Jung and the Tarot

A Card Game From Italy

Tarot was born in the courts of 15th-century Italy, where noble families had decks painted by hand and trimmed with gold. They weren't used for fortunes. People played with them, the way we play cards today.

The game is still played in parts of Europe, but over time the pictures became more famous than the game.

Major and Minor Arcana

A tarot deck has 78 cards. Most of them, the Minor Arcana, come in four suits, cups, coins, swords, and wands, and look a lot like a regular deck of playing cards.

The other 22 are the Major Arcana, and they're the ones people remember. Each has a name and a striking image: the Fool, the Lovers, Death, the Moon, the World.

From Game to Fortune-Telling

For about three hundred years, tarot stayed a game. Then in the late 1700s, French occultists claimed the picture cards held the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt, and tarot became a tool for reading the future.

Most people still know it that way. Jung saw something different in the same images.

Symbols to Play With

In a 1933 seminar, Jung described the tarot as a set of psychological images, symbols people play with. He placed it alongside the I Ching as a way of letting the unconscious show itself through pictures.

He also noticed how closely the cards echo alchemy. The Devil, for example, is drawn as a figure both male and female, the same union of opposites the alchemists linked with gold.

A Journey in 22 Cards

In his writing on archetypes, Jung traced the tarot's pictures back to the archetypes of transformation, the patterns that surface when a person goes through deep inner change.

Laid out in order, the Major Arcana tell that story. The Fool sets out with nothing. The Hermit withdraws to search alone. Death clears away the old life, the Tower brings down false structures, and the World closes the circle with a self made whole.

A Mirror for the Psyche

Seen this way, a card works the way a dream image does. It points inward, toward something already moving beneath the surface, and gives it a face you can recognize.

The Fool, the Hermit, and the Tower have outlasted the game that created them because people keep finding themselves in these figures. Each card holds a pattern that has always been part of us.

"A journey through the Tarot cards is primarily a journey into our own depths. Whatever we encounter along the way is au fond an aspect of our own deepest self." — Sallie Nichols