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.