Editor’s Note: Sarah Taylor was not able to write her usual column today, so we’re offering a second look at one of her earliest articles for Planet Waves, on the principle of synchronicity in tarot. It originally ran Aug. 12, 2010. — Amanda
Now that we’re on the third article in our series on tarot (you’ll find article one here and article two here), we should be familiar with the basic structure of a typical deck of tarot cards –- major and minor arcana; court cards and Ace through ten. We’ve also got them in the spread we’ve chosen –- whether one card or two, a Celtic Cross, a Tree of Life reading or something else.
But… hang on a minute here… just how is this going to work? What makes sure that the cards best suited for this reading are the ones that we pick from the deck? What guides them to be assigned to a particular position in the layout?
In fact, if we’re going to start asking those questions, we might as well go back further. What made us choose that particular layout in the first place? No, go right back to the beginning. What made us choose that particular deck? Heck, why did we choose to interest ourselves with tarot in the first place, and why has this interest brought us to this discussion here?
I believe the answer is synchronicity.
But what is synchronicity? The idea of synchronicity was first discovered and introduced into public consciousness by psychologist Carl Jung in the early part of the twentieth century. This was followed by his paper entitled Synchronicity -– An Acausal Connecting Principle, published in 1952, in which he wrote:
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or “runs”. What I found were “coincidences” which were connected so meaningfully that their “chance” concurrence would be incredible.
According to the Wikipedia entry on synchronicity, “Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order.” In other words, at its most basic, synchronicity can be seen as a universal organising principle that seeks to reconcile the conscious and the unconscious.
Remember, this takes us back to our previous two articles. In the first, we looked at the idea that tarot weaves a narrative about our lives: “what happens on the surface, and what lies beneath”; and in the second we saw how the cards were the repository for archetypal content –- the larger spiritual themes that govern our thoughts, feelings and actions. We also introduced the idea that we need do nothing except trust in this law as the basis for an effective reading: this organising principle never disappears… though we can choose to ignore it.
So if we apply the law of synchronicity to a reading, we know that we will get the card, or cards, that we most need, because they are the ones whose meanings are seeking expression through this organising principle. If we apply this law to the particular deck that we have chosen, then it could be that the deck, through its history and imagery, has activated certain channels of communication that might otherwise have lain dormant: our attraction to it has, literally, turned us on. If we apply it to the matter of why we chose tarot as something that interested us in the first place, then perhaps it is because we have our own archetypal patterns that plug into this medium more readily than they do others. All demonstrate synchronicity in action.
However, while synchronicity is a universal organising principle, faultless in design, sometimes it helps us to be structured in our approach in order to harness it effectively. Human as we are, our interpretive skills need to be honed and sharpened to cut out the static that often accompanies such communications.
One of the ways we can do this is through the use of card positions and meanings.
Last week, part of the discussion centred on tarot spreads. Card positions are the components of a spread: they direct the information down certain channels, for the most part predetermined by the type of spread we choose, which then helps us to build a clearer and more coherent picture.
How? Imagine that you have shuffled your tarot deck, and you have picked three cards, and you simply put them on the surface in front of you, with no thought to the order that you drew them, nor to any particular aspect that each card might refer to. Now imagine that you have the same three cards, but this time you lay them face up, one by one, in a row from left to right, the left card referring to the past, the middle to the present, and the right to the future. Keep in mind that the cards aren’t only the same for both situations; but that the idea that is seeking expression is the same too.
I’d suggest that most tarot readers would prefer to work with the second, structured, type of reading. Why? Because we have access to a method that helps to clarify what is being said; it assists us in accessing meaning faster; and it works.
Anyway, the argument is somewhat beside the point: we automatically start organising seemingly random things into patterns so that we can understand them. For example, we would have to look at one card first over the two others; and we would probably look at the other two before going back to the first. Which means we have already structured them, albeit very simply. The way that we approach things invites structure, so it makes sense to go with the flow and work within a structured framework.
Therefore, by remaining mindful of the law of synchronicity, and by employing a systematic approach to our readings, we can assign whatever meanings to the cards that we feel best fit with the question, and best answer the call of our intuition. We can go with the kind of three-card past-present-future reading that I referred to above; we can do a six-card relationship spread where half of the cards refer to the querent, and the other to their partner; we can work with the Celtic Wings layout that Eric has designed, based on the card positions of the classic Celtic Cross; or we can assign our own positions to any number of cards we choose -– though choose wisely so that you are able to weave a narrative from them: the cards lend themselves to story.
No matter what we opt for, we have offered a channel to what calls for expression, and synchronicity takes care of the rest. It is then up to us to interpret that message with clarity and detachment.
If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.