About century years ago, Carl Jung retired from the
psychiatric sanitarium where he worked, to attend to his private
practice and to pursue his own studies of the Unconscious. Over the
next several years, even decades, Jung developed the heart and soul
of his analytical psychology.
Last year, after decades of sequestering, a central artifact of this
study of his own Unconscious was published and translated. This Is
Jung’s Red Book. It is a hand written, calligraphic and illuminated,
illustrated with his own paintings, mandalas.
Here Jung gives expression through fantasies of the nature
of the unconscious. The Red Book represents early appearances of
contents from the unconscious. As Jung himself says in his
autobiography, everything in his later psychology, his exploration
of alchemy, his investigation into the meaning of archetypes, his
formalizing of active imagination derives from these unvarnished
experiences of his own psyche his own confrontation with the
Unconscious.
It is one of those accidents of history that was at the
same time that the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck was published. Jung
himself seems not to have paid much attention to that innovative
deck, so that when he references tarot in some of his later notes he
is usually referring to the Marseille decks or some Swiss variation.
When learning how to do active imagination in a therapeutic
setting, one learns that a way one comes to understand the meaning
of symbols that arise in one’s fantasies, be they from waking
reveries or sleeping images, is to amplify the symbols with other
symbols. To let them speak to us. Not only in the dim light of some
reductive rationality, but also as a way to uncover their deeper or
more universal meaning.
Likewise with good tarot reading, after we have a general
grasp of what the cards consensually mean, we should explore the
images on the cards as symbols, allowing the symbols to evoke other
symbols, until we have populated the whole world with a symbolic
imagescape.
As one becomes a serious tarot reader, it is almost
impossible, not to be affected by the understanding of symbolism
current in analytical psychology and derived from Jung’s work. One
of the important ways that we can enrich our understanding of tarot
and, at the same time, drink from the source of Jungian insight, is
to apply our tarot reading with a reading of the Red Book itself. In
this way I am adding symbol upon symbols and am directly
experiencing the language of the birds, meaning, opening myself to a
pure unconscious dialogue with the unconscious. Perhaps the image
that makes this clear is like a glass bottom boat, where I am able
to see the undersea world without having to drown.
Jung’s fantasies in the Red Book act as keys within locks
that open the wellsprings of the Unconscious. Here they are
unvarnished, and though he provides some commentary, it is of the
initial sort, that is still under the sway of the numinous material.
As I read these fantasies, I lay out tarot cards as a way of guiding
me further into the nature of the unconscious. I usually keep the
spread as simple as possible.
Usually one card is all that I draw upon and then I ask of
the card what it has to say about the fantasy and what the fantasy
has to say about the card. Because the content of the Red Book is so
rich I am a layout several cards in a pattern to encompass various
aspects of the fantasy. What I have discovered here in learning how
to reread my tarot cards in conjunction with the content of the Red
Book is that the symbolic meaning of the cards on many levels is
much richer than we are led to practice when attempting to apply
tarot card meanings merely to the happenstance is of somebody’s
everyday life.
I highly recommend that you make part of your tarot study a
opening to the Unconscious by applying tarot cards to myths, fairy
tales, alchemical allegories, stories, and when and if you’re so
inclined, profound guides to the Unconscious such as Carl Jung’s Red
Book. The one condition that I would suggest is the gentle
reflection of the puzzle of the fantasy and its symbols with the
learned understanding of the tarot card being only the prelude to
what the card it may itself be suggesting about the fantasy.
Likewise realize that because of the accident of that card coming up
with this symbol and what it may mean is also opening new ways for
you to understand not only the meaning of the fantasy but also the
meaning of the tarot card. In this way we invite ourselves into a
deeper and more profound level of association as far as what the
cards mean.
Obviously it makes sense to keep these explorations in your
own tarot journal. That the nature of the symbols may not readily
makes sense to you, nor is it necessarily true that the ready at
hand explanation is the most accurate. Maintaining a sense of
puzzlement, bewilderment, perplexity, all opens one to the
continuing influence of possible deeper and surprising integration.
All symbols are multi-valent and so should never be reduced to
merely a handful of associations.
This study will constantly reinvigorate the familiar
symbols on the card so that they address greater levels of meaning
and significance. Remember that as we learn the special ways of
understanding the tarot and how it applies to the secret connection
of things with one another, they are gifts that are to be treasured
and also shared with the tarot community.
May the language of the birds free you in flight whether it
be day or night.
William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley Tarot
Becoming Familiar with our Prometheas
Charles Williams and the Greater Trumps (1950)
Weekly Teleconference Study of Meditations on the Tarot by Anonymous
Memories of the Past, Memories of the Future: Semiotics and Tarot-- Semetsky
No.17: Inna Semetsky, "Semanalysis in the Age of Abjection
The Magician’s Autopoietic Action, or Eros Contained and Uncontained
Thoor Ballyee: W.B. Yeats' Tower
What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow!
Semetsky-The-Language-of-Signs-Semiosis-and-the-Memories-of-the-Future
Semetsky-Tarot-as-a-Projective-Technique