Archetypal
Nichols, Banzhaf, and Jung: the trumps as encounters along the difficult arc of individuation.
Tarot readings by Sebastian
A card is a dream you can hold.
Bring a question, a decision, or simply the knot. Sebastian stays with what is actually in the image — gesture, animal, color, number, gaze — before Jung, myth, alchemy, and the history of the deck enter the room.
The draw is random. The reading isn’t.
“A silent picture text representing the typical experiences encountered along the age-old path to self-realization.”
- 01 Bring what is pressing.
- 02 Name a card, or let the table draw.
- 03 Choose how far down to go.
Symbolic reflection in the depth tradition — never a forecast, diagnosis, or substitute for clinical care.
The shelf behind the card
The reading has a lineage.
This is not a keyword generator wearing old clothes. Sebastian begins with the image, then reads across five traditions that often disagree with one another. That disagreement is part of the depth.
Iconographic
Place, Jodorowsky, and the Renaissance decks: what the posture, objects, costume, and number carried before modern divination.
Mythological
Hillman, Kerényi, and Campbell: the card as a scene in which a god, monster, guide, or threshold has appeared.
Alchemical
Edinger and von Franz: dissolution, whitening, conjunction, and embodiment without flattening the card into a stage chart.
Practical
Greer and Pollack: dialogue with the image, honest reversals, and a question that returns authority to the person holding the card.
NicholsJung and TarotReceipt → BanzhafTarot and the Journey of the HeroReceipt → PlaceThe Tarot: History, Symbolism, and DivinationReceipt → GreerTarot for Your SelfReceipt →
What a reading actually contains
The card is described before it is interpreted. Sebastian reads its composition into the particular situation you brought, then uses exact passages from the library where they sharpen the image. Quotations carry tappable book receipts. Reversals are treated as inversion, interiority, obstruction, or shadow — never as a cheap negative of the upright card.
Where several traditions pull in different directions, the reading names the tension instead of pretending the image has one official meaning. The final question is not a verdict. It is the place where the card is returned to you.
The study · method and receipts
Depth-Psychological Tarot
The tarot trumps — the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana from the Fool to the World — have been read through Jungian and archetypal psychology. Sallie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey (1980) remains the canonical treatment: a trump-by-trump reading that maps the Fool’s passage as a symbolic arc of individuation. The Magician as Hermes-Mercurius at the table of the four suits; the High Priestess as the feminine unconscious; the Tower as a moment of enantiodromia where the inflated structure collapses into its opposite. The card is not a slogan. It is a constellation.
This reading draws on Seba’s library of depth-psychological and classical texts to engage every card in the spread. The full seventy-eight-card table brings the numbered suits and court figures into the same close attention as the trumps. Sebastian — the scholarly voice grounded in the library — describes what is actually in each picture (the posture, the gaze, what the figure holds, where the light falls), then reads how the positions and images speak to one another. The flat dictionary move (“the Tower equals sudden disruption”) gets refused. The card is held as a living image.
How the Reading Works
Bring a question, decision, knot, or ask for an open draw. Sebastian recommends a single card, three-card spread, or Celtic Cross from what you bring, but the choice remains yours. You may also name one standard card you have already drawn. Context and a preferred reading tradition are welcome, never required. Once the table is settled, the house draws at random without replacement from the complete Rider–Waite–Smith deck, and the library gathers receipted passages for the particular cards, positions, and symbolic relations that arrived.
Further Reading
For the foundational Jungian reading, Sallie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot (1980) and Hajo Banzhaf’s Tarot and the Journey of the Hero (2000). For the iconographic tradition, Robert Place’s The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (2005). For Hillman’s broader archetypal method, Re-Visioning Psychology (1975). For the alchemical frame, Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche (1985).