Myth & Archetypes

“Myths colors and prophesies our subsequent way of living in the world.”

–Salman Rushie, THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

Myth & Archetypes• Tarot Cards are a reflection of your

own personal mythology. • The stories told by the cards define

your sense of self and give you meaning, identity, and purpose.

• You are the hero and your personal myth serves as the “big story” gives value to the mundane little stories.

• You are not just the hero of your story but the story itself is based on archetypal themes, themes that can be found in all times and places regardless of cultural variations.

Myth & Archetypes

Collective Unconscious

• Refers to the part of the unconscious mind that is shared by all people.

• The repository of all religious, spiritual, and mythological symbols and experiences.

• Archetypes are the primary structures of this area. – a kind of “supernatural cookie-cutter”

Myth & Archetypes

• Archetypes are explained by Jung as patterns of instinctual behavior and figures from the collective unconscious that contain mythological motifs.

• Examples such as the Emperor card which can represent instinctive ruling, fathering behavior, and appears as Zeus of ancient Greece, the pharaohs of Egypt, and heads of state, your boss, and fathers of modern society.

• If you can see or touch it, then it is not a archetype.

Myth & Archetypes

• Images or motifs through their correspondences, point back to a preexisting pattern.

• You can talk about a archetypal event like a journey or ordeal, an archetypal figure like a magician or guide, or archetypal objects like a key or throne.

Myth & Archetypes

“In addition to our immediate consciousness…….there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes….which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

---Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Myth & Archetypes

“The tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is that realization by the few of truths imbedded in the consciousness of all.”

---A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

Myth & Archetypes• Archetypes operates within the

autonomously and independently of the ego, with a inner intent that can surprise the conscious self.

• The goal is to become aware of the archetypes, so not to be blindly driven by them.

• At the deepest level Rachel Pack characterized it, “to a reunion of the self with the divine.”

• The reunion can improve our quality of life in the conscious.

Myth & Archetypes• Jung called the archetypes motifs

found within our psyche the shadow and the anima/animus, although there could be many more.

• Archetypal images can be charged with emotion, and that emotion is what gives the image it value, psychologically speaking.

• Some deck decks images have mythic stories because the traditional images correspond so closely to particular myth.

Activity 19:1• Using your chosen card find a myth,

story, fairy tale, movie, or even a song that fits what you have already discovered about the card.

• In what ways, what you chose, fit what you have previously said about the card?

• At what stage in the story does your particular situation come in?

• What happens in the story before and after this point?

• What might these suggest about possible motivations and future choices?

• How might you rewrite the end of the myth or story to allow other options?

Myth & Archetypes

Process of Individuation

• Jung discovered a process of a pattern of psychic growth that he term the process of individuation.

• The process leads towards greater awareness and maturity.

• He calls the individuation “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization”, during which the contents in the unconscious becomes conscious, producing a harmonious integration of the psyche into a totality called the self.

Activity 19:21. Select the following cards faceup from

among the Major Arcana, and write your impressions of them in your journal. (The Shadow, Anima/Animus, and Persona listed to the right)

2. What do these four cards tell you about your personal myth? Make up a story that uses these figures as characters.

3. Add together the numbers on these cards and then reduce the sum to 22 or less. The number represents your integrated self. Describe its most beneficial qualities. (use step 11, “range”) If the total number reduces to the same number as one of the cards, then subtract that card from the total and reduce the new sum. The cards you get are not definitive, but rather should stimulate ideas – how might they be true?

a) Find a Major Arcana card that is most like yourself. How is it like you? This is your social mask or Persona.

b) Find the card you like least. What do you dislike about it? This is a Shadow aspect.

c) Which card, depicted by figure of the opposite gender, best describes your ideal partner? This is your Anima or Animus.

d) Find a card whose qualities you most admire. Describe them. This is your Higher Self or Guide.

Activity 19:2

• The is my social Mask or Persona:

The High Priestess

Mastery in the internal world

Female energy

Meditative

Dreamer

Quiet strength

Intuitive

Activity 19:2

• This is my shadow aspect:

The Hanged Man

Dancing to a different drum

Selflessness

Adaptability

Slow to act

Activity 19:2

• This is my Anima/Animus:

The Emperor

Masculine power

Drive for achievement

Firmness

Law and order

Stability

Responsible

Leadership

Activity 19:2

• This is higher self:

The Strength Card

Inner Strength

Self-confidence

Patience

Willpower

Gentle Force

Self-Discipline

Protector

Activity 19:21. Add together the numbers on these cards

and then reduce the sum to 22 or less. The number represents your integrated self. Describe its most beneficial qualities. (use step 11, “range”) If the total number reduces to the same number as one of the cards, then subtract that card from the total and reduce the new sum. The cards you get are not definitive, but rather should stimulate ideas – how might they be true?

2 + 4 + 8 + 12 = 26 which reduces to 8

subtract 8 from 26 equals 18

The integrated self

The Moon

Myth & Archetypes

Myth and Tarot

• Numerous myths, stories, fairy tales, and mythic/heroic figures can be associated with each of the Major Arcana and many of the Minor Arcana cards.

• Examples: Three of cups with the three Graces and the four of Pentacles with King Midas

• Knowing the stories helps in remembering archetypal themes.

Myth & Archetypes

Myths

• preserve knowledge and dramatize enduring human truths and cultural ideals.

• also inform, inspire, guide, and even compel us.

• help us make sense of what goes on around us.

• Not only show who you are but who you want to be.

• Are metaphors, if believe to be true then a deeper meaning is missed.

• Tarot cards can help to reveal that deeper truth.

Myth & Archetypes

• “True on the inside, but not true on the outside.” --a young boy responses when asked what a myth is –story told by Jungian therapist Robert Johnson

• “A myth is a public dream; a dream is a private myth.” –Joseph Campbell

• “myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments.” –Roberto Calasso

Myth & Archetypes

“I eventually discovered that historical fables were psychological truths and merely required to be restated in terms of modern thought to be accurate working models of things ineffable. Trouble comes, however, when the fables and the framework are taken at their face value, for then they are very misleading and hampering.”

--Dion Fortune, a British magician and novelist

Myth & Archetypes

Examining a myth or story for a querent

• See where in the story the querent is right now.

• Predict what the next step or stage might be.

• Suggest, if the querent seems stuck, something from the myth that could unblock the querent to move on. (Or find another story with similar elements that offers other options.)

• Explore the querent’s relationships and how these people impact the querent’s life.

• Give meaning and purpose to the experience (since most myths culminate in transformation and renewal).

Myth & Archetypes• Roberto Calasso, who has retold many of

the world myths, says that we take risks when we enter the mythical realm. (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)

• As you do your readings, you define and redefine your metaphors, you enchant yourself, you attract a new persona myth or new twists on old ones.

• To change, you don’t have to change your life directly, only what you tell yourself.

• Allows you to imagine yourself in new ways and revision your possibilities.

Myth & Archetypes• By drawing awareness to things that have

gone unnoticed, it creates the magic Jung called “synchronicity” –an acausal principle in which everything that happens at a single moment in time is related in a meaningful way.

Myth & Archetypes

The Fool’s Journey

• There are earlier writers, beside Jung and Campbell, for the idea of a mythic journey to wholeness

• Dante in his Divine Comedy which tells of journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven that parallels to the tarot.

• The original fifteenth-century tarot deck was created as a cosmology, outlining a journey through the dynamic structure of the universe.

• William Blake, from the eighteenth century, invented an entire new mythology involving supernatural beings he called Zoas (for the zodiac), They represented parts of the human psyche and epic story about their eventual unification into the Divine Human.

Myth & Archetypes

“Human beings need a vision of everything—the whole of space and time, the whole universe how it works, what it’s for, where it came from, where we are in it, and why. We need, in short, the image of a cosmos, and one that is not only mathematical but also animate and conscious and that exists, moreover, for a purpose.”

--Martha Heyneman, in The Breathing Cathedral

Myth & Archetypes

The Fool’s Journey

• Joseph Campbell coin the phase a hero’s journey, seeing it as the way life is reinvigorated and brought into the cosmos.

• The basis for George Luca’s Star Wars• In 1870 Paul Christian, tarot author,

saw the same journey in the tarot.

Myth & Archetypes

• “path of wisdom through the phenomena of life,” –Paul Christian

• “the soul’s progress” –A.E. Waite describing the Major Arcana sequence

• “the fool’s journey” –Eden Gray, A Complete Guide to the Tarot (1970)

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

INITIATION

RETURN

DEPARTURE

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

I: Departure

1. Call to adventure (the feeling that something is about to change)

2. Refusal of the call (resistance or obligations within ordinary world)

3. Supernatural aid (a mentor, guide, or a magical or animal helper)

4. Crossing the first threshold (entering the unknown)

5. “Belly of the whale” (recognition of separation; lowest point)

1. Fool; Magician

2. High Priestess; Empress; Emperor; Hierophant

3. Strength; Hermit; Magician; High Priestess, etc.

4. Lovers; Chariot

5. Hanged Man

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

II: Initiation

1. Road of trials (tests, trials, sacrifices)

2. Meeting with the goddess (attraction; finding love; the union of opposites)

3. Temptation (from the true path; revulsion for physical failings)

4. Atonement with the Father (the Supreme Ordeal; confrontation with ultimate power)

5. Apotheosis (becoming godlike; rest and peace before the return)

6. The ultimate boon (achieving the goal; the grail, elixir of life, alchemical gold)

1. Chariot; Strength; Wheel of Fortune

2. Lovers; Justice

3. Devil

4. Death; Tower

5. Temperance; Star

6. Temperance; Star

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

III: Return

1. Refusal of the return

2. Magic flight (the road back)

3. Rescue from without (assistance from guides or mentors in returning)

4. Crossing the return threshold (remembering what was learned sharing the wisdom)

5. Master of the two worlds (comfortable in both mundane and spiritual worlds)

6. Freedom to live (mastery; free from the fear of death)

1. Moon

2. Moon

3. Hermit (or most any card)

4. Sun

5. Judgment; World

6. Judgment; World

Myth & Archetypes

The Hero’s Journey

• The order of the hero’s journey is not absolute.

• The order may change and sequences can be repeated

• Other choices may be made regarding tarot assignments

The Hero’s Journey

• The fool feels the call to adventure.• He demonstrate magical traits – in

vestigial form.• The family, societal training, and

ordinary world values are represented through the Priestess, Empress, Emperor, and Hierophant.

• Strength represents animal helpers• Hermit is the guide or mentor (any

card can serve in this manner)

Myth & Archetypes

Myth & Archetypes

The Hero’s Journey

• Lover’s create the attraction which brings the first separation from family

• Chariot is the will and to cross the threshold

• Hanged Man is suspended within the great unknown and must accept a new perspective

• The Chariot and Strength are two ways to master the tests on the road.

Myth & Archetypes

The Hero’s Journey

• Fortune offers up the varying trials• Lovers and Justice involves

recognition and balancing of the opposites within self as well as without

• The Devil is the tempter• Death or the Tower of destruction

creates atonement leads to reconciliation such as in Christianity with the Spiritual Father through life and death of Jesus

Myth & Archetypes

The Hero’s Journey

• Temperance and the Star follow showing achievement of peace and renewal as restorative stages of the journey

• The Moon is confusion and reluctance along the road back

• The Hermit reappears as guide through the Moon’s landscape.

• The Sun is rebirth and enlightenment in the ordinary world.

Myth & Archetypes

The Hero’s Journey

• The World dancer holds double-headed wands, showing mastery of both the mundane and spiritual

• Judgment provides liberation from the grave (ex: fear of death)

• Final cards fall into what Jung calls transcendence

Myth & Archetypes• Are like masks or functions that you temporarily take on or encounter in order to achieve or

handle something

• In a spread, they represent the motivating aspects of self, as well as stages of a developmental process

• Also universal motifs signifying the longing for wholeness

• Understanding the Archetypes as how they connect to tarot cards can help you recognize their mythic and psychological counterparts in a reading.

Activity 19:5• Go through your tarot deck and sort all

the cards into what you see as their most relevant archetype categories (write the title of each of the categories listed above on a piece of paper and place the related cards around them)

• How are the cards in each group related?

• What cards clearly belong in several groups?

• What meanings might you give the cards, based on their archetypal groupings?