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
Years ago, during a mid-life crisis, I found myself attracted to a man who was not my husband. I was the emotional captive of a pair of beautiful eyes and an inviting smile. After exhausting my storehouse of coping skills, I searched my home for a Tarot deck I had purchased in San Francisco many years before….
Suddenly, my perception was opened in a way I had never experienced, for the cards’ symbolism spoke to me through my intuition, mirroring what I was feeling with astonishing accuracy. They gave me the insights to manage my emotions and move through the attraction without causing damage to my marriage.
— Toni Gilbert, Messages From The Archetypes: Using Tarot for Healing and Spiritual Growth
This passage from Toni Gilbert’s book is a fitting introduction to the second part of the discussion on where tarot is most useful. Last week, I looked at tarot as a way of telling us about the present. This week, the present becomes more personal:
Tarot tells us about ourselves.
It was apparently an inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that delivered the exhortation “Know thyself.” It almost certainly wasn’t the first such exhortation, and it definitely wasn’t the last. For millennia, people have devoted their time — sometimes their lives — to the pursuit of self-knowledge. Today, one of the ways we can do this, if we are able and so inclined, is through tarot, which enables us to shed light on who we are — both the areas that are already illuminated, and the areas that reside in the shadows but which influence our lives greatly nonetheless.
How does it do this? Through the use of archetypes.
There are several definitions of ‘archetype’, but the one I am going to use here — and which I draw on regularly in my articles — is the one that has been born from the field of analytical psychology pioneered by psychiatrist Carl Jung.
According to analytical psychology, archetypes “are innate, universal prototypes” (Wikipedia: Jungian Archetypes). In other words, archetypes serve as the blueprint for both who we are and the experiences that we have while on this planet. This is a coarse definition, given that there are books dedicated to the subject, but for reasons of clarity and brevity, I’d like to keep it as minimal as possible.