Dreams are at the center of nearly every sort of depth work. Depth psychology posits that dreams can act as spontaneous expressions of the unconscious, revealing patterns, conflicts, potentials, and perspectives that the waking ego may not yet recognize. As Jung wrote, “The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.”

And dreams just feel important. We know the unconscious is trying to communicate something, but it can be so hard to grasp when symbols are not our (conscious) native tongue.

This is where tarot can come in. Rather than mere words, tarot and dreams both speak the language of symbol and archetype. In essence, tarot also speaks the language of the unconscious. Therefore, we can use the cards to amplify, clarify, and deepen our understanding of what our dreams are telling us.

Let me offer an example. I once had a dream in Paris. I was in a quiet apartment in the city, looking through its tiny window at the Eiffel Tower glittering against the black night. There was nothing else happening in the dream, no rustling around for a lost earring or a stranger knocking at the door. It was only the view and a feeling—a blend of solitude, silence, contentment, and beauty.

Because the dream was not particularly exciting or memorable, I didn’t think much of it. But later that afternoon as luck would have it, I had a tarot reading scheduled. And as my reader placed the Hermit on the table, all at once the dream clicked into place.

I realized in that moment that both my Paris dream and the Hermit card held the same message, one that was so exquisitely simple I never would have realized it on my own: You are missing the serenity of aloneness. The place where you can see the true beauty of what you love. Return to that place, and seek peace.

I wasn't trying to make the cards “fit” with my recent dream; my realization came organically via deep resonance and emotion. The tarot and our dreams offer us messages via image and feeling, calling us to surrender to our unconscious wisdom rather than prod the conscious mind to intellectualize and analyze. They present underworld reflections of our daily lives, showing ourselves to us through the lens of imagination, myth, and mystery.

When we begin to recognize the shared language of tarot and dreams, a new and extraordinary pathway of the psycho-spiritual work opens to us. We can develop our ability to hear and heed the unconscious, and move through our lives with depth, clarity, and grace. When we join these two modalities, something extraordinary can happen.

So, I will walk you through three tips to get started with tarot dreamwork, understanding the powerful ways they can combine and support each other.

1. Pull cards to reflect on elements of a dream.

Now I want to be clear I’m not saying to ask your deck, “Tell me what this dream means.” This can often create more confusion than you originally had upon waking. We generally don’t want to dig deeper tunnels; we want to find entryways to squeeze in through.

Instead we should pull a card and allow it to draw us into an element of the dream. Maybe, for instance, you dream about not being able to start your car, and then it starts rolling down a hill and crashes into a garden. If you pull the 9 of Pentacles, then perhaps the element you’re called to focus on now isn’t the car but the garden. Perhaps the garden represents your independence, your pleasure, the life you’ve grown for yourself. This may be the more approachable symbol for now, so start there.

And, of course, be willing to let it go if things just don’t click. Sometimes we simply can’t see all the connecting lines from within our own limited ego-perspectives. We’re not trying to solve a puzzle, but explore potentials that encourage our inner growth.

2. Consider how the cards you pull might be reflecting dream symbols and vice versa.

Symbols drop us down into the realm of the collective unconscious where the archetypes live, and, so often, both our dreams and the cards will leave mutually affirming symbolic breadcrumbs on our path of individuation.

Here’s an example. I once pulled the High Priestess card for a client who was trying to commit to a new life path, but I could sense there was something not quite connecting about the card’s deeper meaning. I encouraged her to reflect on any dream images that got stirred up, and suddenly her eyes widened. She told me about a dream she’d had when she first started making shifts in her life in which she came upon a statue of a woman seated on a throne. With this symbol of the seated statue in mind, we were able to uncover that though the inner wisdom of the High Priestess was present in her psyche, it wasn’t really alive. This revelation was exactly what my client needed to pursue a more vital connection with this archetype’s wisdom.

Maybe you dream of a rose, or a lion, or fork in the road. Your deck is one of the best resources you have for amplifying the meaning of that symbol. The rose may point you to the Fool, the lion to Strength, the fork to the 2 of Swords. Be curious and flexible, and you may discover exactly what you didn’t know you were missing.

3. Bring your feelings into the mix.

You may have dreams that seem to have nothing to do with the cards you pull, and they certainly don’t always link up. But rather than looking for obvious, one-to-one correlations each and every time (e.g., pulling the Empress and dreaming of a beautiful queen, or dreaming of a juggler and pulling the 2 of Pentacles), consider the feeling of the dream.

The image in my dream of looking out at the Parisian skyline alone offered no clear clues to connect to the Hermit, but the feeling was nearly identical. It felt calm, deep, present—all things I feel when I look at the Hermit card. And you may see the subjectivity in that; good! The tarot cards, as with anything, can feel different from person to person. Leaning into your personal feelings can provide real clarity.

When we discover the themes and feelings that connect our cards and our dreams, we’ll more readily access the heart of the message we are meant to hear.

4. Notice your dreams before and after you pull cards.

With regard to my Parisian dream, I had it the night before that reading in which the Hermit appeared. But, interestingly, the night after my reading, I dreamed something clearly in conversation with both: In my second dream, I was trying to accomplish some task that required physical labor, but then was hit with the sudden impulse to go off into the forest alone and so I dropped my work and started walking. Both these dreams very clearly reflected the Hermit card to me.

Of course you may wonder, did the card inspire the dream, or did the dream inspire the card? The answer is both and neither. Yes, I may have dreamed of the forest after seeing the Hermit card, but there was more to it than that. When we’re speaking of archetypes, we think of them being “constellated,” or activated. In that moment of my life, the archetype of inner solitude was what I most needed. It had therefore constellated in my unconscious, and showed up both in my dreams and in my cards.

And if a message is coming through to you from various angles, as happened here, it doesn’t mean your unconscious is simply shouting it to you (although yes, you should pay attention!). With my two Hermit-oriented dreams, I noted they each took different perspectives. The first showed me the allure of solitude, and the second showed me that I had the ability to choose it.

Pay attention to how your dreams and card pulls may be echoing one another. This can reveal all kinds of nuance and depth to the archetypal constellations revealing themselves to you.

So go out and test these tips, and happy dreaming!

Edited by Emma Frey.

A couple weeks ago a bombshell dropped in the world of tarot. Alex Reads Tarot—one of the most popular readers on TikTok with nearly a million followers—shared that she is stepping away from her massive career as a reader in order to prioritize her blossoming Christian faith. She says confidently, “Jesus Christ has saved my life, and I can no longer ignore that reality.” This revelation, it seems, has made it clear for Alex that she can no longer entertain the tarot as a part of her life, and in fact needs to willfully reject it in order to affirm her faith.

If you’ve been a member of the tarot community for a while you’ll know this is not the first time we’ve witnessed this sort of about-face and sudden condemnation of the cards and new age spirituality. Perhaps the first (and most surprising) to initiate this trend was the immensely popular writer Doreen Virtue, who, following her conversion in 2017, shifted her catalog from topics such as angel numbers and lightwork to bible verses and the dangers of new age spirituality. Since then it seems that every six months or so we hear about another convert—psychic medium Jenn Nizza, co-host of the Tarot Diagnosis podcast Luna Hammond, new age celebrities like Kat Von D and Russell Brand.

There is clearly a new-age to Christian-convert pipeline, and while I have many theories about why this happens (the blowback of spiritual narcissism, the lure of a prescribed path in a compass-less post-religion world, the repression of shadow leading to the intensified polarization of archetypal “good and evil”, the list goes on), that’s not what I want to get into here. What I want to talk about is not theory but history. I want to respond to the belief which clearly motivates these converts’ repudiation of the tarot: that the tarot is fundamentally anti-Christian.

At this point I have to make an enormous disclaimer. In no way am I avowing nor disavowing Christianity. Like so many others in this community, I was raised Christian, and even worked in the Church until my late twenties. While I am no longer a Christian (for many reasons), I continue to carry appreciation for what it instilled in me. My stance is essentially this: Does Christianity have a legacy of being corrupt, coercive, and even abusive? Absolutely. Is it still okay to believe in Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life? Right on it is if that's your jam.

But in the twenty-first century, as educated as we are and inclusive as we now claim to be, I was honestly surprised to realize that this idea that the tarot (and all divination really) and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible and even adversarial is still tragically entrenched. I was alerted to this recently while scrolling when I came upon a video of someone condemning a Lord of the Rings themed tarot deck, saying that it was such a sad and offensive creation because J.R.R. Tolkien (the author of LoTR) was a devout Catholic. If he knew his work had been adapted into a tarot deck—boy oh boy, he’d be rolling in his grave!

I don’t usually comment on things like this, but being a diehard stan of Tolkien and an actual scholar of tarot, this time it couldn’t be helped. I (respectfully!) offered that while who knows what Tolkien would say about anything (being long gone as he is), in no way is his work being defiled of its Christian themes and influences by being adapted into a tarot deck. In fact, quite the contrary! The tarot is a symbolic system built upon those same Christian themes and influences, and I honestly can’t think of a better coupling to demonstrate their depth. (Have you seen that photo of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism on Pope John Paul II’s desk?!)

And this thinking is not only coming from the Christian side either. In a recent class one of my tarot students asked how to deal with cards that have Christian-sounding names or imagery when they or their querents reject Christianity. On both sides of the divide there is the same sentiment: tarot and Christianity do not go together. If you are a new-ager/witch freed from the chains of Christian dogma, the tarot may feel like a tool of spiritual liberation and even rebellion; if you are a devout Christian you may see it as evil and engaging in some sort of forbidden devilry.

But the truth is that the tarot and Christianity are profoundly linked. More than that—the tarot’s very incarnation comes from undeniable Christian roots.

Though there’s lots of speculation about the outside influences that helped inspire the creation of the tarot deck, its first appearance came in the mid-fifteenth century within the social circles of the nobility of northern Italy. At that time northern Italy was a hub of great wealth and the epicenter of the burgeoning Renaissance, and while it’s true that the intellectual and spiritual curiosities of the Renaissance would eventually push Europe to challenge Church hegemony, at the time the Catholic faith was universally accepted. Filippo Maria Visconti, who is credited with commissioning fifteen of the oldest surviving decks (what we now know as the Visconti-Sforza decks), was even brother to the the archbishop of Milan and a relative of Pope Gregory X. The point is that it’s an undeniable fact that at the time and place the tarot was born, Christianity was the foundation of everything.

We see this very obviously in the deck itself. Looking at the longest standardized version of the tarot (the Tarot de Marseilles), we find la Papesse (the Popess), le Pape (the Pope), le Maison de Dieu (the House of God), and le Jugement (Judgment Day). And if we take a step farther back and examine the imagery of those earliest decks, we find that even many of the secular-sounding cards are speaking directly to Christian principles:

• The Wheel of Fortune may seem totally unrelated to the Christian tradition, but was actually a very influential concept to Christian philosophers and central to medieval theological discourse.

• Three of the four Christian cardinal virtues—Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance—are present.

• The World depicts two cherubs holding up a window to the majestic city of New Jerusalem—an alternate name for heaven.

• As tarot scholar Helen Farley explains, the Chariot carrying the woman drawn by winged white horses closely matches the common allegorical description of the Church, “acting as the vehicle to convey the faithful to Heaven.”1

And, perhaps most compelling of all (and surprising to the Christians who believe the deck to be demonic), the Devil is absent. Many tarot scholars believe it to be lost from these earliest decks, but others say it was left out or intentionally removed. As an artistic expression glorifying the Christian faith, it makes sense the Devil would not be a welcome addition to the deck at the time.

Most of the time our discourse around the tarot (or really the Major Arcana) is about what mysteries it means to communicate. What do these images mean? Where do they really come from? Do they hold near-Eastern or pagan secrets? Are they covertly heretical or overtly mystical? The truth is that we don’t know exactly what intentions were behind the cards in their origins, but certainly they mirror the era from whence they came, which was thoroughly loyal to the Christian belief system.

I know that for many this historical lens can feel disappointing, but here’s why it shouldn’t. The facts of origin of the tarot—or anything really—are always subordinate to their archetypal realities. Even if Temperance was meant to display the Christian virtue of moderation, or the Chariot personify the glorification of the Church leading us to salvation, they were also speaking to something archetypal, an experience that clearly holds a deeper and more universal significance, one that has spanned across the centuries.

And what I wish to suggest is that the archetypal core of much of the Christian symbolism in the deck still has resonance for us, whether or not we subscribe to Christianity itself.

Fortitude, though a Christian virtue, still speaks to us about the perseverance of will toward the good. Judgement may show a scene of rising to be judged for our sins, but it is an essential part of inner growth that we “judge” or take responsibility for our “sins” or actions in life. And even the Devil who, theologically, is the Great Deceiver trying to foil God’s faithful is also a force we can all innately identify as the great inner enemy who chains us to our darkest behaviors and beliefs.

My intention in writing this is not to convince Christians that the tarot has nothing to do with devilry, nor it is to convince witches that it has everything to do with Christianity. It is simply to argue that when we focus on severing our tools from their origins we are missing the greater point. As A. E. Waite—the intellectual author of the contemporary tarot deck—wrote, “The true Tarot is symbolism; it speaks no other language and offers no other signs.” The tarot is a symbolic tool of self-reflection and self-betterment—which I’d like to tentatively suggest could be the same purpose as reading Jesus’s parables, or the psalms, or even the stories of the Old Testament. There may be a universal truth in them about the divine, but there is equally a personal truth, something we are meant to understand symbolically to support our growth and path to wholeness—indeed, our path (perhaps) to God, or in psycho-spiritual terms, the Self.

Yes, many Christians will argue that tarot is divination which the bible expressly renounces—and you can totally choose to put it down for that reason. But as I urge readers of my book, Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche, divination doesn’t have to have anything to do with fortune telling. In fact, you can toss out the word entirely if you like. Divination, by definition, is seeing the world through god-blessed vision, and in my opinion that is also a definition of prayer. We pray that God may help us understand life through its wisdom, just as we ask our decks to help us see the truths the inner divinity most wishes us to discover.

If you read tarot—even casually—you will at some point likely pull cards for someone else. It may start with a friend asking for a reading. Or perhaps a coworker might request a spread, cloaking vulnerable need with a shrugged “Why not?”

Whatever the case, when you engage with something as intimate as tarot reading for another, compensated or not, you encounter responsibility.

Say you pull for your friend the Tower: a card fraught with charged implications. But your friend is going through a hard time, and you love them! In that moment, you have a crossroads. Do you tell them the Tower is revealing something highly unstable in their life (likely true)—or just say everything’s OK, and maybe a vacation is in order? You may have to also help them sort through some choices you would never have made. You may have to deal with endless questions of when they’re going to meet their husband, get the new job, win the lottery… etcetera. You know, casual stuff.

You get the picture. Tarot may have begun as a “game,” but if you’ve spent enough time plumbing its archetypal depth, you know its power. Tarot readings can be startlingly affronting, holding up mirrors we don’t always want to see but, if looked at, can serve as catalysts for the real growth and change our souls are after. As Mary K. Greer put it, “A true tarot reader wants to help the client by offering perspectives and previously unknown, or known but unconsidered, information that ultimately will serve the client’s well-being and best interests.”

Think about it. You wouldn’t not tell someone they have parsley in their teeth. But you also wouldn’t point and laugh about it loudly in front of their crush. You’d handle it delicately, without avoiding what you’re seeing. Because that’s what friends, or simply ethical acquaintances, are for.

And this is likewise our goal as tarot readers. We want to help our clients, to broaden their perspectives, to serve their well-being. And this requires conscientiousness and clarity in our ethics. The ethics and empathy of tarot reading is something we discuss at length in The Archetypal Tarot School (my signature course I host yearly), but I’ve put together a small list here of three ethical points to consider when reading for others, based on my own experience. I hope these points help you have beautiful, healthy, supportive readings.

1. Engage with the querent’s present—not future.

When you’re in a reading, and your querent is staring at you wide-eyed, urging you to tell them “When, how, who?” you feel pressure. Pressure to give them what they want: definitive, positive statements about the future. Essentially, “It’ll turn out great!”

This is what I did early in my practice. And, spoiler, it didn’t turn out great.

Early in my tarot career, I had a client who was in a very bad relationship. Week after week she booked sessions with me, asking, always, “Will we get married? Will he forgive me? Will he stop lying?” I’d glance down at the Page of Cups, Temperance reversed, the Nine of Swords, seeing that their relationship didn’t look solid, to say the least. I couldn’t see their future, but the cards certainly weren’t painting the prettiest picture of the present. And yet, panicked, I’d stammer out to my client that while things weren’t perfect, they would eventually “work out” if she was in touch with her truer needs.

Why did I offer this “prediction”? Essentially, I was trying to titrate reality to my anxious, grasping client. I tried to give her hope while also infusing small doses of what I was seeing in the cards. In the end, of course, the client’s relationship did end, and my client, of course, never returned. While I had good intentions, I quickly realized I would have served her better if I had just told her I cannot predict what will happen next, but I can help her make sense of what’s happening now.

We are not obliged to give someone definitive forecasts for their life, especially when those insights don’t come through organically. Of course, if a sincere intuitive insight comes through, it’s totally OK to offer it! I acknowledge there are amazingly skilled readers out there who blend psychic insight with cartomancy to divine really accurate things.

But we cannot demand such insights, and we can’t make them up to satisfy someone in crisis. I believe our most ethical engagement with the cards is to share what we’re seeing in the moment. With care, humility, and gentleness.

2. Be wary of projections.

Projection is a big issue with all therapeutic or guidance-centered work, and it is a particular danger in tarot readings because most readers don’t know to spot this impulse and reel it in (therapists are trained to).

Projections happen when we make unconscious assumptions about someone that reflect our own psychology. As Jung wrote, “Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.” Essentially, we project when something about another person reminds us of an unknown or unacknowledged part of ourselves. As Anais Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” This is at the heart of projection. We project because we are using our personal knowledge of the world to fill in the gaps of what we don’t know about them. It’s human instinct, perfectly normal, and happens to even the most skilled depth psychologists.

That said, it is so important to see your projections and bring them back under control. Why?

The persistent problem with projection is that it prevents us from having authentic, meaningful connections with others. When it comes to tarot, this means our querents. In readings, projection can severely inhibit powerful, cosmically divined guidance. It creates biases and judgments. And it just makes for bad exchanges.

When you get the sense that you “know” what the querent is feeling or what they should do (again, hearkening back to the dubious nature of predictions), or you feel the sharp pang of judgment rising up, be wary. When you feel that you’re straying from what you’re really seeing in the cards and offering your own advice, take a quick pause. What you see in your querent may actually be a mirror for what you don’t consciously see in yourself—and perhaps don’t want to acknowledge.

Go slowly with your readings, honor your querent’s individual humanity, and be a little more curious about their unique experience. This is delicate work.

3. Seal your container.

Marion Woodman describes the space of analysis as a container that must be “held absolutely sealed.” Of course, she doesn’t mean a physically locked room.

What Woodman means by a “sealed container” is a space between analyst and analysand that should energetically resemble a bubble that cannot be infiltrated, a cocoon of complete vulnerability. It should feel like an hour-long refuge that is utterly safe. Why?

With any sort of depth work, be it depth analysis or archetypal tarot, it’s a unique experience. Relative strangers find you and agree to reveal their greatest insecurities, fears, and tensions—the things about themselves that ache and embarrass them most. Or, with our friends, we agree to submerge wholly into their confusion and struggle to become a channel for what they cannot access. For that one small block of time we, as readers, are devoted to crises of the heart for others: clients, friends, coworkers. Therefore, the way we form that container as tarotists really matters.

I’ve taken this advice to heart throughout my tarot career, and here’s my advice for how to seal your containers in your own tarot readings.

At the beginning of a reading, it is important to make clear to the querent your orientation to the cards. Make sure they understand what to expect in the reading and what you will be guiding them toward. Warn them if you’ll be asking personal questions. Give them a way to put up a boundary or pull back if needed. We want to, as Woodman urges, make the container feel extremely safe.

And most of all, remember that the reading is not about your skill, or the cards you pull, but rather the querent’s experience. Sense when to hold back and when to push, when to listen and when to advise. Make sure the querent has a clear voice in the reading, that they are heard, understood, and being held the way they need. Try not to make judgments, and try to always remember their inherent worthiness (holding your projections, once again, in check). And if you’re not sure how you’re managing all of that in the readings you’re currently giving, record one of them and watch it back. You might be surprised by what you see.

We must create a container that is given entirely to the querent’s soul, protecting it, exploring it, and facilitating its opening to the querent themselves.

If this is the kind of tarot education you crave, The Archetypal Tarot School would probably be a good fit for you when it comes back around. But my book Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche is also probably right up your alley, and available right now. Check it out, and may your readings be beautiful, powerful, and ethical.

Edited by Emma Frey.

I like to tell this story because it was this simple moment that changed the entire trajectory of my life and landed me in the unimaginable and wonderful path I’m on today. I didn’t know anything about the tarot back then. I had no fantasies of writing books or teaching classes to people all over the world. My focus was entirely on booking my next gig as a musical theater performer and making next month’s rent. But it was the title of that book—the undiscovered self—that caught me. I sensed it immediately, that there was something yet undiscovered within myself that perhaps this book would guide me to. (And boy oh boy, did it.)

I spent the next few years devouring Jung’s writings and eventually wound my way into the world of tarot. Slowly the incredible connections between depth psychology and the cards became clearer and my archetypal tarot approach began gestating. I started applying it in readings with clients, then put together an hour-long workshop on Jung and tarot which I taught to a dozen attendees (a huge accomplishment at the time!).

But it was in late 2021 as I sat paralyzed in the grief of my mother’s death and the enormity of the what next that the true spark of the Ace of Wands was lit. A wild thought came, the way they sometimes do, as a fleeting gift from the universe: What if I really shared my archetypal approach? What if I allowed myself to believe that the marriage of tarot and depth psychology could change how others lived their lives the way it had for me?

The next six months were a whirlwind of passion as I researched and edited and refined my ten years of study into The Archetypal Tarot School. Doubt was a constant companion. I kept thinking, “Probably no one cares about alchemy and shadow work,” or, “Who really wants to learn about the cognitive functions and the suits?” I believed that it was too niche, too intellectual, too woo-woo, and that I was ultimately wasting my time.

But this doubt only motivated me to make ATS better—more in depth, more thorough, more hands on. I began compiling resources from everywhere—blogs, books, YouTube videos to accompany each lesson. I added demonstration videos and sample readings.

When I finally put it out there I was actually standing in Carl Jung’s house in Zurich. I said I silent prayer of thanks to the man whose wisdom set me on my path, and hoped my heart would not be too damaged when nobody signed up. When I checked my phone later that day, I was stunned. The course was already a quarter full.

After the first class was completed, I sent out a feedback form (again waiting for the disappointed responses), but they all loved it, some even saying that it changed the way they connected not only to the cards but themselves.

The next class said the same, and the next. Past students were asking to take it again. Others told me they felt like they’d just gotten a college degree. I realized, finally, that people really did care. There really are deep souls out there who seek not only the psycho-spiritual wisdom in the cards, but the sacred path closer to Self.

Then the Ace of Wands struck again. What if I could reach even more people? What if I could teach the archetypal tarot approach in a book? Two years later, Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche was birthed into the world.

And so here I am today. Last week I was being interviewed on a podcast and the interviewer said, “Not to make it sound too dramatic, but your work is like a movement.” I understood what they meant—in a world that has become increasingly scary, shallow, and directionless, my work (and the work of many, many others) is reminding us that there is a path to centeredness, depth, and sincere authenticity. Whether your tool is tarot or astrology or psychology or bodywork, we are indeed part of a movement to rediscover the Self.

As my book moves farther out into the world and I hear how people are discovering the power in the archetypal tarot approach, my heart longs to return to my roots. I am eager to teach again, to guide questioning souls through the wisdom of the cards and the mysteries of the psyche.

And so I am so thrilled to welcome the 8th cohort of The Archetypal Tarot School this spring. This program is not about learning the cards, but understanding their symbolic language and translating it into a reading pattern of the greater meaning of your life.

So, with a grateful heart, I extend the invitation to you. If you believe in the archetypal potency of the cards, if you are drawn by the symbolic tapestry of the soul, welcome. This was made for you.

Hope to see you inside,
Mariana

The number one request I get from aspiring archetypal tarotists is which books to read. The material you absorb is indeed extremely important, and though I have written (and re-written) this list a dozen times, I wanted to offer my up-to-date opinion on what’s worth sinking your teeth into.

And while I am 1000% a supporter of perpetual self-education, I do want to say that sometimes reading a dozen books is just not feasible. Sometimes more concentrated and focused options save us time (and $$).

So if you are a beginner tarotist looking to dig into depth psychology, inner work, and the psycho-spiritual wisdom of the cards, the Foundations of the Tarot Workshop is currently open for instant access (and $20 off!). This is not merely a class on memorizing the cards, but a deep discovery of the true foundations of the tarot and how to use it to support your individuation. Check it out before it’s no longer available!

Ok, now onto the books :)

1. Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot by Karen Hamaker-Zondag

This is probably my fave Jungian tarot book. It offers the traditional card-by-card breakdown of the tarot, but with a dedicated a Jungian scope. While similar books tend to focus exclusively on the archetypes of the major arcana, Hammaker-Zondag offers an approachable, real-life reading of all 78 cards. It explores numbers, images, and focuses on adaptable interpretations over intimidating philosophies. A classic!

2. Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for Personal Transformation by Mary K. Greer

This is a book I often assign to my students. We tend to try to learn the tarot by keyword and memorization, but the true pathway to knowing the cards is relationship. This book forces you to build that relationship with the cards, guiding you through dozens of activities such as meditations, rituals, spreads, mandalas, visualizations, dialogues, charts, affirmations, and more. It’s a serious undertaking, but worth committing to. There’s no chance you walk away from this book not feeling like you know the tarot.

3. Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche by Mariana Louis

Yes, my book is on the list! This is the ultimate book for the archetypal tarotist. Part classic guidebook, part provoking how-to, with a dash of stirring tarot philosophy, it teaches you that the true power of the tarot is as a mirror. With the right approach, the cards reflect the tapestry of our psyches, illuminating both conscious will and unconscious longing. They teach us to befriend our shadows, evoke our imaginations, and attune to the soul’s quiet directive: How am I meant to live?

More than a manual for reading the cards, it invites you to use the tarot as a living language of the psyche, helping you listen to your intuitive wisdom, embrace your wholeness, and awaken the answers waiting within.

4. Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

I get asked all the time what book is the best to read by Jung himself, and it’s this one. Man and His Symbols is a fantastic summary of Jung’s ideas in his own words and the words of his most devoted students. It covers the fundamental concepts of his theories—the concept of the unconscious, the archetypes, the Shadow, Self, and the Anima and Animus. It reviews the basics, but also dives into the deeper concepts, touching on alchemy, active imagination, and psychological complexes.

I have the illustrated version, which is full of beautiful supplemental imagery, and I really recommend it!

5. Tarot and the Archetypal Journey: The Jungian Path from Darkness to Light by Sallie Nichols

This book was my first dive into Jungian tarot theory and it is just so good. Sallie Nichols writes with musical precision, and though it’s rich with Jungian insights you do not need a background in Jungian psychology to grasp its wisdom. It dedicates whole chapters to each of the major arcana, exploring the depth of their archetypal meanings. However, this means it also leaves out the minor arcana, which I have personally mourned each time I return to it!

It’s an oldie but a goodie. And so if you want to connect to the bigger archetypal meanings of the major arcana, I can’t recommend this book enough.

6. Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert Johnson

This is the standard for Jungian inner work. It introduces you to the framework of the psyche, archetypes, and dreams, and then thoughtfully walks you through how to actually do the inner work. Though it is totally approachable by the Jungian newbie, it doesn’t compromise any of its psychological complexity. It’s primary focuses are dreamwork and active imagination, offering a step-by-step guide of how to do them and how to alchemize their meanings.

7. Discovering Your Self through the Tarot: A Jungian Guide to Archetypes and Personality by Rose Gwain

There’s a handful Jungian tarot books out there, and though I don’t think all of them make the cut, this one has some elements that are very worth it. Discovering Your Self through the Tarot goes a little deeper into one of Jung’s most popular theories: the four psychological types, which as Gwain shows correlate with the four suits of the tarot. Gwain also offers a way to understand your personal psychology and type (as in the Myers-Briggs system) through the lens of the court cards. Overall it’s a great resource to look at the more practical applications of Jungian theory.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the story: you discover the tarot, your heart is set aflame with curiosity, and then you snatch up half a dozen guidebooks or binge twelve hours of YouTube videos, fully buying into the promise that you’ll walk out of the weekend a tarot master.

And then you actually pull the cards and discover that all those cheat sheets and mnemonic devices didn’t help very much. You stare down at the 7 of Swords at read off the list of keywords—deception, betrayal, stealth—and pound your head against the wall struggling to understand how this answers the question of how you can love yourself more.

Here’s the thing: you can memorize thousands of keywords, but that won’t actually help you learn the tarot, at least not in the way you want. The tarot is a language and we learn it like one. Just as you were in language class as a kid (French in my case), we are taught to drill vocab first. But when we are paired up and instructed to begin conversing, we find ourselves catastrophically blank. We can know every word in the dictionary but it won’t help at all if we don’t get the feel for simply stringing together a sentence.

This is because forced memorization, while effective in giving the illusion of competency, is devoid of meaning. We might successfully list off keywords by rote, but we are not able to comprehend the card with any real depth. The missing component is our own intuitive insight, our sense of connection, our engagement in the card not as glyph but story.

As I put it in my upcoming book:

The tarot speaks the language of symbol, the cipher for which is redefined in each individual consulting the cards. We can learn from our gurus and growing stack of tarot books, but the meaning of the cards and how they apply to our lives are ultimately ours to decode. It is in both learning the depth and breadth of the cards and practicing sincere self-contemplation that we develop the skills to effectively translate the tarot’s messages of wisdom.

Therefore, to actually “get” the cards we pull we have to build relationship with them. When relying on keywords alone, that 7 of Swords might seem like a mis-draw in response to seeking a pathway to self-love. But what happens when we forget those keywords of deception and stealth and instead focus on our personal reactions to the card? What happens when we focus on the scene itself? The colors? The number? The suit? Perhaps then something surprising and actually useful emerges. You might notice the man’s head turned away as if he doesn’t want to see what’s right in front of him. Or that the background is yellow not gray, meaning the sun is shining somewhere out of sight. You might hone in on the swords themselves and how they represent our thoughts and decisions, or the number 7 which appears across the globe as the number of the trickster.

One of the reading points I’ve always found particularly useful (especially with the pips) is how the Ace through 10 demonstrate a sort of hero’s journey of each suit. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, who originated the idea of the hero’s journey , laid out seventeen stages of what he called the monomyth. I’ve taken his formula and tweaked it a little to fit the cards:

With this framework, we might look at that 7 of Swords as the mythic point of “The Test of the Return”, the opportunity to gather what we’ve learned in our journey thus far (in the case of the Swords perhaps our mental growth, discernment, self-honesty) and see how we might begin to actually live it. We will struggle a little with this task; we might be unsure, overwhelmed, or resistant. But we are called to challenge ourselves and persevere. This might be the precise moment we need to open our eyes and look at the ways we’ve been deceiving ourselves—telling ourselves we’re not strong enough, smart enough. Maybe that’s the secret we’ve been missing to living a life of greater clarity and self-tending—one of greater self-love.

The suggestions that I’ve listed above for interpreting a card are by no means the only ones, and I also don’t mean to overload you with yet another fifty reading points to consider. Rather, I want to show how keywords are only one (sometimes unhelpful) piece of the puzzle. Google telling you that a card “means” celebration or conflict or optimism or productivity is only one way in. The more important (and perhaps the only) question is what it means to you.

This is what I mean by building relationship with the cards. Yes, the keywords might point us somewhere but then we must expand beyond that direction. We must interact with the cards, test out alternate possibilities, and always personalize everything. The 7 of Swords might mean deception for someone else, but for you it might signify self-sabotaging thoughts, or an opportunity to face your hidden manipulations, or the need to trust that life will provide you with what you need. Getting to these interpretations is not always easy, but believe me when I say you can get there and in fact this is the whole point of the tarot—this is what learning it means. But it does require a more intentional practice in which we actually listen, reflect, and probe the many layers of wisdom each card presents.

If this all seems overwhelming, don’t panic. In my book Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche this is exactly the work I guide new readers through. Once you begin to understand what building relationship and personal meaning looks like, it becomes second nature. Once you push through that sweaty-palmed I-have-no-idea-what-they’re-saying panic, you’ll find that you can indeed string a sentence together and more.

Give it time. Learning a new language is always a challenge. (I studied French for ten years and it still takes me a full minute to order a croissant and cappuccino at a Parisian cafe.) But if you remain committed and curious, it will get better. And when you come to the close of your learning journey (though not at the end of the weekend!) you may well find yourself fluent in this symbolic language of the soul.

I always get a little nervous talking about shadow work. It’s one of the most popular forms of inner work discussed in our contemporary psycho-spiritual landscape, but also one of the most misunderstood. People often seem to think of it as a form of self-care, as something to do on a rainy Sunday evening. But really, shadow work is the deepest and most uncomfortable form of self-exploration.

The shadow, as first defined by Carl Jung, is not merely our negative qualities. It is all that has been pushed away from conscious awareness and banished into unconscious repression. It is the stuff that haunts us, the stuff we simply cannot accept. As Jung tells us:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

“Working” with the shadow is a serious commitment. It is where our our greatest truths and potentials lie, but also the hiding place of the greatest threats to our egos. When we engage in shadow work, we willing dive into a space of profound discomfort and even psychological danger. It disorients and weathers us. As depth psychologists Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf put it, “To live with shadow awareness is to turn away from the peaks toward the valleys . . . to move our eyes from up to down, to relinquish the clarity of blue-sky thinking for the uncertain murkiness of a foggy morning.”

What we win from shadow work (eventually) is the consciousness that allows us to live with greater authenticity, clarity, and stability. But the effort to get there is one that requires great intentionality and care. If we do it recklessly or without focused direction, we risk overwhelming ourselves and initiating an ego crack-up. We need a guide into the depths, and this is why the tarot is one of the best tools out there to guide this work.

The tarot prevents us from fumbling around in the dark. It presents us with a card, an image, a feeling, and asks us to be humble and curious. We don’t need to do a shadow work spread or ask for something shadowy to arise, either. Whenever we encounter cards that in some way upset our status quo, we are likely confronting exactly what the ego is most uncomfortable seeing.

I get the question of exactly how we can use the tarot in this way often, and the truth is it’s not something I can summarize in a 1,000 word essay. This is why I host one of my favorite workshops, Tarot and Shadow: A Guided Workshop of Self-Reckoning with the Cards. In it we cover both the depth psychology of the shadow as well as how it shows up in the cards. We touch on things like reversals, court cards and complexes, typological imbalances and the suits, and of course the greater mystical progress of individuation and the shadow in the Major Arcana. Then we apply it all in the “work” itself, moving through spreads, techniques, and the greater shadow work process.

But don’t worry, I’m not leaving you empty-handed. The first step in working with the shadow with the tarot is to identify the “shadow cards” as they arise. Not all cards point to a shadow experience, but generally there are three markers to look out for:

• Placement in the spread. Some spreads include a position indicating shadow or something hidden, but if you’re reading in a freer style if a card is beneath another I generally consider it something shadowy. You might even check the card underneath the deck after shuffling as a shadow influence.

• Inversions. Big disclaimer: not all inversions mean shadow! The Ace of Pentacles may come up inverted right after you didn’t get a job, and there’s no mystery there. But often inversions don’t point to the opposite of a cards’ meaning, but how its energy is locked in shadow.

• Your reaction to it. This is the biggest tell if a card is pointing to something shadowy. Cards that confuse us, agitate us, or contradict us generally reveal exactly what it is that the ego is refusing to see. Often we toss out these cards or reach for clarifiers, but here is an excellent opportunity to dig deeper.

The next step in the process is to discover what that shadow element is. To begin, pay attention to what it initially brings up within you. Rather than reach for guidebook meanings, consider questions like:

What was my first thought when I saw the card?
What is the prevailing feeling or emotion it creates?
What tension does this card bring up in me?

With this basic awareness, you’re ready to dig into what the ego resists in the card. For example, if the Knight of Wands makes you feel tired and annoyed, maybe you are resisting the effort of taking action. Or if the Ten of Cups makes you feel tense, perhaps there is a strange discomfort with the idea of true happiness. You don’t need any set answers here, only possibilities. Often that angry or fearful swell of energy will let know when an interpretation is right.

Now, slowly, explore why. Perhaps the conclusion is that you know taking action also means welcoming failure, which you cannot tolerate. Or that happiness is something you distrust because you don’t believe you deserve it. Follow whatever comes up without judgment, rationalization, or analysis. This is not meant to provide definitive answers, but new questions you haven’t thought to ponder before.

In my upcoming book Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche (and more thoroughly in the Tarot and Shadow worksop) I guide readers step-by-step through a framework to understand and integrate the shadow material the cards present. It’s inspired by Carl Jung’s formulation of the stages of alchemy, and shows exactly how we move from confession (the identification of the shadow) to transformation (integrating it into the personality).

While it’s a little too thorough to cover here, if shadow work is something you’ve felt called to explore and initiate, both resources offer powerful material to guide you through. (And Tarot and Shadow starts in one week on January 14th, so perfect timing to jump in.)

However you initiate your work with the shadow, I encourage you to bring in the tarot more intentionally and see how powerfully it hones and supports the work. Many blessings on the journey, friends.

Sources:

The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8) by C.G. Jung

Romancing the Shadow: Break Unconscious Patterns and Create Conscious Relationships with Shadow-Work by Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf

A few days ago a friend sent me an Instagram post from the New York Times Opinion account with the tagline “Forget Therapy. I’m Turning to Magic.” I swiped through the excerpts from the essay and the gist wasn’t hard to get—the author (novelist Makenna Goodman) abandoned traditional therapy and turned instead to the more taboo guidance of astrology and tarot. Therapy’s expensive, meandering, and tedious, she seemed to argue, while magic is cheap, direct, and perennially mysterious.

At first I was delighted that the New York Times would dare to publish such a woo-woo think-piece, but then I turned to the comments. Rather than magic-workers rallying in support, they were skeptical if not outright dismissive:

“This is so irresponsible!!!”
“Tarot reader here! This is a bad idea.”
“I absolutely believe in magic, but it’s absolutely not a replacement for excellent therapy . . . Let’s not set up a false binary here.”

Now let me begin by saying that tarot is not therapy. It cannot cure depression, or treat anxiety disorders, or lead us through processing trauma. When our mental health is fragile, tarot will not save us. We have spent a century and a half developing psychological support systems for a reason, and we should rely on them first and foremost when we need them. Tarot and therapy, in my opinion always work best together.

However, I can’t deny that I was surprised and a little disappointed by the collective response. My work has been dedicated to demonstrating exactly how the tarot can be profoundly therapeutic—if we know how to use it. This is what my archetypal tarot approach is all about, and the premise of my upcoming book, Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche. I believe deeply in therapy, being myself in Jungian analysis for nearly twelve years (and probably for the rest of my life), but I also recognize that tarot has helped me in a way traditional therapy never could.

Though the Instagram tagline painted Goodman’s opinion as radical, the essay itself was much more reasonable. Goodman admits to using her divinatory devices for naval-gazing and oracular-outsourcing (the title of the essay is “The Fool’s Guide to Major Life Decisions”), but she also grasps the deeper nature of the tarot. She really seems to get how it does the thing I always say it’s best at (and will keep saying forever and ever): declining answers and instead inspiring the better question.

As I write in my book:

We generally come to our decks with a specific question seeking a specific answer. But rather than give such answers, the tarot’s real gift is to point us toward the better question. There is always a truer question that might reveal the blind spots, motivations, and denials behind our uncertainty. In our archetypal approach, we want to be guided toward these better questions that prompt deeper self-inquiry and exploration.

Goodman offers an example of doing just this. Upon seeing a listing for a major fixer-upper, Goodman immediately reached out to her reader requesting a couple cards telling her whether or not should should dive in and buy. The Fool and Strength emerged, which as any practiced tarotist would tell you seem positive for the green light.

But then something else occurred to Goodman. “I was the fool,” she writes, “projecting meaning onto houses. . . . I had to reframe the question. It wasn’t, ‘Should we rush to buy this house?’ but, ‘Why am I looking at this house?’ Because I want adventure.”

And here, exactly, is the point. The Fool was not telling her to go off and take the leap; Strength was not saying just muscle her way through. These cards inspired a new question in her psyche, one which sitting in an office or Zoom room for an hour rattling off her inner dilemma yet again may not have produced. As Goodman puts it:

While in therapy, I got too good at telling one story. But Tarot is full of many stories. In that way, Tarot is a text. But it is not fixed; each time a new combination brings a randomness that complicates the narratives we think we know.

Tarot speaks a symbolic language that comes from a wisdom beyond us (that’s actually within us). It presents a story that, much of the time, contradicts the ones our egos tell. It brings prismatic variation to how we can examine our narratives: our problems, our longings, our wounds, ourselves.

In the consulting room, whether we realize it or not we are articulating the narrow narrative the ego has constructed of itself. A skilled therapist is trained to witness the fine line between what we say and what we don’t say—but they are not all-knowing. The best ones might spot our egoic narrations and question them, but the mediocre ones (sorry to say) may merely give our ego a good pat on the back.

And thus, sometimes therapy leaves us feeling the way Goodman describes—that we’re just telling the same boring, spiraling story of ourselves over and over, and that big kick-in-the-butt revelation we’re secretly hoping our therapist will one day hand us, the one that jostles us into seeing how limiting and false our self-told stories really are, may never come.

The tarot can give us that big kick-in-the-butt because it provides something symbolic, something unexpected in the ego’s narrative. It is not merely a reiteration of the same old story. It is not the gentle interrogation of and how does that make you feel? It gives us the Fool and (if we’re willing to be challenged, which is a big if) invites us to look through the true mirror beyond what the ego sees to tell us the truth.
And just as Goodman did, we may realize that maybe we’re not stuck on whether we should take advantage of a good opportunity; maybe we just want something to make us feel alive.

Perhaps Goodman’s best statement from the piece is:

In many ways I believe we have become over-therapized. As I mentioned, am I a lifetime Jungian analysand, so this is not at all an attack on therapy. But for many therapy feels like an effort to pathologize and cure, and then we become frustrated when “progress” doesn’t happen. Tarot holds no interest in bettering or fixing. It is a tool of story-telling, revealing our story from endless unseen angles.

Of course I am in no way saying to break-up with your therapist and buy a deck. (Please, please don’t.) Rather I am saying that tarot can be an equally vital therapeutic tool. It cannot create relationship the way therapy can; it cannot make us feel held and witnessed the way therapy can; it cannot care for us the way therapy can. But it can give us that needed kick-in-the-butt. It can put an ellipses at the end of our story and inspire us to find the real question we never thought to ask.

As depth psychologist James Hillman writes:

Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements that we give ourselves. We are all in therapy all the time insofar as we are involved with soul-making.

Tarot is, in my humble opinion, the best personal tool we have for soul-making. No, it cannot replace traditional talk therapy, but it can enhance our inner work in a way therapy might never do for us. It can help us open our stories and seek truer ones.

Sources:

“The Fool’s Guide to Major Life Decisions.” The New York Times, 30 Nov. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/opinion/tarot-astrology-divination-esoteric.html

James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology (Harper Perennial, 1975).

In a class I was teaching the other day we were discussing reading techniques and one of my students asked, “So if we start reading for other people, do you recommend we call ourselves archetypal tarot readers?”

Yes—it’s a strange title. To some may sound a little snobby, to others it probably means nothing at all. But years ago, when I made that tremendous decision to drop everything I knew about reading tarot and cultivate my own approach, adding the word archetypal made all the difference, both in my career and my work itself.

For most of its modern history, tarot has been employed as a divinatory tool: a means of prediction, guidance, and future insight. It has (for the most part) adhered to a standardized encyclopedia of meaning, and readers have applied practiced systems of interpretation. Today, we’ve moved beyond the old ways of reading, but still we go to the cards asking when the job is going to come through and then anxiously thumb through our guidebooks to confirm the “answer”. Though it may be much more intuitively driven and psychologically reflective, we still use it to divine things, to tell us what’s what and what we should do about it.

I’m in no way the first to move beyond this traditional approach. For decades tarot scholars have been exploring deeper psychological lenses that view the cards not as fortune-telling devices, but as mirrors of the inner life. Archetypal tarot is one of these lenses, but it offers a real framework, a grounded understanding rooted in depth psychology.

In archetypal tarot we don’t read the cards for predictive divination or even encouraging self-care, but as a tool to support our individuation, the psycho-spiritual process of self-becoming. It orients us in the processes of the psyche and the symbolic language of the soul. It acts as a tool to mend the great divide between our conscious desires and unconscious truths.

To grab from my upcoming book, Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche:

In my years of tarot teaching and counseling, I have come to learn that the only question we bring to the cards is . . . how am I meant to live? While the lure to glimpse what the future holds is undeniable, we don’t really want to know what’s going to happen as much as we want to know what promise we hold and how to meet it. We ask whether to move, to go on that date, to quit that job, but actually we want to find out which path is leading us to the most authentic, fulfilled experience of our individual selves. We may (and usually do) intuitively sense what is right; still we cannot help but doubt. Essentially, we do not the cards to tell us how to live, but to help us trust how we live.

This is the key principle archetypal tarot is built upon. There are no answers, only mirrors, only opportunities to understand, to trust.

This is all very nice to say but let me offer some concrete examples of what I mean. Over the years, I’ve distilled the difference between traditional tarot and archetypal tarot into four central principles. Perhaps you already read the cards this way, or perhaps these ideas will open a new doorway for you. Either way, I hope they invite you to consider how the tarot can support your own unfolding.

(And by the way, this is a topic I dive into deeply in my book, so if this new orientation to the cards excites you but the hows seem elusive, that’s the resource to get your hands on!)

1. We ask deeper questions, if we ask one at all.

Traditional tarot tends to focus on concrete, future-oriented questions:
When will this happen? Will this relationship return? Where is this headed?

These questions are direct and measurable, which makes sense—traditional tarot is often used for prediction, clarity, and practical direction. It looks to answer the what, where, when, and how.

Archetypal tarot, however, turns its attention inward. Its primary concern is alway the why. Instead of asking what will happen, it asks why we desire certain outcomes, what motivates us beneath the surface, and how we might better understand the patterns shaping our lives.

It favors open-ended inquiry:

Instead of, “What will make him come back to me?”
We might ask, “Why does this hurt so badly?”

Instead of, “When will I get the promotion?”
We ask, “Why do I feel so stuck?”

The wider the question, the more room the psyche has to speak. Open-ended questions invite exploration, not certainty—and through that exploration, intuition naturally deepens.

2. We go beyond the “traditional” meanings.

While some readers rely solely on intuition, I’ve always believed in learning the foundational meanings of the cards, because these meanings give us a structure to lean on. That being said, the traditional interpretations are often literal, surface-level, or overly simplistic.

In archetypal tarot, the card meanings become living symbols. They are not fixed; they are portals. Through the lens of depth psychology, each card becomes an expression of psychic dynamics: archetypes, complexes, shadow material, cognitive patterns, and inner conflicts.

Then maybe the Four of Swords tells you not “take a break,” but to consider how deactivated your sense of discernment is in this moment. Or the Sun is not about being “optimistic” but acts as a symbol for the great joy of understanding ourselves, seeing an authentic side of our personality finally have the space to shine through.

3. Archetypal tarot is about individuation, not divination.

Traditional tarot seeks answers from outside the self—guidance from an external source, be that spiritual, intuitive, or metaphysical. Archetypal tarot seeks illumination from within.

Carl Jung’s word for this process is individuation—the lifelong journey toward becoming one’s whole, undivided self. Individuation is not about improvement, nor about becoming “better.” It is about becoming authentic—integrating forgotten, hidden, and disowned aspects of the psyche into conscious awareness.

With this orientation, the tarot becomes a tool for self-revelation. The cards do not tell us what will happen; they show us who we are.

Every reading becomes an invitation to encounter our own truths. Every symbol becomes a mirror. And in this worldview, there is no “wrong” card, no confusing message, no failed reading. Every card contains something we are meant to see—even if it challenges us.

We’re not asking the cards to dictate our lives. We’re using them to trace the pathways of our inner landscape.

4. The real work begins after the reading.

Many readers—especially those new to tarot—want instant understanding the moment the cards are flipped over. But tarot doesn’t unfold that way, not even for seasoned practitioners.

Traditional tarot often ends when the reading ends: you pull cards, interpret them, take notes, and move on. Archetypal tarot slows this process down dramatically.

The true reflection begins once the cards are back in the deck. A reading can unfold over hours, days, even months. We return to the symbols the same way we revisit dreams—gently, curiously, allowing the psyche to reveal meaning in its own time.

We may engage in:

• active imagination

• dreamwork

• shadow exploration

• dialoguing with the archetypes

• symbolic journaling

• or other contemplative practices

None of this is meant to be strenuous or obsessive. It is simply a way of honoring the symbolic material that emerges, recognizing that the psyche often speaks in layers.

Just as a powerful dream can stay with us for years, so can a powerful reading.

What matters is the seriousness with which we hold the symbols—the willingness to let them work on us inwardly. In this way, tarot becomes a companion on the path of self-knowledge, continually offering new perspectives, truths, and possibilities.

And if you’re anything like me, you may find that this ongoing dialogue with the cards becomes a lifelong source of wonder.

At twenty-six I was a struggling actor trudging through that sticky malaise of quarter-life crisis. I still had big dreams of Broadway (and knew if I kept pushing eventually they’d come true), but a couple years earlier I had also discovered Carl Jung, who brought with him an obsession with the unseen universe of soul. In essence, I was in desperate search of the more in life.

At last gave into the longing and put my career on hold to get my master’s degree studying archetypal theory and transformation of Western thought. I had little hope this would bring me anything substantial other than debt—but ya know, worth the shot.

My very first class of grad school was titled The Faust Legend. I was particularly excited for this one because in my reading of Jung’s writing I had noted his many fangirlish references to Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. What interested me about the play was what interested Jung—the influence of the shadow, the quest of individuation, the mystique of a man wanting so much out of life he’ll sell his very soul to the devil to get it. I wrote some top-notch papers and felt satisfied I had “gotten” it all.

It was near the end of the semester when we finally finished Goethe’s play, and it left me gobsmacked. Rather than wrapping up the way most other versions of the tale do (with Faust being dragged to hell, as per the agreement), Goethe’s version mysteriously ends with Faust’s salvation—and more bewildering than that, his salvation by a goddess.

The play finishes with these lines:

All things transitory
Are only symbols;
What is insufficient,
Here becomes an event;
The indescribable
Here is accomplished;
The eternal feminine
Pulls us upwards.

I remember walking into class, my brain pulsing with wtf. I waited and waited for the professor to address the glaring strangeness of those lines, but after ten minutes, thirty, ninety, no one brought it up. I tentatively raised my hand (I had a mean case of imposter’s syndrome in that classroom) and asked, “Why does the ‘Eternal Feminine’ save him? And what is that even supposed to mean?”

The professor shrugged, and answered with a grin, “Well that’s the question isn’t it.”

It was the question. It is the question. And it initiated a quest to find an answer, which turned into my master’s thesis on archetypal transformations of this Eternal Feminine throughout history.

I studied a lot. I studied the Black Madonnas of Europe, Sumerian mythology, medieval women’s mysticism, gnosticism, Romantic poetry, alchemy, and contemporary feminist spirituality. I was on a mission to learn what the “Eternal Feminine” really is, which proved more difficult than I’d anticipated. My research always had this question at its heart: Who is she, and why is she such a mystery to us?

While the first part of that question is something I doubt I’ll ever find a satisfactory answer to, the second part was much easier to uncover. She’s a mystery because she’s suffered thousands of years of patriarchal oppression. We don’t feel we know her because she was erased from conscious knowledge.

It may be old news to most, but it’s worth restating that patriarchy is the dominion of male over female, masculine over feminine, and to enforce this domination what we deem masculine had to eclipse, malign, and repress what we view as feminine. In the pre-patriarchal world, the Feminine (capitalized to indicate an archetype) was revered, worshipped. But when the patriarchal paradigm took over, that power and potency had to be eradicated in order to assert dominance. The archetypes themselves had to be dominated and controlled.

The Maiden’s open-hearted innocence became helpless fragility. The Priestess’s embodied wisdom became irrational blustering. The Goddess’s womb of life became a sexless vessel. The Witch’s lunar mystery became heinous evil.

Patriarchy could not dispose of the Feminine altogether, but it could obscure its true nature. It removed the sacred Feminine so far from society that for thousands of years the only way to view it was through a carefully pruned patriarchal perspective. And so the great and divine mystery of Femininity was just a weak thing, a malignant thing, a wild thing, and a thing to be kept in the darkness.

After I earned my degree and initiated my career as a tarotist and psycho-spiritual educator, I taught about the Eternal Feminine often. But as the world became a heavier and scarier place, it felt always a little more hopeless that we might reclaim her in the world and our lives.

Recently I’ve felt called to return to the Eternal Feminine again, to reinitiate my effort to unearth its true nature. Though it was Goethe who penned the Eternal Feminine back to life, it has always found a way to shine through in our myths, stories, deities, and real women.

On October 29th I’ll be teaching Princess, Priestess, Goddess, Witch: A Four-Part Exploration of the Archetypes of Feminine Power in Western Consciousness. Over four weeks, we’ll step into the stories of the Princess, the Priestess, the Goddess, and the Witch—not to romanticize them, but to see them clearly.

We’ll explore their history, their shadow, and their enduring presence in our psyches. Through depth psychology, myth, and cultural reflection, we’ll uncover how we might engage with these archetypes of the Eternal Feminine in ways that are healing, empowering, and deeply relevant to your sacred feminist journey.

This series begins October 29th with four live Zoom sessions, and will also be recorded for later watching. You can register for only one of the lectures or all four (which comes with an additional Divine Feminine Reading List with over 50+ titles in Jungian, feminist, and religious studies).

Many of us today are seeking the Eternal Feminine, and finding that the process is both slow and a little painful. The more we sense, then feel, then touch the Eternal Feminine, the more we recognize the incredible loss of its absence in our world. But when you recognize that the Eternal Feminine is not just some witchy rhetoric but a real wound for women and men alike, the more you understand the essential need you have for her in your heart.

When you discover the true nature and power of the archetypes of the Eternal Feminine, you will find its true grace, wisdom, vitality, and strength in your life. The more she swells in your heart, the less the suppressive hand of patriarchy can grip it.

Finally, this may sound a little too pseudo-religious for some, but it’s a personal truth I cannot help but share. We want to reclaim the Eternal Feminine within ourselves and the world around us, but there’s more to it than that. What I learned from Goethe in those last lines of his play his that we do not redeem her, she is the one who redeems us.

All we need to do is seek her and open ourselves to her truth and she will indeed pull us (all of us) upward.

Recently a student of the Archetypal Tarot School (my 10 week program teaching a depth psychological approach to the cards) asked why she felt so clear and strong when reading for others, but simply couldn’t make sense of anything when reading for herself. Quickly many other students chimed in expressing the same frustration, and I have no qualms admitting that I, too, even after years reading and teaching tarot, feel exactly the same way.

The good news is that there is a real reason for why you probably have the same experience. The bad news is there’s not a neat “do-this” answer for how to fix it. Rather, by understanding the reason self-reading is so challenging we can cultivate a deeper awareness and conscientious practice that will help things make more sense.

So don’t worry, it *can* get better with the right approach.

Let’s begin by breaking down why reading tarot is easier when we do it for others. Tarot is a form of what Jungian Marie Louise von Franz called chaos divination, meaning it has no set binary of yes/no and no definitive cipher of interpretation. We cannot pull the 10 of Pentacles and say, “This means we will make a lot of money.” It could mean we’ll inherit an expensive heirloom, or get a promotion, or (in most cases) that we’re simply in a phase of abundance and fulfillment. Because there is variability in how we can interpret a card, the process of determining the “right” interpretation is chaotic, meaning without set order or direction. It’s up to us to discern what the card is saying, which means we need to access more than keywords to get the point.

What we access is the intuitive function. Jungian psychology tells us that we all interact with ourselves and the world through four main cognitive functions: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting. According to Jung, while thinking and feeling are about judgment (right/wrong, good/bad), sensing and intuiting are all about perception. The sensation function perceives via concrete senses: If I can see it, prove it, develop it—it’s real. The intuition function on the other hand perceive via unconscious instinct. This is the part of our experience that simply knows. Sometimes this feels “psychicky” but often it comes in gut reactions and quiet certainties. It perceives a reality that is both very real and very invisible because it exists below conscious awareness.

It is the intuitive function we rely on when we read the cards. Because we are intentionally engaging with the unconscious intuition, this part of our brains are sometimes electric with those impulses that say, “She’s hiding something” or “It’s not going to work out.” When we are sitting across from someone else whom we are perceiving, those intuitions can really fly.

So here’s where it gets sticky.

Perceiving ourselves is much harder than perceiving others. With our ego as the directing center of the psyche, we are always biased to what we already know. The ego by definition is inherently limited in its self-understanding. Although its self-knowledge may be strong and vast, there will always be material in shadow it cannot see. We will always have unconscious fears that hold us back, or shadow-projections we are blind to. We might instantly intuit that a friend is self-sabotaging, but glimpsing that in ourselves will be near impossible, even with the nudge of the cards.

Subscribe now

What is missing is objectivity. Though intuition may feel intimate and personal, it is objective. When reading for another we don’t know what intuition we’ll get—whether it’s pointing to things working out or major problems ahead—and because we remain objective, the clarity of the intuition (wherever it takes us) can be heard.

The ego cannot be objective about its own experience of self. It is thoroughly subjective by nature, meaning that even if we do grasp those intuitive perceptions it will interpret them through its own subjective lens, perhaps skewing them or becoming anxious or dismissive. If we run to our cards asking if getting back with our ex is a mistake (and the ego very much wants them to say no) pulling something like the 9 of Swords may send us into a tailspin. While for a stranger we’d probably intuit bad times ahead, for ourselves we might say, “I’m just overthinking it,” or worse (as it so often goes) shrug: “I don’t get it.”

This is not to say that we’re always in denial when the cards are clearly telling us what’s what. More often the cards speak to us symbolically, but the ego is itching for clarity and doesn’t have the patience to explore the symbol

I had a client who kept pulling the Hierophant inverted. This is a tricky card, and so naturally she kept staring at it, totally baffled by its meaning. She was familiar with the card, but couldn’t identify with experiencing a corruption of power, control, or spiritual authority. It just didn’t connect for her. When it came up in our reading together, I suggested we think of the Hierophant symbolically, as someone who has access to greater knowledge. My client expressed that she had been on a deep spiritual journey for years, but still felt unsure about her “claim” over what she’d learned. The more I asked about how she might picture herself as the Hierophant the more uneasy she became until finally she admitted, “I can’t see myself that way. What if I’m getting it all wrong?”

And bam—the Hierophant inverted had concretized. By looking at it as an interior symbol the unconscious rejection of that archetype in her psyche came forward in a big way. She could not understand the inverted Hierophant’s meaning in her own readings because her ego was so stuck in her subjective vision of herself. She viewed herself as someone longing to express her spiritual gifts and could not see that she was simultaneously suppressing them.

So what to we do about it?

Unfortunately you may not like this part, but the fact of the matter is that we have to learn to go slower in our readings and be more confused. I talk about this in my upcoming book Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche. Though we use the tarot as a tool to free ourselves from confusion, we don’t realize that “clarity” often only solidifies the bias of the ego. When we are confused we ask questions. We consider things we wouldn’t have before. It demands that we dig deeper, look closer, seek truth. Clarity is where we’re aiming, but confusion is the path to getting there.

The point is not to be told getting back with our ex is the right decision because that’s what the ego wants to hear. The point is to learn to listen to what the unconscious is saying, to pay closer attention to the intuitions which contradict the ego-perspective and bring us nearer to truth.

My recommendation is to pull less cards and really sit with them. If they don’t make any sense—great! Here’s an opportunity to ask something you wouldn’t have before. Consider why you’re annoyed by the card, or what you were hoping to get, or what about the card mystifies you. Be confused and curious. This will frustrate the ego, but that is well and good. This is the only path to opening the lines to our unconscious.

We must learn how to not know, so that we might truly listen.

Share

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke penned perhaps the most inspiring lines of the 20th century in his collection of ten letters sent to an aspiring poet seeking writing advice. Refusing to comment on his work, Rilke tells him, “Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write.”

This is the same (yes, frustrating) advice I have given my tarot students for years. I started out with tarot the way most of us do, excited to partner with this magical deck of cards to unravel my destiny and determine the best way to live. I was in my mid-twenties and had just given up a career in musical theater after a decade and a half of training and wishing. I didn’t know what was coming next, but I felt that “call of the soul” which tugged me toward the landscape of Jungian psychology and archetypal theory. Ostensibly this shift in my path was totally nuts. Broadway stardom was already a fool’s hope—building a brand new life studying the symbols of the soul was pure insanity. I was stuck between the new dream and the old, and I didn’t know which was crazier.

Of course, I went to the cards. I asked and asked and asked. And I pulled many powerful things: The High Priestess, the Star, the Page of Wands. But I perpetually felt I didn’t “get” the instruction. What was all of this telling me to do?

I can’t tell you exactly how, but years later I realized that the cards had indeed given me the answers I was looking for. Though I never understood them clearly in the moment, it was my wonder at their meaning that drew me deeper into myself. They led me—as Rilke put it—to search for the reason for my longing, and in that search I discovered where it was leading me.

This is why I tell my students that the true gift of the tarot is not to provide answers but to guide us to the better question. To quote myself from my upcoming book Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche:

Just as we must wander in the haze of the Moon before truly accessing the illumination of the Sun, we must let the cards confuse us so that we may voyage toward expanded understanding. True, lasting clarity is best won through contemplation of our confusion.

Therefore, I again urge you to orient your readings to arrive not at answers but the better questions. . . . There are no true answers in life, and questions are not our crises but our hope. They are the stepping stones of the journey that only becomes truer and more precious.

We go to the cards, like Rilke’s young poet, seeking support, direction, and—most often—answers. Whether we feel lost, overwhelmed, or simply need some comfort, we ask the cards to point us toward the path of resolution and release.

But more often than not we draw cards that confuse or taunt us, and we despair. We wail that we “don’t get it” or shove the cards back in the box and out of our minds. We don’t realize that they are giving us exactly what we’re asking for (just as Rilke was for that young poet) by aiming our focus back to the question.

How does this card speak to our longing? How does it challenge it? Support it? How does it make us feel? What does it make us think?

The more we search ourselves the more we will discover those better questions, the ones that lead us to the true answers we’re looking for.

But I must reiterate that these answers won’t feel like answers. It was years before I realized that the High Priestess told me exactly what I needed to know, though consciously all she did was stir up a frustrated excitement that made me feel more stuck. When we trust the cards, and embrace the confusion and new questions they inspire, we may indeed find what we’re looking for. Once again, Rilke puts it best:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

The point is to live everything. Life is not meant to be provided answers, which are meaningless when they are not earned. The cards can lead us deeper, guiding us to new questions, better questions, but we must be willing to live it all.

When meditating on what to name this Substack, Living the Questions seemed the closest to what I aim to inspire with these writings. This is not intended to be a tarot blog clunked up with keywords. This is about using the tarot to light our path to living those questions straight into the answers. It’s about discovering the power of the archetypal landscape within us, and how it guides our lives within and without.

If you wish to live your way into the answers of your life, I welcome you to follow along.

Sources:

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (W. W. Norton & Co., 1993).