardie, Israel, The Golden Dawn. St. Paul:
Llewellyn Publications, 1982. This is essentially the same book available in a smaller
edition by Aleister Crowley as Tarot Divination. Gives the Golden Dawn system of
meanings, also the "all day" method of reading the cards.
Huson, Paul. Mystical Origins of the Tarot. Rochester: Destiny Books, 2004. Excellent
source for the history of the Tarot and its interpretation. Lists and compares several
different systems of meaning for each card. Also has an excellent bibliography of other
sources.
Papus (Dr. Gerard Encausse). The Tarot of the Bohemians. No. Hollywood: Melvin
Powers / Wilshire Book Co., undated. Example of a tour de force of the initiated
interpretation of the Tarot. Most useful for its simplified system of deriving meanings,
as opposed to memorizing keywords. Edited by Arthur Edward Waite, with an
introduction in his usual style.
Wirth, Oswald. The Tarot of the Magicians (tr. from the French, Le Tarot des Imagiers du
Moyen Age). York Beach: Samuel Weiser, 1985 (original pub. Paris: 1927). Deals primarily
with the Major Arcana; what is most useful about it is as an example of how the selfconsuming dialectic works in practice, from the "initiated" point of view -- studying
Wirth helps to learn how to interpret the cards, rather than just studying for meanings.
Note that many of these resources are in the public domain, and are available for
reading and/or download from the internet. One excellent source of Tarot related
materials is: http://www.tarot.org.il/Library/English.html

VIII. Supplement
ADDITIONAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MAJOR ARCANA
The following list provides interpretations for the Major Arcana based largely on the
work of Paul Marteau, with additions and modifications from other sources. These were
developed specifically for cartomancy and divination, rather than for esoteric
instruction or indoctrination in any system of belief.
In using lists such as this, it is important to keep in mind that no list can define the
meaning of a card in a reading. Divination is not an objective science with repeatable
results. It is a subjective art, in which the meaning of the card is given by a complex
interaction of the imagery on the card itself, the knowledge and intuition of the diviner,
and the self-consuming process already discussed. As such, a given card may mean
completely different things in different situations, and will certainly mean different
things to different diviners.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if one is actually going to read the cards, as
opposed to applying a pre-determined set of meanings, then the imagery on the card
itself will be relevant to the meaning. The interpretations developed by Paul Marteau
were specifically intended for the Marseilles-style deck; diviners must necessarily adapt
those meanings to the images of the deck actually being used. A particular arcanum
may, therefore, mean completely different things depending upon which deck a diviner
is using. This is one reason why choosing a deck is an important personal decision for
each diviner some sets of images and their meanings simply will not be effective tools
for some diviners, while they may be very meaningful to others.
It is important to realize that while many of the Major Arcana depict images of persons,
the forces and energies represented by the cards are strictly impersonal. The
characteristics of persons are represented in the Tarot by the Court cards, not by the
Major Arcana. It is, for example, a common mistake to apply female personality traits to
The Empress, and doing so results in a reading that is skewed away from the forces
actually represented by the card. Female personality traits are represented by the
Queens, and in some cases Pages or Princesses; the energies of The Empress have
nothing to do with gender or personality.
Finally, in the list that follows, the Abstract meaning is an attempt to characterize the
forces or energies represented by the card. Upright and Inverted are suggestions for
interpreting the actions and results of those energies in a reading. Some diviner choose

not to read cards as upright or inverted; in this case, the upright and inverted
meanings would apply to how the cards are influenced by circumstances or other
nearby cards.

I. THE MAGICIAN / JUGGLER / MAGUS

Abstract: The underlying current of energy moving events is strong, though it is capable
of being influenced. Action by magic or occult means.
Upright: A situation that is changing, often in petty or insignificant ways that do not
affect the outcome. A situation that is being manipulated or controlled, particularly if
associated with a Court card. Possibly a situation in need of control, or forces that need
to be directed. Not a very strong card, it is more indicative of what other, stronger cards
are doing.
Inverted: Random changes with no overall direction. Lack of control, purpose or
direction. Annoying details and distractions that do not matter in the overall outcome.
With other negative cards, may mean control or manipulation with evil or malicious
intent, or even sheer stupidity. May also mean hesitation or delay.

II. THE PRIESTESS / PAPESS / HIGH PRIESTESS / JUNON

Abstract: Unseen forces at work, the occult, intuition, clairvoyance. Wisdom and
assistance from unknown sources.
Upright: Unseen forces affecting events in subtle but decisive ways. A hidden pathway
or knowledge, or a completely new idea, is revealed that uncovers a possibility
heretofore unknown. Unlocking of doors, great power to overcome evil and adversity; a
safe haven or respite. Wisdom appearing from unknown sources.
Inverted: This is a very strong card, and it does not lose its power when inverted, but it
can be delayed or temporarily obstructed. It can neutralize or reverse other negative
cards. But it carries with it the danger of becoming moonstruck of becoming lost in
the mystique of the unknown, and losing focus or delaying action.

III. THE EMPRESS

Abstract: Universal consciousness; the Entelechy or Vital Force. The Circle.
Upright: This is a strong card, which cannot be overpowered. It represents the power of
things and persons to set and follow their own paths. It is the card of natural forces

that act impersonally, but nonetheless can affect everything around them. If one can
align one's self with this card, one has great power and unlimited resources upon which
to draw. But to do so, one must respect and honor the consciousness of all Beings in the
universe. It is a force which neither evil nor selfishness can overpower, and may
represent events or situations that cannot be changed.
Inverted: The return of the current -- one has set one's self in opposition to the Universe,
and one is in danger of being crushed by it. Depending on the other cards, it can mean
the delay of the inevitable.

IV. THE EMPEROR

Abstract: The center of the circle. The Self, that part of the individual that cannot be
destroyed. Individual consciousness the crystallization of universal consciousness
within each individual.
Upright: An opportunity to carry out a plan, or to direct the forces that shape a
situation, but only temporarily. Success, wealth and power, but not enduring. This is not
as strong a card as The Empress, but if aligned with it, is a very positive omen, if the
opportunity is seized. If surrounded by negative cards, it can mean tyranny.
Inverted: Loss of control, power, wealth. The preservation of the essence of the
Individual in the face of adversity no matter what the loss, that which makes the
individual a person cannot be destroyed. The dethroning of an established power or the
failure of a plan, more by circumstances than by force.

V. THE POPE / HIEROPHANT / HIGH PRIEST / JUPITER

Abstract: The occult power of the individual, power through wisdom.
Upright: Great wisdom brought to bear on a situation; progress through wisdom,
kindness and generosity. Forgotten or lost knowledge that comes to light, and changes
the entire situation. A secret whose revelation is positive. A new interpretation of old
ideas. Answers found through research and study.
Inverted: Wisdom frittered away uselessly. Worthless advice, unhelpful assistance,
meaningless insights, pointless discussion, wasted efforts. Delays or failures brought
about by stupidity. Dumbing down, an appeal to the lowest common denominator.
False doctrines or teachings.

VI. THE LOVER / LOVERS

Abstract: Singularity and multiplicity the One divided within itself, that it might
experience different possibilities. The alchemical Solve, or dissolution of one into two.
The idea, romance and enchantment of love.
Upright: A situation that is open to different resolutions. Different paths that can be
taken, but if action is not taken, circumstances will choose, and once decided, recourse
may not be possible. Harmonizing and resolving differences between two apparently
contradictory alternatives. The interplay of two and one union, partnership, love,
marriage, but without the loss of individuality. Synergy -- the coiled springs of
relations between individuals who respect and honor each other, without destroying
their own individuality. Refusal to allow others to control one's life or destiny; refusal to
surrender to the will of others. There is a great deal of variation in the design and intent
of this card among different decks in some, the emphasis is more on the pathways
aspect, while others are more focused on a romantic meaning. Some decks emphasize
the idea of an arranged affair or marriage, some suggest chance meetings, while
others are more suggestive of competition.
Inverted: Separation, failure to unite, falling apart, betrayal, one person dominating
another. Indecision, hesitation, nihilism, false dichotomy. Forcing a choice between what
is wanted, and what one feels obliged to do but does not want. As Carlos Castaneda's
Don Juan once said, there are many paths one can choose, but only one has heart, and
the others will surely be your death. Choosing a path that separates one from one's
heart is a fatal and potentially lethal choice because it separates the individual from
a part of himself, and ultimately destroys the individual. As Sartre said, You never
have to 'have to', and if faced with a choice between following one's dreams and
following the demands and expectations of others, it may be best to walk away from the
entire situation and find a different alternative.
This can be a very dangerous card, for many interpretations of it play on the false belief
that beauty and pleasure are opposed to rightness and goodness, and that the ideal life
is such that one does not have things that bring pleasure and enjoyment. This problem
of things that are worthwhile and valuable becoming deprecated, while things that are
worthless become important, is called the transvaluation of values, and is a result of a
process called the master/slave dialectic, which is the meaning of this card inverted.
In short, the process works by the psychological conversion of jealousy into a moral
imperative for example, jealousy of those who are physically attractive turns into
contempt for those who are attractive because of the belief that they are immoral, and
attractiveness becomes a thing to be shunned. In this way, ugliness, stupidity,
mediocrity, and so forth become things that are admired, while beauty, wisdom, wealth,
and power become objects of contempt. What those who fall for this philosophical ruse
fail to see is that the purpose of the dialectic is to insure that the masters are able to
keep the things of value, while the masses of slaves rejoice in the fact that they do not

have those things. The extreme form of this kind of nihilism is that one should live a life
of mediocrity and toil, and that one'sreward for this will come in some supposed life
after death. It has been, and still is, a very effective tool for keeping the slaves enslaved.
This should serve as a warning to the person drawing this card, particularly if it is
inverted, that there may be a kind of manipulation going on, in which a person is being
persuaded to follow a course of action, in the name of what is right, that is truly
against his or her best interests.

VII. THE CHARIOT

Abstract: The flow of energy and events that carry individuals along with them.
Upright: Victory, conquest, being carried along with the progress of events.
Something that has started, and may be difficult to stop. Standing up for one's self in a
group. Unexpected news, good or bad according to surrounding cards. Can also mean
the spreading of news.
Inverted: Being swept away by events, losing control, being caught up in the crowd. A
herd animal, losing one's self in the group. Surrendering to the will or judgment of
others. Bad news. Can influence nearby cards for good or bad.

VIII. JUSTICE / ADJUSTMENT

Abstract: Equilibrium, adjustment, righting of wrongs by force. The hope of those who
are right, the fear of those who wrong.
Upright: A trial or test, or the need for proof. The adjustment of efforts to suit the
situation; a mid-course correction. Compensation, reward, receiving what is due. An
opportunity to correct past mistakes; rehabilitation, restitution.
Inverted: Injustice, falsely accused, wrongly condemned. Loss due to failure of legal
system, failure due to technicality. Plans going wrong and not being corrected.

VIIII. THE HERMIT

Abstract: The power of solitude to reveal the truth.
Upright: Revealing of a secret, illumination of a mystery. A light which provides
guidance, and dispels the fog of lies and deceptions. Reveals that which has been
hidden or concealed with malicious intent. Inwardness; truth revealed through
contemplation.

Inverted: Darkness, confusion, deception, delays in revealing the truth. Self-deception,

hiding in a web of lies and falsity. Unwanted social contact and interaction.

X. THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

Abstract: Contingent events, evolution, Expect the unexpected.
Upright: Instability, unpredictable change, beneficial accidents and coincidences.
Generally an improvement in the situation, due to unexpected events. Progress brought
by a reshuffling of plans. The card is almost always beneficial.
Inverted: Confusion, disruptions and changes that create difficulties, but nonetheless
are beneficial. Can disrupt the influences of surrounding cards.

XI. FORCE / STRENGTH / LUST

Abstract: Mind over matter; will-to-power, energy that emanates from the core of Being.
Upright: Overcoming difficulties with determination; taking control of events by the
force of Will. The strength to oppose evil and injustice, and to fight for what is right in
the face of forceful opposition. Refusal to surrender or capitulate. Victory after a long
and hard fight. This is a strong card that does not yield to the influences of those around
it. It means that one will not give up.
Inverted: Overcome by events. The tide of events has turned against you, a need to
rethink plans and strategy.

XII. THE HANGED MAN

Abstract: Mirror images, action and reaction, suspension and stillness.
Upright: This is generally a bad card, meaning weakness, vacillation, abandonment,
renunciation, faltering on commitments and giving up from weakness, fear, or
indifference. A refusal to commit, or to see things through. The abandonment of free
will, and surrender to fate. Fortunately this is a weak card, and its influence is easily
overcome by other forces.
Inverted: The inverted card shows the Hanged Man on his feet, suggesting the
possibility of pulling one's self up by one's bootstraps. A possibility of success, but
without reward or satisfaction. But more generally it means hypocrisy, hidden agendas,
backstabbing, gossip, and outright lies.

XIII. DEATH
Abstract: A progression of events to their final conclusion. A wasteland; everything cut
to pieces and left to rot.
Upright: A final decision, from which there is no appeal or recourse. Death, either
physically, emotionally, or figuratively. The end of something; progress terminated and
cannot be restarted. When combined with other cards, it can mean irreversible
consequences.
Inverted meaning: A temporary reprieve, an illness or shock which may not prove fatal.
It can also mean a haunting, or a train of evil that does not stop at physical death, but
continues to bring destruction and suffering beyond death itself. When combined with
other cards it can mean an unresolved situation, or unending difficulties.

XIIII. TEMPERANCE / ART

Abstract: Measured action and response; the proper force applied in the proper way, in
the proper amount. The alchemical Coagula, combining and recombination. From
each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Upright: Reflection, deliberation and decision; nothing done without having thought
the matter through. Results delayed, but in the end more beneficial due to careful
timing of actions. All sides considered; an equitable and fair outcome.
Inverted: Chatter, leveling, criticism and argumentativeness that drain the value out of
all ideas and actions. Inaction through indecisiveness. Politics, with plans and projects
delayed or made worthless through compromise. Ideas drained of their value through
endless analysis. Master/slave nihilism: the emptying out of all value and worth
through dialectic. A good result spoiled by criticism. Reflection and deliberation used as
an excuse for inaction.

XV. THE DEVIL

Abstract: While this is a forceful card which has no meaning in the abstract, it eventually
evokes the wrath of all the other cards. The Devil is the God of someone you don't
like.
Upright: Success and triumph, through evil and corrupt means. Fortune and victory
through scheming, trickery, fraud, and outright destruction and physical force over
others. When this card follows others, it means that the efforts of the other cards will be
subjugated by evil. However, the triumph will be short-lived, as this card always means

eventual punishment. Particularly if followed by a strong card, it is a bad omen, for

what has been gained through unscrupulous means will be lost, and severe punishment
will be inflicted. This is not a card of mistakes; it is a card of willed evil, and of the
punishment for it. It is a very strong card; while other strong cards that follow it can
fight and overcome it, the only cards that can completely destroy it are The Empress,
Force, and The Tower. In some versions of this card, it may mean random and
haphazard creation and action without regard for consequences, but in this case, while
the intent may not be evil in itself, the result is always corruption and degeneration.
Inverted: Evil and harmful effects, corruption and degeneration. When upright this card
means evil on its own, when inverted it means evil through influence on other cards. It
corrupts everything it influences.
In some decks, this card is intentionally designed to avoid meanings associated with
religion and evil, and often reflects the idea of a nature spirit, or the will of nature.
In these cases the card reflects a personified view of some of the energies more
generally represented by The Empress. It can refer to the free will of the individual, or
the expression of a connection between the individual and nature. Even though the
religious aspects of evil and corruption are absent in these designs, they nonetheless
carry with them the need to pay attention to one's actions and beliefs, and to consider
what motivates one to think and act in certain ways, and in what direction one's
thoughts and actions may be leading. Is one really acting from free will, or is one being
manipulated and controlled for some other purpose?

XVI. THE TOWER OF DESTRUCTION / THE BLASTED TOWER / THE

FALLEN HOUSE OF GOD
Abstract: A very powerful card; it is the same force as The Empress and Force, but
applied in a vengeful way. The destruction of false gods, the storming of the Bastille, the
burning of the paper tigers. That which is highest has the farthest to fall.
Upright: A dramatic and unexpected turn of events; overpowering force brought to bear
on a situation that cannot be resolved in any other way. The death of a tyrant and the
end of oppression; the complete obliteration of the infrastructure that allows tyranny
and oppression to flourish. This can apply either figuratively or literally, but most often
means actual physical destruction, not imaginary. Liberation from prison, a sudden end
to plans that depend upon an established power structure. Death of the aristocracy and
power elite; revolution, upheaval, class warfare, payback for abuse and domination. The
destruction of oppressive and repressive conditions. This is a force applied from
without, a force not under your control, that can topple everything you have built up,
but it can also topple everything that oppresses and obstructs.

Inverted: Purposeless violence and destruction; riots, mob violence, looting, gang wars.
Inciting riots for personal gain. Yellow sheet journalism, undeserving victim of a
scandal. The survival of a tyrant, the incomplete destruction of an oppressive
government, allowing them to return to power. Replacing one form of oppression with
another.

XVII. THE STAR

Abstract: Energy flowing from a higher plane to the physical. Intervention of unseen
forces in ordinary affairs; harmony resulting from this energy flow.
Upright: The inspiration of a starry night. Hope, assistance freely given without
conditions attached, help from a higher plane. When it appears in a reading, it usually
means things taking a turn for the better, as a result of subtle yet powerful influences
whose source may not be apparent. Satisfaction and tranquility through harmony and
peace. This card implies an outpouring of energy in response to having asked for it or
deserved it, as opposed to a beneficial series of random events. By itself, this is not a
very strong card, and unless it is near stronger cards, it can be overpowered or its effects
can fade.
Inverted: Disappointment, dissatisfaction, disharmony. The disruption of a harmonious
state. Temporary happiness broken by feelings of loss. A well-disposed situation falling
apart.

XVIII. THE MOON

Abstract: Illusion, mystery. Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by
night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.
Upright: Illusions, things imagined or not seen clearly. This card is often thought of as
evil because it implies secrecy and hidden actions, but it also suggests romance,
enchantment and mystique, and the artistic expression of the imagination. This card
means that whatever can be imagined, can become real, and in that sense it is a card of
hope and inspiration. It does mean magic and witchcraft, but these things are not evil in
and of themselves. It can also mean safe passage by night, a beacon in the fog, hope in a
bad situation, and possible escape from unjust imprisonment, both physical and mental.
Inverted: Moonstruck, lunacy, delusion, obsession, madness. Acting on false beliefs, and
attributing false and imaginary evil to those who have done nothing wrong. Believing
one is right, to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. Thievery, sabotage,
subterfuge, scandal. Failed attempt to escape, following a false lead, heading in the
wrong direction.

XVIIII. THE SUN

Abstract: Brilliance, universal radiance, generation and renewal.
Upright: Triumph and success in whatever circumstances one finds oneself. A powerful
card which dispels darkness of all kinds, and brings forth positive and beneficial effects
from the cards around it. Riches, satisfaction, joy, happiness. Other cards cannot undo
its effects. This is likely the most positive card in the deck.
Inverted: Success delayed, and maybe tempered, but never destroyed. The Sun is the
source of all energies on Earth, and just as that energy can fluctuate with the days and
the seasons, so even the triumph of the Sun can have its ups and downs. Also, just as
the Sun rises, so it can also set, and unless backed up by a card on a higher plane, its
effects can eventually fade.

XX. JUDGMENT / THE LAST JUDGEMENT / THE AEON

Abstract: Release. The call of man to a higher state, the drive to rise above the physical.
Upright: This is a complex card, with many subtle shades of meaning. It almost always
means a release of some kind, or even a rescue. A final decision that releases everything
and everyone kept on hold. A solution, or possibly an escape, made possible by an
appeal to a higher plane. Fame or glory earned and received. An action or idea that
triggers a series of events that opens doors, solves other problems, and leads to great
success.
Inverted: A suspension of judgment, everything kept waiting. Fame or glory, but only
transient and of short duration. Failure to understand or pursue a solution. This is
primarily a mental card, and does not combine well with the more physical cards like
the Devil and the Wheel of Fortune. It does, however, offer a possible way around their
effects.

XXI. THE WORLD / THE UNIVERSE

Abstract: The perfection and harmony of man and universe.
Upright: This is another complex card, as its meaning is largely synthetic, determined by
the cards around it and the overall direction of the reading. In general it means the way
the individual fits into the world, and what the overall result is likely to be from the
cards that have been drawn. Given its position at the base of the Tree of Life, it gives the
effects of all the forces in play. By itself, it indicates success, fortune, and a positive

outcome that is enduring, and that radiates satisfaction throughout all the planes.
When acting with other cards, it is usually a positive force; it can subordinate the desires
of the individual for the good of the Universe, though it never sacrifices the I on the
altar of We. Quite the opposite, it lends aid to the individual seeking to better himself
by bettering those around him. It also indicates a fine-tuning of positive cards like the
Sun, a crystallizing and permanence of the gains that have been made. Perfect harmony
that crystallizes into solid and lasting results.
Inverted: If one sees the World as upside down, it is usually because one is standing on
one's head. An illusion of failure, failure to understand or appreciate success. An
unwillingness to accept that the matter is finished; a lingering feeling that something
has been left undone. A failure of other cards in the reading to synthesize into a
coherent meaning.

The last major arcana, without a number, or sometimes 0 or 22

THE FOOL
Abstract: Man progressing towards evolution, time progressing onward.
Upright: The meaning depends on surrounding cards. In material matters, it can mean
foolishness, taking dangerous risks, irresponsibility, and abandonment. But in mental
and spiritual matters, it means an openness to inspiration and new ideas, daring to take
a new direction, exploring new possibilities. It can mean an unexpected event or a
chance meeting, a change of direction (either expected or unexpected), or even
strangeness, unusual or weird circumstances and events the direct intervention of the
Unknown. It also indicates the progression of time; in some divination systems, it shows
the point of the present. Depending on which way The Fool is facing, it may advise the
Questioner to take a specific direction.
Inverted: It may be advising a specific direction to take. Otherwise, it shows that one has
stumbled on the path, and progress has been halted. In mental matters it indicates
closed mindedness that is obstructing movement, or a hidden agenda that one is not
being honest about.

FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE MAJOR ARCANA

In addition to considering the suggested meanings of the cards, the various ways in
which one might interpret those meanings, and the effects of dignification, both in
terms of cards adjacent to one another, and the order in which they are drawn, it might
also be useful to consider the relationship between the meaning of a card and its
placement on the Tree of Life.

For example, it has been noted that three cards represent very strong forces that cannot
be overcome by other cards: The Empress, Force, and The Tower. A glance at the Tree of
Life diagram easily shows why this is the case. All three of these cards are really the
same force or energy, applied at different levels where the Tree of Life transitions
between Worlds. They are barriers, one the one hand, and transformations on the other
when they occur in a reading, they have the power to transform the entire situation
under study, and in fact can make or break the entire matter. None of these cards have
much to do with influencing, or being influenced by, other cards; they are mostly
autonomous in their effects.
Along similar lines, notice that The Priestess, Temperance and The World also occupy
special positions they are the cards of the Middle Pillar. They represent perfectly
balanced forces, and for this reason are not easily overpowered. They cross, at right
angles, the transformation cards already described. These cards are breakthrough
cards, pathways through difficulties and obstacles, and ways of passing through the
barriers and transformations they intersect. Their appearance in a reading usually
suggests a way forward, or may offer protection and assistance from a higher plane.