51: The Tarot • Part II: Synchronicity & The Spirit of Creative Genius

I used to be afraid of the Tarot.

This was roughly twenty years ago, when I was first dabbling in the craft of reading the cards. I had a deck of my own, which, following the recommended tradition of Tarot practitioners had been gifted to me. It was Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth deck with artwork by Lady Frieda Harris. The rich symbolism and the colorful paintings drew me in from the moment I saw them. I loved this deck and I still have it. But it’s been twenty years since I last used it for the reasons I’m about to share.

I had purified this Book of Thoth deck by touching it with the four elements. I brought it to the park with me and laid it in the grass. I had even held it above my favorite incense and let the cards breathe in the rising smoke. For all intents and purposes—this was my deck. And I started to regard it as a trusted friend.

As a novice of the Tarot I had only used it a handful of times and my understanding of the cards was still at its beginning stages. One night, I was with my girlfriend—who is now my wife—and I decided we should let the Tarot tell us who we were.

I shuffled the cards well and spread them out between us. She drew first, then I. We held the cards face down and turned them up in unison. Her card was The Star. Symbolic of hope, clarity of vision, dreaminess. My card: The Devil.

We laughed it off—but I felt insulted and surprised. Why from the 78 cards was I presented this one. I felt my deck had betrayed me.

So I grabbed the little booklet which accompanied the deck and I read the meaning of The Devil: Blind impulse. Ambition. Temptation. Obsession. Secret plan about to be executed. Hard work. Aching discontent. Materialism. Fate.

You see, unknown to anyone else but me, I had commitment issues and I was having cold feet about our relationship. I had been found out. The deck had not betrayed me, it had revealed me—a part of me, as I was in that moment in time. And due to the mixture of surprise and even shame, I did not use it again.

Over the years that followed, there were several passing experiences like this one with other decks like the Waite-Smith that confirmed to me: the Tarot does not lie—it reveals. And so I fled from engaging with it. Partially out of respect for the unseen mechanisms by which the cards seemed to work. And partially because I wasn’t ready to confront such things about reality and myself—but now I am.

It’s only taken twenty years but ‘better late than never’ eh?

In recent years, this question of ‘how does the Tarot work?’ Has come back into my mind. By what function do these 78 cards cause such profound coincidences?

That is the subject of this episode.

Welcome to Creative Codex, I am your host, MJDorian.

This is Part 2 of my Tarot series. If you have not yet listened to Part 1, I recommend you pause this episode and scroll down in the podcast feed to episode 50: The Tarot • Part 1: Tarot’s Origins & The Archetypes of The Collective Unconscious. That episodes builds a strong foundation for understanding the Tarot through its history and an exploration of one of its key aspects: the archetypes.

Today we’re going to explore the other key aspect of the Tarot: synchronicity. What is it? What do the writings of Dr. Carl Jung and his colleague, Marie Louise von Franz, teach us on the subject? Why do synchronicities occur? And finally, once we’ve tackled those problems, we will explore the possibility that there is some guiding spirit by which the Tarot came into being and continues to be reborn with each generation.

This is Codex 51: The Tarot • Part 2: Synchronicity & The Spirit of Creative Genius.

Let’s begin.

Chapter 3: Divination & Synchronicity

In the last episode of this series, we explored the early history of the Tarot. It’s a mystery with few clear answers. It begins with the myth of the Tarot and its potential origins as an Egyptian book of wisdom called the Book of Thoth, which was in the priceless collection of the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt. But when we explore the earliest surviving Tarot cards, like the Visconti-Sforza deck of 1450, and the earliest manuscripts referring to the Tarot, we face another implication: that Tarot began as a simple card game of 22 cards called the Triumphs which gradually fused together with the common four suit playing cards of the time. If this is the true story of the Tarot, we have to ask: what is it about the cards which encourages its use as a tool for divination?

The most obvious answer is the artwork of the cards—which depict rich archetypal imagery. As we explored in the last episode, archetypes span all world cultures—they are universal to human experience. Flipping through a deck of such images, we can’t help but be engaged by it and resonate with the symbols and narratives. They exist outside of popular culture and religious dogma.

But the less obvious answer to ‘what encourages us to use the Tarot for divination’ is that humans have always had a tendency toward divination. If we weren’t using Tarot cards we’d be using sticks, stones, coins, tea leaves, dreams, books, scrying mirrors, or even the patterns on the insides of animal organs. Our desire for reading our future runs deep: who among us didn’t dabble with an 8-Ball or an Ouija board as a child?

Based on physical evidence, historians of the Tarot say that playing cards appear first, in the 1300’s. With that we can posit a theory: before there were Tarot card readers there were playing card readers. The term for this is cartomancy and it is still practiced today. There is a direct logic between the two—Tarot reading is rooted in the same principles: you have the four suits of playing cards, each referring to a different aspect of human life, you have the court cards just as in the Tarot, though modern decks leave out the Knight, giving us 52 playing cards rather than the 56 of the Minor Arcana. The added uniqueness of cartomancy with playing cards is the numbered cards rely more on numerology rather than the rich imagery of the Tarot.

There are some Tarot theorists who insist one should first learn to read playing cards or at least know the basics before learning to use Tarot for formal readings. The author, Margaret Becker, wrote a book that encourages this approach. If you’re interested, there is a great audiobook of it on Spotify called Tarot for Beginners you can check out. Then there are authors like Alejandro Jodorowsky who swear by early versions of Tarot which don’t show human figures on the numbered cards, but only the respective number in that suit. For example: six of cups shows six chalices, and ten of pentacles shows ten coins, etc. In Jodorowsky’s book, The Way of Tarot, he also makes a convincing argument for learning numerology for use with the numbered cards.

But back to the subject at hand—divination.

In the book, Alchemical Active Imagination, the psychologist Marie Louise von Franz shares a story about a particularly unique divination method of an old Swiss village she visited. She writes:

“I know a village in the canton of Uri in Switzerland where the church and the cemetery are on different sides of the little river, and one crosses by a path and a bridge to get to the cemetery. All funeral processions have to go this way, and when the people walk with or behind the coffin over this path, they always look at the cracks on it, and from that can tell who will be the next to die.

Irregular crack patterns are frequently used for bringing up the knowledge of the unconscious. The technique of melting lead is the same thing.” (Alchemical Active Imagination, p. 129)

Now that’s a new one, I’ve heard of bibliomancy—the use of a book for divination, or geomancy—the use of clumps of dirt, but this is the first I’ve heard of—crackomancy? I have to give credit to Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops for coining that term during one of our conversations together. Check out our episodes on his show: Third Eye Drops.

One of the oldest known forms of divination is still used today: the I-Ching. The earliest historical documents are from roughly 1,000 BC. It is a Chinese method of tossing yarrow stalks, essentially sticks, and based on their patterns of formation you then read a specific passage from the associated I-Ching book. The passages are prosaic in nature, and leave themselves open to metaphorical interpretation.

Out of curiosity, I threw some sticks while writing this episode. I asked the I-Ching:

“What should I keep in mind to create the absolute best upcoming episode of Creative Codex?”

The sticks responded with hexagram 48, which reads:

“Ching / The Well

Deep Waters Penetrated and drawn to the surface: The Superior Person refreshes the people with constant encouragement to help one another.

Encampments, settlements, walled cities, whole empires may rise and fall, yet the Well at the center endures, never drying to dust, never overflowing.

It served those before and will serve those after.

Again and again you may draw from the Well, but if the bucket breaks or the rope is too short there will be misfortune.”

You know what? That’s pretty good. The goal of my work on Creative Codex is always to find that deep reservoir of life giving water—it endures beyond the whims of pop culture, trends, and the rise and fall of empires. Carl Jung, in his Red Book, associates this type of knowledge with the ‘spirit of the depths’. And that first line in the reading, ‘Deep waters penetrated and drawn to the surface.’ It reminds me of my own guiding maxim which is always stuck as a sticky note on my work desk: DIG DEEP.

In my personal opinion, our impulse to engage with reading the future and knowing which direction to walk comes from this innate sense we all carry that there is a paradox to time-and-space. That it only appears fixed—but we sense that it isn’t. Outside our view we get the impression that it shifts from time-to-time. Its true nature is forever hidden from us due to the limits of our senses—we don’t have eyes that can see the full wavelength spectrum of light or microscope-vision that can see down to the cells and atoms.

In truth, our sense of time is not even that accurate to begin with. For example: how much time passed since I spoke about crackomancy? One minute, five minutes, more? You likely have to check a clock or the episode duration to know. It’s all relative.

Because of this, there is a perceived inadequacy in us regarding the paradox of time-and-space. It’s only further heightened when you see the abilities of animals at work—the powerful olfactory sense of dogs to track someone for miles or the fact that owls can hear sounds up to ten miles away. What does that even mean? How does that warp your sense of time and space?

Imagine knowing that your best friend just left their house because you just heard them open the front door and turn on their car from five miles away? This is probably what birds are doing when they perch up high in a tree—it’s like bird TV, but completely with sound.

Perhaps humans have turned toward divination for millennia because of both this unconscious sense of inadequacy and as a way to confront the paradox of time & space. Every world culture at some point has had divination practices.

Dr. Marie Louise von Franz states this in her book titled On Divination and Synchronicity:

“You may perhaps know of the amusing fact that originally divination was always practiced in churches. The old Jews, for instance, had a divination oracle in their sanctuaries in Jerusalem and on certain occasions when the priest wanted to consult Jahweh he tried through such oracles to discover the will of God. In all primitive civilizations divination techniques have been used to find out what God, or the gods, want, but in time this has been discontinued and outgrown; it has become a dark, magical, and despised practice…”

And this is where Tarot steps in. It stands as one of the few divination methods modern culture still entertains. And thank the gods for that, because the cards provide us so much more than just future reading, they are also a tool for psychological growth.

Ok, so we’ve established that divination is a natural inclination of the human psyche.

Any skeptics in the audience? I thought I heard some eyes rolling—it sounded like billiard balls on the floor.

I know this seems irrational, to pull up some seemingly superstitious practice of the past and argue for its merits. We all know that there are countless examples of tricksters and con-jobs who use the practice of fortune telling for a quick buck. But what about all the people who never go to a card reader and only use the Tarot cards in solitude with themselves? And they aren’t using it to predict the future but to understand themselves.

Let’s sit with this just a bit longer because there’s a really interesting door at the end of this hallway I want to show you. We arrive there by asking this question:

What is happening in divination? Is it really some metaphysical superpower or something less obvious?

We find a surprising answer in the writing of Marie Louise von Franz. In her book On Divination and Synchronicity, which is transcribed from a series of her lectures, she recounts a conversation she once had with a well known palm reader. She writes:

“Once many years ago I consulted a palmist named Spier, a Dutchman who wrote a famous scientific book on palmistry. He had an enormous scientific apparatus and knew all the various lines in the hand. He didn’t look at your hand but put soot on it, and then you had to make an imprint on paper and he read from that.

He was a fantastic medium. I did not let him tell me my future; I thought I owned my own fortune and that was none of his business, so I bound him down only to tell me my past. He told it most accurately; he even saw an operation I had had two years before—and he didn’t say some accident, he said an operation. He was just fantastic.

So then I got interested and had coffee with him and squeezed him and asked him exactly how he did it. Finally he confessed, he told me that he was a medium and that when a person came into the room to consult him, he knew all about him; he just knew it, but did not know what he knew; and this whole performance with the cracks and the handlines was to bring up the knowledge he had.

In that way he could project his unconscious knowledge into these lines and inform his client, so they were a catalyzer to make him conscious of what he already knew. Really, he drew on what Jung calls the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, which we know exists, as we can see from dreams.

The unconscious knows things; it knows the past and future, it knows things about other people. We all from time to time have dreams which inform us about something which happens to another person. Most of you who analyze will know that prognostic and telepathic dreams occur quite frequently to practically everybody, and this knowledge of the unconscious Jung calls absolute knowledge.

A medium is a person who has a closer relationship, one might say a gift, by which to relate to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, generally by having a relatively low level of consciousness. This explains why mediums are very often morally odd people—not always, but often—or they are slightly criminal, or take to drink, and so on. They are generally very endangered personalities because they have that low threshold and are so near to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.”

And this is the crux of the matter. What is happening in divination?

It appears that engaging in an irrational symbolic act, such as gazing into the lines of someone’s hand or the cracks in the road, flips a switch in the mind of the observer. The conscious mind has no frame of reference for what is happening, so the ego begins to relinquish control. It is in that moment that the door to the unconscious begins to open. A filter that usually would remain closed begins to let material seep through. This is where a trancelike state might set in as well.

It is as if the ego is saying “I don’t know what to do with this…This is not my domain. Here, talk with the unconscious for a bit.”

Von Franz writes “There are innumerable divination techniques which to my mind are techniques to catalyze one’s own unconscious knowledge.”

This is not about looking into a metaphysical future, per se, this is about letting knowledge that your unconscious has already picked up to float to the surface.

Further in the lecture von Franz states:

“One stares at a chaotic pattern and then gets a fantasy, and the complete disorder in the pattern confuses one’s conscious mind. We could all be mediums, and all have absolute knowledge, if the bright light of our ego consciousness would not dim it.”

Fascinating stuff.

In this lecture, von Franz is speaking to a room of fellow psychoanalysts, so some of what she says is intended for therapists with analysands. But even in this context, she shares some mind blowing insights for anyone interested in these subjects. On the topic of practices which provide the benefits of divination she states:

“There are many other ways of doing it. For instance, it is of great value to encourage an analysand to paint abstract or random paintings. He makes a few dots first (as in the Rorschach test) and thinks, ‘That looks like an elephant,’ and he puts a trunk on. Generally if you ask an analysand how he made his pictures he can tell you exactly how he began, with a dot, say, which looked like a rabbit, so he put a tail on, and then invented the whole picture and so an unconscious fantasy unfolds.

That is one source of divination. Another is like provoking a dream in daytime. Instead of waiting till one dreams in the night, one can provoke a dream in daytime by fantasying into a dot or into a chaotic pattern and so get the daytime dream. Probably we dream all the time, not only in the night but also in daytime, but because of the brightness of our conscious life we are not aware of it.”

Phew, wild stuff. First that an improvisatory creative act such as freely drawing or painting can also bring out the unconscious, and I assume the same is true of free-writing as well. I keep one journal for only that purpose and whenever I feel uneasy, yet can’t explain why, a few minutes of free-writing usually draws out the problem.

Then, of course, the second and even wilder point von Franz makes is that we are probably dreaming all the time, but don’t notice it because of the brightness of our conscious life. Perhaps when you are sitting in travel, staring out a window and begin daydreaming, you are simply checking in on a dream already in progress.

In some strange roundabout way, this gives us an answer to the age-old question: why do we dream?

Well, if the unconscious is constantly churning through its contents in this way, outside of our conscious  awareness, then when we fall asleep we are simply turning off our conscious mind and revealing what is already taking place. If this is true it could help us understand mental disabilities like schizophrenia, and what is happening to people who suffer from it: the conscious mind of the individual is unable to shut the door from the unconscious material and it floods in whether they like it or not.

There is evidence in the anthropology of South America, Africa, and Asia, that in tribal cultures, people with mental disorders like schizophrenia are not mistreated or assumed demon possessed—as they often have been in Western and Euro-centric cultures. But instead, these people are considered more in connection with the spirit world, and can instead find a role as the shaman of a tribe. If you’re interested in exploring this thread further, there is a celebrated book by the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano called Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. It is an ethnographical portrait of a man who professes to be possessed by she-demons. The title of that book again is Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano.

Now, back to the matter at hand: the Tarot.

Our exploration of divination has brought us some understanding as to what happens when the Tarot cards give us insights in a reading. Some aspect of the randomness of the imagery and the archetypal character of the figures calls up responses from our unconscious. But we have yet to explain one final factor which is oftentimes the result of a good Tarot reading: synchronicity.

It is my belief that the Tarot is a synchronicity generator. And this is one of its most surprising traits—the frequency with which the cards compel synchronicities. This is also why so many people get this uncanny feeling that something is behind the cards, moving things around—and ultimately why they may fear the practice.

So—what is synchronicity? And how does it relate to the Tarot?

Synchronicity is one of the most famous terms of Swiss psychologist, Dr. Carl Jung.

Here is my personal definition of the phenomenon which helps me to recognize it when it happens: synchronicity refers to the experience of a coincidence that strikes you as deeply meaningful. And whose occurrence seems so unlikely that it often leaves you feeling astonished.

By some mechanism, an unseen hand has woven together disparate elements of your reality—most often involving an inner aspect of your mental domain and an outer aspect of the physical domain. And experiencing a synchronicity can have a profound effect on you, and even sometimes catalyze meaningful change in your life.

In the book, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung shares a case which is now infamous among Jungians—the story of the golden scarab. It’s one of the many synchronicities he personally witnessed during analysis with patients. He writes:

“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited for this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably ‘geometrical’ idea of reality.

After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.

Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window, I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room.

This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle…whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’

This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

This is a classic example of a synchronicity. It is “the experience of a coincidence that strikes you as deeply meaningful. And whose occurrence is so unlikely that it often leaves you feeling astonished.” I’m sure everyone listening has at some point experienced something of this sort.

For the sake of a more rigorous scientific explanation of synchronicity, here is Dr. Jung again from his book, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Important to note, when Jung write the term psychic state he is not referring to psychic in the modern usage of the term, but simply as a term referring to the individual’s psychological state—their psychic state. He writes:

“All the phenomena I have mentioned can be grouped under three categories:

1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state of content (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
2. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer’s field of perception, i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterward…
3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.”

Notice that the second and third categories include mental states paired with external events which are not immediately verifiable as they occur outside the individual’s awareness or will occur in the future. It is the first category which is more clearly describing the case of the golden scarab, and which is also largely the category of synchronicity we most often experience in reading our Tarot cards.

“The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state of content, where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event…”

In this category we have an existing motivation, complex, archetype, or insight which seems activated in some way, but not yet fully conscious. And the act of reflecting on the Tarot cards in front of us calls up those activated contents. It’s interesting to note that when this moment happens, the contents seem to burst forth with a noticeable energy. There is an excitement to that moment of insight which mirrors the feeling of discovery or the moment of creative inspiration.

On that topic, there does seem to be some mysterious link between synchronicity and creativity. Perhaps it’s the strong emotional engagement paired with the ritualistic act of art-making which calls up activated unconscious content.

Von Franz confirms this in her own research of the phenomenon, in the book Alchemical Active Imagination, she has a long passage in which she discusses the ecstatic state which someone suffering from schizophrenia can work themselves into if they become possessed by an archetype, such as the savior archetype, and embrace this as their reality. This seems to increase the perception of synchronistic events in the individual’s immediate surroundings. Following this passage she states this:

“This is only one example showing that a kind of emotional ecstasy—or rather, an emotional possession through an archetype—goes together with a greater frequency of events of a synchronistic nature. This also occurs frequently when people are emotionally gripped by some creative process, which is always close to the state of madness; it is just the ‘positive’ version of madness, around which synchronistic events are often clustered.” (p.123)

 

INTERMISSION

 

So we’ve done a decent job now of laying out a framework with which to understand how Tarot works.

Let’s review the details:

As we came to understand through the writings of Marie Louise von Franz, divination relies on calling up material from the unconscious, which it is believed has a kind of ‘absolute knowledge’. How absolute this knowledge is remains unclear but we can at least agree on the impression that the unconscious knows more than our conscious mind does.

So what happens when you decide ‘I’m going to do a Tarot reading’?

First, the process of shuffling the cards, laying them out face-down, and picking one to several cards calls chance into the equation. There is a sense that our ego is not a big fan of chance, and even seems mystified by it at times. The fact that people gamble or continue to play the lottery even after they learn about the enormous odds against them is telling of this.

It’s not just a lack of intelligence, in fact many highly intelligent people fall into destructive habits with gambling—one famous example was the creative genius, Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. During his university years, while studying electrical engineering, he had a nasty gambling addiction that lost him all his money.

And so we see that chance over-rules logic in some way, there is a mystification to chance—we can see this in the personification of it as Lady Luck and further back as Fortuna to the Romans and Tyche to the Greeks. So—every time we shuffle and lay the cards out we are calling up this mystifying force—chance.

The cards which we then turn over are filled with a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar images—kings and queens, but also sphinxes, chariots, chalices, wands, and so on. The imagery, in decks such as the Marseilles of 1709 and the Waite-Smith of 1909 is deeply archetypal. We are faced with symbolic representations of all the energies of life: birth, death, transformation, hierarchies, introspection, etc.

We gaze long into these symbols, and if we are approaching the cards with an open mind we may also notice a door at the end of our mental hallway opening. The veil that covers the threshold begins to sway, letting through images, memories, sensations, and the occasional insight. These archetypes have a tremendous resonant power in the mind—which activates and draws up the energies and complexes.

It is at this moment that a synchronicity occurs—while grasping for a thread that connects the symbolic imagery to our inner life narratives. To repeat Jung’s first category of synchronicity, it is “the coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state of content […] where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event […]”

But just as often the synchronicity may be delayed. In my experience, if I do a Tarot reading at nighttime before going to bed, I don’t get an immediate understanding of the cards. I have some inklings but I remain locked out of the deeper meaning. Until the next day, when in the morning or midday, the symbols and their meaning appear together in my mind in a flash. Oftentimes, if the question I asked was one loaded with emotion, the symbols or personal associations reappear in several other forms as related synchronicities throughout the next 48 hours. Jung acknowledges that this is sometimes part of the phenomena, that synchronicities occur in a series.

For example, here is an account shared by Jung in his book, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. He writes:

“I noted the following on April 1, 1949: Today is Friday. We have fish for lunch. Somebody happens to mention the custom of making an ‘April fish’ of someone. That same morning I made a note of an inscription which read: ‘Est homo totes medium piscis ab imo.’ (Piscis being fish in Latin.) In the afternoon a former patient of mine, whom I had not seen for months, showed me some extremely impressive pictures of fish which she had painted in the meantime.

In the evening I was shown a piece of embroidery with fish-like sea-monsters in it. On the morning of April 2 another patient, whom I had not seen for many years, told me a dream in which she stood on the shore of a lake and saw a large fish that swam straight towards her and landed at her feet. I was at this time engaged on a study of the fish symbol in history. Only one of the persons mentioned here knew anything about it.

[…] I must own that this run of events made a considerable impression on me. It seemed to me to have a certain numinous quality.”

The term numinous, which often appears in Jung’s writing in reference to archetypal and spiritual material, means something with a sacred or otherworldly character, which elicits a sense of mystery, awe, or even terror. In other work of Jung it is used as an indication that you may be dealing with an activated archetype, either when in a daydream, dream or in a meditative vision. On the footnote of the page Jung writes:

“The luminosity of a series of chance happenings grows in proportion to the number of its terms. Unconscious—probably archetypal—contents are thereby constellated, which then give rise to the impression that the series has been ‘caused’ by these contents…”

This calls to my mind a series of synchronicities I had recently whose origin point was a nightmare. I transcribed it in my dream journal the morning that it happened. And I’d like to share that with you now.

It reads:

“April 2nd, 2025. Nightmare.

First setting, a very fancy home interior, with floor to ceiling windows. I am there with my father and daughter as if we are on a museum visit. The dream shifts without warning.

Second setting, we are in my house, my daughter and I are on the second floor, there is some kind of commotion downstairs—like an argument or a fight. I run over with my daughter to the top of the stairs and listen with anxiety and fear. I then see two people running up the long stairs—in haste. As they make their way closer I can make out more details.

It is a man and a woman pair, both of them with pale skin and black hair, both enormous in stature—tall with broad shoulders. They have their dark green jackets still on as if they rushed in from outside. The woman is on the right, and has her long black hair in a ponytail, with very strong facial features, jaw, and pronounced eyebrows. She pushes ahead of the man on their way to get to us.

I yell “What did you do with my father?”

The woman responds “He won’t be a problem anymore.”

I then see that the man is holding a knife, perhaps from the kitchen. He is a hulking mass of a man—with a stature like Andre the Giant. I genuinely feel fear upon seeing him.

The woman gets close to the top of the stairs, there is now only a baby gate between us. I extend my arms and struggle with her until I push her back and she falls down the stairs. Sliding down backwards on her head and shoulders.

The man is still coming up slowly with the knife. I get the sense his intention is to kill me or both my daughter and I. I turn to her in a panic, we have to do something. I know that he will be too great a force to overpower. In my heightened anxiety I wake up…and feel so disturbed by this nightmare that I lay there and figure out what we would have done to save ourselves.”

This nightmare left a lasting impression on me. Not only because it was disturbing. I also couldn’t help but marvel at its architecture…The split between first floor and second floor, possibly implying my unconscious and conscious mind respectively, my father downstairs and my daughter upstairs, the strange twin effect of the dark masculine and dark feminine making their way up the stairs with a threatening force.

I didn’t fully comprehend its meaning, but I respected it as an unedited and clear message from my unconscious. I intended to bring it to psychoanalysis to unpack its meaning further. Nearly three weeks later I brought the dream journal with me on my commute into Manhattan to my session. I was waiting for the train and took out the book I was reading at the time, Marie Louise von Franz’s On Divination and Synchronicity, which has been so indispensable for my research in this episode.

As I stood on the train platform, a business card I had placed in as a bookmark fell out, so I instinctively shoved it back in. Before putting the book away I thought ‘why don’t I see what is on the page where I put the business card?’ I opened the book to page 106 and my eyes immediately started reading, it was a passage where von Franz shares a dream which she once had. She states:

“Then I went on and up the mountains where I saw, as one usually does in the high Swiss mountains, brown wooden huts, some with little gardens round them with just a few carrots, etc., for the people who watch the cattle up there. The entrances to the gardens were always marked by two stones.

People often mark entrances by two stones, or stone pillars such as were there, but now comes the amazing thing. The two stones were ordinary field stones picked up at random and of irregular form, but there were always two of them and inside there was a mathematical pattern of golden threads. The stones and patterns were completely identical.

They had not been cut apart to make two alike, they were two different stones, picked up individually, each of which had this absolutely identical pattern, something completely impossible in nature. I just stared at these stones in awe and amazement that such an impossible thing should be.

That was just another dream comparable to the dreams Jung tells in his paper on synchronicity. They show, as Jung points out, that there must be a formal factor in nature which coordinates, so to speak, certain forms in the physical world with the psychic world, two incompatible worlds. […]

What is also striking is that there is a double motif which contains an element of symmetry such as in these double mandalas which are symmetrical in each other.

Double motifs, as we usually interpret them, refer in general to the fact that something is just coming up to the threshold of consciousness. If somebody dreams of two identical dogs, or identical people, etc., it means this content is just coming up from the unconscious and approaching the threshold of consciousness; at the threshold it falls apart into two.

I think that is why we also have at all boundary lines this idea of placing double stones, double pillars, and so on. We always use a double marker at the threshold; it is a symbolic urge suggesting that the threshold of consciousness is a doubling phenomenon, so to speak…”

I was absolutely floored by this passage. Somehow it confirmed so much—and completely by chance—or in this case: by synchronicity. The mention of the two pillars immediately called to mind the High Priestess card of the Tarot. Who sits in between two pillars—Jachin and Boaz, between them hangs a veil, which covers the sanctum sanctorum. It is a delineation between two worlds—as von Franz says: a threshold. These two pillars are often interpreted as being symbolic of duality, light and dark, good and evil, life and death, and so on. Does this mean that it’s our conscious mind which applies a filter of duality to all of life? While in the unconscious, things remain as they are, as raw energies.

We see such a doubling phenomena also in the other cards of the Major Arcana’s first 7 card row: card V shows the two monks in front of the Hierophant, card VI the two Lovers, and card VII the two sphinxes in front of the Chariot in the Waite-Smith or two horses in the Marseilles deck: a stallion and a mare. In the four books about the Tarot which I’ve read, I’ve never seen anyone make this connection before that Marie Louise von Franz inadvertently just made. That the doubled figures can represent a doubling phenomenon that results when unconscious material crosses the threshold of consciousness. And it explains our inclination to place two like items at such thresholds in the physical world.

What continued to floor me is that my nightmare seemed to be a confirmation of this. The two antagonistic figures: which I interpreted to be the dark masculine and dark feminine, were clearly related to one another. They wore the same clothes, had the same black hair, and were both oversized in stature. They were coming up from the first floor to the second floor. The unconscious really could not have spelled it out more clearly.

On my train ride to my therapist’s office, I marveled at this connection. I exited the station with a smirk on my face in a kind of pleasant daze, looking forward to share this synchronicity with someone well versed in Jungian theories. I approached the entrance to the building as always and reached for the buzzer—my therapist’s number was: 44. The doubling phenomenon.

Later that night I asked the Tarot a question before bed. “Tarot, by what mechanism do you function?”

I intended to draw three cards as in my usual self exploratory questions, but as I hovered my hand over the cards a third card didn’t feel right. Only two cards were needed. I flipped them over:

The VII of Swords and the X of Cups. It would take me some time to reflect on these, but the thing which struck me immediately was the composition of the VII of Swords—Swords being concerned with the intellect and thoughts in general.

It shows a man sneaking off with five swords in his arms, as he looks backwards he smirks, and you see he has left behind two swords he cannot yet carry. If the direction he is moving is the conscious mind, the direction behind him is the unconscious, and these two swords stand perfectly side by side. Does the Tarot know I just learned about the doubling phenomenon earlier in the day? Is the Tarot showing its sense of humor? Or is it trying to communicate something about its own mechanism? That it primarily works with unconscious material which nears the threshold of the conscious mind?

And what of the X of Cups, which shows a man and woman standing together presenting the sky with their arms and two children dancing to their right—again two pairings showing another doubling phenomenon. Above them are 10 golden chalices filing the sky in a rainbow. The cups being the suit of emotion, is the Tarot stating that the heightened intensity of any of our emotions plays a part in its mechanism?

It’s a curious possibility. No matter the emotion, whether it’s anxiety, jubilation, or sexual attraction, it is their heightened intensity interacting with the material closest to the threshold of consciousness which activates the Tarot’s synchronicities.

Is there anything in Jung or von Franz’s writing which confirms this hypothesis?

In the book, On Divination and Synchronicity, p.53, Marie Louise von Franz states:

“…the old oracle techniques were attempts to find out the probabilities or relative regularities of the psychological human situation. Almost all oracle techniques should be used like the I Ching, that is, only in very serious situations and not as a drawingroom game, as for instance when a few people sit together and say: ‘Let’s throw an I Ching and find out something.’

One should only use the oracle when one has a burning question, or if one is at an impasse and in a state of emotional tension, but not when things are going smoothly and one is really not concerned with any particular problem.

We know that big inner tensions generally occur when an archetype is constellated.”

 

Chapter 4: The Spirit of Creative Genius

While doing research for this series over the last few months I had a strange thought: who invented the Tarot?

When we trace Tarot’s history to its earliest years we can’t find such an attribution. We could certainly make a list of the important figures who shaped the Tarot into what it is today, that list would include figures like: Bonifacio Bembo, Antoine Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, Arthur Edward Waite, Pamela Coleman Smith, and so on.

But there is no singular person that can sign their name under the Tarot. If there were, if we could say some random Italian named Federico Mozzarella of the Mozzarella Dynasty invented the first Tarot cards in their 78 card format in 1350—wouldn’t we call him a genius?

Most definitely. Looking at what the Tarot is capable of, looking at the deep complexity of its structure—which every Tarot author wrestles with—it cannot be denied that the Tarot is a work of genius. But whose genius?

We usually assume such masterpieces are brought into the world fully formed. That whoever invented it would have received a brilliant lightning bolt of insight showing all 78 cards and brought them forth as such. But the strange reality of the Tarot is that the further back we look, we have to contend with the impression that it was a fusion of two different card games, one arriving to Italy from Egypt in the 1300’s, called Mamluk cards, which we know today as playing cards. And one originating in Italy, which were called the Triumphs. The two games were combined, giving us the 58 cards of the Minor Arcana and 22 cards of the Major Arcana.

In the 1400’s, playing card readers, using divination methods known as cartomancy, used both decks so frequently that it resulted in their fusion. Later on, in the 1700’s, occultists such as Court de Gebelin, who was a Freemason, and the Comte de Millet, wrote theoretical essays in the book Mondes Primitifs which linked the symbolism of the Tarot with ancient Egypt. They also proposed a fusion of the 22 Hebrew characters with the 22 cards of the Major Arcana.

In the late 1700’s the French occultist, Etteilla, created his own Tarot deck with the direct intent of only using it for divination. Some historians claim he is the first person to earn a living from being a Tarot reader. But that does not take into account the use of Tarot as a tool for divination by the so-called ‘lower classes’ likely for centuries beforehand. In the late 1800’s the ceremonial magic group the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded, and its members altered Tarot for even more overtly spiritual purposes.

In 1909, Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith—both members of the Golden Dawn—created the celebrated Waite-Smith deck. Later in 1940, Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, created the Book of Thoth deck, another esoteric standard of Tarot practitioners.

And so the Tarot tradition gradually became what it is today. But all the while, the allegorical signatures of the cards remain the same. Despite six centuries of aesthetic adjustments, the spirit of the Tarot remains in tact. That’s the only way we can adequately describe what is happening here: the spirit of the tradition. Because how else can we account for the lack of changes to the structure of the Tarot? It would appear that when you engage with such a rich tradition, you are also engaging with a guiding force of the tradition.

You can call this force purely psychological or you can lay the claim on some egregore of the Tarot in the metaphysical planes. In the end the effect is the same. Once you have the history all laid out before you, to claim there is no guiding force is ignorance.

The ancient Greeks would often use the term daimon when referring to the guiding force of a place or a people. For example, in Plato’s Symposium, the priestess teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but instead a ‘great daimon’. It is posited that a daimon is something between the gods and man. In the Apology of Socrates, he claims to have a daimonion which warns him against mistakes but does not ever tell him what to do.

The Romans largely kept the same premise, but instead called it the genius of a person, place, thing, or people. One could even make offerings to this disembodied genius, it was a guiding force you could become attuned to—for example, it could be the genius of music or the genius of an army. Skeptics may say these are superstitions of the past, but we still refer to such things today with the term: spirit.

How do we define the word spirit?

Jung was fascinated by this subject and elaborates on the meaning of the word spirit in his book, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, he writes:

“The word ‘spirit’ possesses such a wide range of application that it requires considerable effort to make clear to oneself all the things it can mean…

A very widespread view conceives spirit as a higher and psyche as a lower principle of activity, and conversely the alchemists thought of spirit as the ligamentum animae et corporis, (the bond between soul and body) obviously regarding it as a spiritus vegetativus (the later life-spirit or nerve-spirit). Equally common is the view that spirit and psyche are essentially the same and can be separated only arbitrarily.

Wilhelm Wundt—the German philosopher—takes spirit as ‘the inner being, regardless of any connection with an outer being.’ Others restrict spirit to certain psychic capacities or functions or qualities, such as the capacity to think and reason in contradistinction to the more ‘soulful’ sentiments. Here spirit means the sum-total of all the phenomena of rational thought, or of the intellect, including the will, memory, imagination, creative power, and aspirations motivated by ideals.

Spirit has the further connotation of sprightliness, as when we say that a person is ‘spirited,’ meaning that he is versatile and full of ideas, with a brilliant, witty, and surprising turn of mind. Again, spirit denotes a certain attitude or the principle underlying it, for instance, one is ‘educated in the spirit of Pestalozzi,’ or one says that the ‘spirit of Weimar is the immortal German heritage.’ A special instance is the time-spirit, or spirit of the age, which stands for the principle and motive force behind certain views, judgements, and actions of a collective nature. (Such as the spirit of the Renaissance.)

…We are concerned with a functional complex which originally, on the primitive level, was felt as an invisible, breath-like ‘presence’…In keeping with its original wind-nature, spirit is always an active, winged, swift-moving being as well as that which vivifies, stimulates, incites, fires, and inspires.

[…] man’s idea of spirit rests on the recognition that its invisible presence is a psychic phenomenon, i.e., one’s own spirit, and that this consists not only of uprushes of life but of formal products too. Among the first, the most prominent are the images and shadowy presentations that occupy our inner field of vision; among the second, thinking and reason, which organize the world of images.”

It is with this impression that I now view the tradition of the Tarot. That when you engage with the cards, study them, and use them as a tool for reflection during life’s ups-and-downs, then you are engaging with more than just images on card stock—you are engaging with the spirit of the Tarot. It is a thing which exists somewhere between the realm of man and the gods.

And likewise, when we see the creativity which countless Tarot practitioners and artists have applied to the tradition, which has evolved the cards to compliment philosophical and spiritual ends, we can say another force is at play: the spirit of creative genius. An influence which millennia ago was represented by the Greeks as the nine muses—whose shrines were in The Great Library of Alexandria.

It is the spirit of creative genius which guides the brushes of all painters, the pens of all poets, and the melodies of all singers. When you are attuned to it, and under its influence, you can recognize the surge of energy that inspires you to aim higher and think bigger.

It is the self-renewing force of creation that stimulates ingenuity and play. It is the fire of the imagination. And the Tarot, is just one of its many countless masterpieces, which we as a species have brought into form. I understand it now, more clearly than ever: the Tarot is a work compelled by the spirit of creative genius to arrange the archetypes of the collective unconscious into a workable exterior form.

The Tarot does not belong to any single inventor or culture, it is a collective masterpiece, reborn with each generation. It belongs to us.

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