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Tarot cards, Jung, and what on earth?

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flowerbells:
Hi, everyone.  Last month I bought a deck of Tarot cards.  I also bought a book that purportedly discusses Jung's alleged interest in them.  (I regret I don't know where I put the book, so can't name it at this time.)  Amazon.com shows several books claiming to discuss Jung and the Tarot.  The one I have has a lot about the Tarot and how to use the cards, and almost nothing about Jung.  The index has maybe 5 references to Jung, and none of them are substantial in any way, neither in content nor length.

The cards have images that I suspect may be archetypes, and I'd like to know what to do with them.  Does anyone have a way to make the cards practical?  In Europe, according to [that book] Tarot is used as a game.  Apparently in Europe, or at least some countries there, Tarot cards and the Tarot are not "worshiped" as a lot of people here in the United States (and elsewhere no doubt) tend to do.

Anyone got any clarification about Jung and Tarot cards, and how to use them the way he did?

flowerbells:
 (-)appl(-)I don't know how to edit my post, if it's possible to do so once it's published.  So I will tell you I have found the book I referred to.  It is intriguingly and rather deceptively :o called [italics] Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot [italics closed].  It has 8 references specifically to Jung, and I did not find any of them very helpful.  The Tarot deck I bought is the one that I understand is most often used, namely the Rider Waite 78 card deck.

Matt Koeske:
I'm no authority on tarot, but there is a great deal of what could be called "archetypal" symbolism in the Rider-Waite deck (and most other decks).  The tarot symbolism is quite rich.  As for a "Jungian interpretation" of tarot symbolism, anything that purports to be definitive should be treated with enormous skepticism. 

Tarot symbolism develops and becomes especially complex when two or more cards are interpreted or analyzed in relation to one another. But the level of symbolic complexity means that there is a great deal of creativity and variation possible in any interpretation.  In general, this capacity for both complexity and "slack" is what makes divination systems compelling (for the human mind).  I sometimes refer to such things as "projection texts", because the aspects of the texts themselves that we tend to notice or emphasize are the ones that have those "synchronous" hooks for our complexes and obsessions.

It is part of the selective perception phenomena.  We are drawn to perceive that which resonates most with our expectations, desires, habits, beliefs, etc., and to ignore/miss/conform that which is odd/other (unless it startles or threatens us).  But if you take just about any three tarot cards (from the traditional decks and their variations especially) and try to interpret them as a whole narrative, you'll find that there are innumerable possible constructions of that narrative.  There is just so much going on in each card.

Such interpretation also works better with the traditional decks that have a lot going on in each picture as opposed to some decks that might purport to depict "the anima" or "the shadow" in specific cards.  That should be attributed to the higher degree of symbolic complexity in decks like the Rider-Waite.

To be clear, when I write about interpretation above, I mean symbolic or "literary" interpretation, NOT divination.  There are many Jungians interested in both phenomena (Jung included), but my own interest is in the psychology of the perception of symbols/meaning and in the psychology of the mental apparatus that is prone to confabulate divination.

On a more aesthetic note, I find tarot symbolism fascinating and some of the tarot art very interesting, compelling, and beautiful.  Some tarot symbolism has appeared in my poems and in my dreams.  I own a number of decks (chosen for their artwork), but I do not "divine" with them or consult other oracles (like many Jungians do with the i Ching).  It's one of my crotchety, "un-Jungian" traits.

flowerbells:
Matt, thank you for your explication of how you view Tarot cards.  A friend of mine has used them a lot, again, not for divination, but so far we have not gotten together so she can tell me what she does with them.  She says it may "sound weird," but that they have helped her tremendously.  What do you do with your deck/s?  I suppose one could create short stories with them.  I haven't tried that yet, but would be quite interested in how you use them.

Matt Koeske:
I haven't actually looked at those decks for a couple years.  But hopefully this conversation will encourage me to take them out again.  My kids might find them interesting, too . . . as long as I can explain how they are a bit like Pokemon cards  :D .

I was mostly interested in them for the study of their symbolism.  I didn't lay them out very often (in whatever that traditional cross-like pattern is called), although I found that they became more interesting when I did.  Although these instances never proved to be especially insightful for me, I did enjoy the way potential narratives could unfold.  Once I did a "reading" for an equally skeptical friend of mine just to show him how the symbolism could be employed.  Of course, I already had some insights into his personality, so reading the symbols in order to elicit that was not hard.

It never interested me to learn much about how the cards were "supposed" to be interpreted.  I didn't like that kind of restriction, and my grasp of symbolism is fairly advanced, so I didn't feel it was necessary.  I don't like interpretive equivalencies.  Meaning is always highly contextual in my experience (one of my concessions to postmodernism, I suppose).

As a pretty experienced self-analyzer and dream worker, I didn't feel like the tarot readings had anything to add for me, but it is a great symbol set to be familiar with.  The autonomous psyche hungrily grabs on to many of these tarot images.  They are very evocative.  I can certainly see why people might find tarot readings helpful (and again, Jung himself practiced divination, especially with the i Ching).  But ultimately, I find dream work the most functional source for reformative self-reflection and -analysis. 

Dreams are like tarot readings, but designed perfectly for the individual dreamer and are much more effective at getting the ego out of the way.  When one reads the tarot cards for oneself, there is a much higher chance of egoic "contamination".  That is, those things that consciously preoccupy us the most tend to take precedence in our perception over other things that we may need to take a better look at.  It's one of the ways it is easy to fool oneself with tarot, with any divination practice, or even with active imagination.

The ideal is to commune with and listen to the voice of the Other/Self.  But only dreams guarantee that communion (with the possible exception of lucid dreams).  It is very easy to deceive or distract oneself when the conscious mind is active . . . and the somewhat disguised and inflated ego is then mistaken for the Other/Self.  We convince ourselves we are following "God", when we are just following some idealized form of our own ego.

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