I will now analyse for you, Souls of Light, who have come this far on my site (and …. you did not get there by chance…) one of my many Masters: CARL GUSTAV JUNG.
THE TAROT AND CARL GUSTAV JUNG
Jung dedicated himself to the study of the Major Arcana of the Tarot.
According to the psychologist, the best Tarot deck to consider was the Tarot de Marseille in the Grimauld edition, the richest in alchemical references.
In 1933 Jung had introduced the subject of the Tarot in a seminar on active imagination that he held.
Speaking of the cards he said: ‘They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents. They combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of events in human history’.
He then continued his reflection by referring in detail to the colours, numbers and symbolic figures that appear on the cards, such as the sun, the man hanging upside down, the collapsing tower, the wheel of fate:
“These are a kind of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which are mixed in with the ordinary components of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is suitable for an intuitive method that aims to understand the flow of life, perhaps even to predict future events, events that arise on reading the conditions of the present moment”.
He compared the tarot cards to the I Ching and emphasised their effectiveness not so much as a means of reading the future, but as a tool for understanding the present: ‘Man has always felt the need to find access through the unconscious to the meaning of a present condition’.
Tarot cards could help man through images to fix an understanding of the present, in its most elusive, remote, impulsive and unconscious aspects, both individual and collective. Only at this point does it then become possible to reflect on the future, only by taking a cue from the present state of things in all its innermost complexity.
An embrace of Light,
