Editor’s Note: 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 tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
I propose that the body is a temple for the energy of the archetypes. In the chaos of the shuffle, the cards react to the energy of the shuffler’s archetype of the moment. So much so that when the client’s hands shuffle the cards, the energy of the heart Chakra with all it’s [sic] archetypal energetic information affects the cards. The cards magically fall in line with a synchronicity that is part of the mystery of the cards. The resulting segmented pictorial layout is a portrait of the client’s psychological state or their inner worldview.
— Toni Gilbert, Messages from the Archetypes
This passage describes holistic nurse and transpersonal counsellor Toni Gilbert’s hypothesis on how it is that tarot works — how it is that we seem to get just the cards that we want or need during a tarot reading, whether as reader or as client.
To explain two of the terms that she uses, and which I often refer to in my writing:
Synchronicity is a term that was first used by psychiatrist Carl Jung to describe, in his words, “an acausal connecting principle.” Wikipedia explains it as “relationships that are not causal in nature [which] … can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related.”
A bit of a mouthful, but I venture that most of us know it when we experience it. For example, several years ago I was driving in my home town, and I kept passing cars with number plates that had three consecutive sevens on them: 777. The frequency started to become a little unsettling, but I rolled with it … until I passed a car, looked at the plate, and burst out into incredulous laughter: 777 777. “Okay!” I said out loud (and I paraphrase). “If this is some kind of sign, then show me one more thing that I absolutely cannot pass off as coincidence. Come on! Show me!” I looked ahead, saw a car coming towards me. It had a personalised number plate: 777 WIN. That, for me, was a sublime moment of synchronicity. My thoughts — and also my feelings — and the number plates I encountered — all of them converged at a single moment in time.
Archetype, in the context in which Toni Gilbert uses it, refers to a blueprint of a behaviour, characteristic or feeling. Tarot cards are “archetypal,” in that they reference people and situations that we can identify with both deeply and immediately. They are collective: they describe an aspect of the human condition in which we all share to a greater or lesser degree, consciously or unconsciously, at one time or another. If you are taking a risk by stepping out into the unknown, then you are embodying the tarot archetype of The Fool. If you are encountering a moment of grace, where you feel in the flow, then you are encountering The Star. If you feel part of a joyous celebration of love and harmony, then you are in a dance with the Three of Cups.