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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780877287230 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 01/15/1992 |
| Series: | Basic Instruction for Reading Cards |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.68(d) |
Read an Excerpt
THE TAROT BOOK
Basic Instruction for Reading Cards
By Jana Riley
Samuel Weiser, Inc.
Copyright © 1992 Jana Lee RileyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87728-723-0
CHAPTER 1
The Archetypes
The tarot is a deck of cards consisting of 78 pictures of archetypes. It is broken down into three sections:
The Major Arcana—22 cards showing archetypal forces, usually depicted as people drawn from mythology or religious traditions.
The Minor Arcana—40 cards consisting of four suits each numbered 1 through 10.
The Court Cards—16 cards depicting a King, Queen, Prince, and Princess of each of the four suits.
Before any serious discussion of the tarot is undertaken, it is probably appropriate to first try to agree upon exactly what it is we are looking at. The tarot, although familiar to cartomancers and students of the esoteric, still remains largely unknown or misunderstood in the minds of the general public. It is not uncommon to hear it called pure rubbish, wishful thinking, fortunetelling, even a tool of the devil.
But no matter how people feel about the tarot, whether they see it as a respectable form of divination or as silly superstition, it remains clear that cards—whether they be tarot or the tarot's sibling, playing cards—have some sort of formidable allurement for the mind; not only have cards been around for centuries, but they continue to be one of humanity's favorite pastimes.
Our interest in cards throughout history seems to be based on more than just our natural love of games. If it were only for this reason that cards have endured, then we would not still have the tarot, which has remained so consistently true to its original art forms. Tarot is very much like some other games we still play today, such as chess, backgammon, and checkers—they continue to carry the ancient symbols from which they originally sprang. If we explore the reason for tarot's timeless form, we discover it is not a fluke that cards have remained popular in the collective psyche of humanity, but instead—because the tarot (and playing cards) carry ageless images—they are expressions, literal pictures, of what Carl Jung called the eternal archetype.
The tarot is a collection of 78 archetypes; playing cards use 52. In reality, we can probably assume that there are an infinite number of archetypes existing in the universe, or if you take a more holistic approach, you might say the universe is one big archetype of which we perceive infinite parts; we call these perceived parts of the One different archetypes.
What is truly amazing about the tarot is its holism. At some point in our history, someone, or group of someones, had enough wisdom and knowledge of dimensions beyond our own to set down in picture cards 78 of these universal archetypes. How someone managed to do so with such faithful, unerring precision is an enigma that remains to this day one of history's unanswerable puzzles.
So what is an archetype? Carl Gustav Jung, one of the greatest psychologists of our time, is the person responsible for defining in modern terminology what an archetype is. Even though examples of archetypes have been with us from the beginning in such familiar traditions as games, religion, mythology, legends, folklore, and fairy tales, as well as the esoteric arts (such as astrology, numerology, geomancy, and cartomancy), Carl Jung is responsible for bringing to us descriptions and knowledge of archetypes which are acceptable to our current way of thinking. His theories and ideas have done much to change the foundation of psychology as we know it today. Jung spoke of truths that touched our hearts and sparked within us the recognition of something we thought we had lost.
An archetype is a difficult concept to define with any of the five senses. Sight, hearing, and even communication through the spoken or written word all become inadequate when attempting to define archetypes. Because archetypes are holistic, able to encompass worlds both visible and invisible, both physical and spiritual, by their very nature, they are ephemeral, like footprints left in the sand or wisps of shadows glimpsed for a moment just beyond our periphery of vision. They are not bound by time or space, past or future, and they play in dimensions most of us can only dream of.
We may recognize an archetype by the tracks it makes, by the effect it leaves in our lives in the form of strange incidents, revelations, or magical moments. Jung defined such a moment of archetypal recognition as a synchronicity. A more popular definition of recognizing an archetype might be a startling coincidence.
Carl Jung dedicated his life to this search for the "something not perceived." He wrote of archetypes:
The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently it is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. Whereas the personal unconsciousness consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes.
The concept of the archetype ... indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere.
[The instincts] ... form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour.
Jung probably remains unsurpassed in his research and exploration of archetypes as applied to the human psyche. Although he consistently made subtle referrals to the existence of archetypes in other areas of life, the mass of his published material deals only with the psychological aspects.
Another more mystical and less psychological way of viewing the archetypes is to see them as emanations originating from the Godhead. The Godhead is one, undivided, the All-That-Is in a state of beingness where there is not, for all is. When the Godhead is pictured as light, as It is often described, the light is seen to be pouring forth its rays, infiltrating all of creation with itself. The closer the rays of light are to the source of the Godhead, the purer and less divided they are. As they descend further from the source, the less pure and more coarse they become, and the less they partake of is-ness. If this can be pictured in linear time and space (which light isn't, but we must deal with what we can understand) we can see the Godhead not only sending forth pure rays of individual beams of Itself through the matrices of infinitude, but also modifying these beams at each progressive level of space according to the angles, or arcs, at which they are perceived.
Just as water seeks its own level, the individual rays of light beams being sent forth from the source consist of harmonically-resonant spectrums encompassing the unique code-pattern that the All-That-Is has programmed in each. Each spectrum is a part of the source, reflecting that part of the source which it has sent forth from itself. At each level these light-blueprints fuse or translate according to the rhythms of the plane and process they are intermeshing with, and even though they remain whole, they appear translated according to each level's perception of them. In other words, the Godhead sends images of Itself out to "become" according to each image's own innate nature.
As the groupings, or arrangements, of like light-beams reach closer to the coarser portion of the cosmos, the light eventually materializes, grounding itself in its rhythmically similar material form. Each material form is but a physical manifestation of the light-archetype from which it formed, partaking of the same code-pattern that formed it. Viewed this way, each archetype is an arrangement of energy-motion corresponding to its own like code-principle, not only on this level but on all the similar levels that oscillate with its own particular light-blueprint. This implies that constant creation is forever and in all ways taking place, all archetypes mirroring the original source, the All-That-Is as it spirals down from the purest of matrices. Each archetype is the same energy-motion comprised of the origin, structure, and dynamics of its own light ray from the source. This also implies that the source is creating life from itself, and life is also creating the source from itself.
Although Jung limited his analysis to the human mind and spirit, couching his interpretations in psychological-sociological terms more easily acceptable to the scientific communities, this universal principle is an alternate description of archetypes as applied to the human psyche. He simply said it differently, more psychically.
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines an archetype as "the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies." If we consider Jung's psychological theory that archetypes comprise the collective unconscious, the mystical theory of archetypes being light-beams of God encoded with God Itself, and take into account Webster's definition that archetypes are copies of the original model, we may find ourselves recalling the ancient philosophy known as Taoism. Taoists say that all is one, and any idea we have that anything is unique or set apart from anything else is merely illusion, stemming from our ability to perceive only a small part of any whole.
Included within this concept is the symbolism of the microcosm and macrocosm, the macrocosm being God, the microcosms being what we are calling archetypes. Everything is contained within everything else, i.e., the quark is within the electron, the electron within the atom, the atom within the molecule, the molecule within the cell, the cell within the organ, the organ within the body, the body within the earth, earth within the solar system, the solar system within the galaxy, the galaxy within the universe, and on and on ad infinitum, both inward as well as outward. Just because an atom is not aware of the organ it is in, as we are not aware of the molecules within us, does not mean that they are separate or do not exist. It means that we cannot know of one another because of our lack of awareness.
If we view the infinite number of microcosms in a single macrocosm as archetypes, we might better say that we are not aware of them because we are only able to perceive at angles compatible to our own. It is no accident that Plato knew about archetypes two millennia ago, and even called them such, because archetypes are the type of angle, or arch, in which we view the Whole. When we read cards, whether we know it or not, we are studying various angles of other various angles, according to their own angle. Of course, this is true of everyone and everything, but what makes divination unique is that we are attempting to grasp angles which extend beyond our present ones; we are admitting, hopefully, that the world extends beyond that of which we are aware.
There are numerous ways of describing the archetypes, and through the ages people have done so in every way imaginable. But if we can read between the lines, we will discover all these seemingly different descriptions are more or less saying the same thing. Tarot cards do it with pictures. And seldom has the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words" been more applicable than in tarot.
* * *
Most tarot decks use people to depict the archetypes. Over the ages so much effort and research have gone into the human figures of the Major Arcana, not to mention their surrounding symbols, that the Major of many decks speaks volumes of information through its currently understood symbolism. However, this does not appear to be the case with the Minor Arcana and court cards.
It is natural enough that the court cards should be people in tarot. The only symbolism we need from them is that of showing exactly what kind of people we are talking about. But the Minor Arcana is an altogether different story because the Minor is not only talking about people; it is instead more like the Major than the court cards in that it attempts to show an infinitude of universal possibilities and archetypes. The Minor Arcana of most decks uses people to depict the wholeness of life, but there are some decks which also employ more cosmogonal symbolism.
For instance, playing cards use numbers, color, and arrangement of pips to depict universal meaning. And the Crowley (Thoth) deck is a fascinating representation of archetypes expressed not only by number but also as unifying coagencies and code-patterns. Lady Freida Harris, who painted the deck under Aleister Crowley's direction, used mandalas, symmetries, and color to express the archetypes in the Minor Arcana. For example, Crowley's 2 of Discs shows a crowned serpent looping around itself into a figure 8 with two yin-yang symbols within each loop of the 8. One could hardly conceive of a more harmonious representation in a single picture for the 2 of Discs, expressing both its exoteric meaning (juggling the dualities of everyday living) combined with its esoteric meaning (opposites being the two halves of the same circle, implying no polarity within polarity). The symbolism and imagery in the Crowley deck is an exciting and enlightening pansophy of the archetypes expressed in brilliant symbolism.
This difference between expressing archetypes as people or expressing them as symbols is significant. In tarot, because we are attempting to interpret the wholeness of life from a few pictures painted onto cards, it is important that we not limit ourselves any more than we already, by necessity, are. Arche-types are not only people — they are all of life everywhere — people, animals, nature, emotions, thoughts, spirit, events, and situations. To limit pictures or words to only people is like trying to describe the ocean by looking at one drop of water. In this sense, tarot decks depicting the archetypes as symmetries, manadalas, and universal symbols are usually more accurate than those using only people.
This is especially true of the Minor Arcana because, as mentioned, while the Major Arcana over the centuries has lent itself to archetypal analyses and symbology expressing wholeness, the Minor Arcana is still sadly lacking in many decks. Not only is the totality of the archetype lost in its picture of human dominance, but all too often the card's picture leads the student to view only one side of its human condition, with its polarity being completely ignored.
This is not to imply that people symbology in the Minor Arcana is always more limited than those using symmetrical arrangements or code symbols, but it can be the case. As a matter of fact, there are some decks available now with Minor Arcana that are outstanding in the way they have incorporated symbology on and around people. If we focus only on people, however, we may tend to forget we are not alone in the universe, that God is all creatures and all life, and in tarot there is nothing that can be said, told, or predicted for ourselves or others that does not in some major way involve all that is around us.
In religion, archetypes are often called devils, gods, angels, and demons. In mythology they are heroes, heroines, and objects of power. Archetypes are in all things, and express in all ways — people and objects included. But it is as incorrect to think of them as only entities (i.e., people or animals) as it is to think of them as only spirits or demons. For while they are these entities, they are also the processes and motion of all things. Archetypes are arrangements of processes and motion; they are dynamic oscillating motion grouped and ordered by like-rhythms. Just as in physics the sub-atomic world consists not only of particles but also of waves, so in the physical world and beyond, archetypes consist not only of entities but also of processes.
Archetypes are processes, or symmetries, of harmonically-resonant energy-motion. They are matrices of concordant form and motion, never static, corresponding to and intermeshing with lattices of like motion. When we spot a synchronicity, we are recognizing an archetype breaking in from another spectrum, or dimension, to complete itself in time-space.
Although he doesn't use the word archetype, in his book Notes to my Children, Ken Carey gives a delightful description of archetypes as found within people. To briefly summarize, he says that if we watch a river flowing, we will notice many little ripples and whirlpools in the river. When the flowing river passes rapidly over something under the water, strange patterns are formed. But what are they really, these patterns? Apart from the water, there is no definite entity in the pattern, for every instant the pattern consists of different and new drops of water. In some places where there is a rock buried beneath the surface of the water, a pattern is formed that lasts, so that it remains a fixed pattern. It appears to be a thing of itself. In reality, however, it is a part of the river, constantly renewed by the river's flow, so that eventually the entire river may flow through this pattern. Whirlpools are created, which for a time form a powerful force of their own, until they eventually get swept back into the river's flow.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE TAROT BOOK by Jana Riley. Copyright © 1992 Jana Lee Riley. Excerpted by permission of Samuel Weiser, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note
Chapter 1. The Archetypes
Chapter 2. The Tarot and Synchronicity
Chapter 3. The Tarot and the Individual
Chapter 4. Divination
Chapter 5. Choosing Your Deck
Chapter 6. An Introduction to the Cards
Chapter 7. The Numbers
Chapter 8. The Four Suits
Chapter 9. The Court Cards
Chapter 10. The Minor Arcana
Chapter 11. The Major Arcana
Chapter 12. Reading the Cards
Final Thoughts on Tarot Divination
Bibliography
About the Author