Hero's journey and tarot

The major arcana are not a gallery of divinatory symbols arranged for convenience. They are a sequence — and the sequence tells a story. The claim running through the depth-psychological tarot tradition, from Nichols through Banzhaf to Hamaker-Zondag, is that this story is structurally identical to what Campbell called the monomyth: departure, initiation, return. What makes the tarot unusual is that it renders the pattern not in narrative prose but in pictures, and the pictures carry an archetypal weight that no verbal summary can fully contain.

Banzhaf's structural argument is the most precise. He reads the twenty-two trumps against the ancient cosmological image of the sun's daily arc and night-sea journey — the single-digit cards (I through IX) tracing the journey through the day sky, the double-digit cards (X through XVIII) mapping the descent into the underworld and the return to light. The turning points are The Hermit and The Moon, corresponding astrologically to the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, the solstice pivots of the solar year. This is not arbitrary numerology; it recovers the pre-Copernican worldview in which the soul's inner movements were legible in the movements of the heavens.

Yet, as often as this story has been told, as many collections of fairy tales and myths as it may fill, only once has it taken on a complete form as a whole in pictures — and this is in the 22 tarot cards of the major arcana.

Nichols maps the same territory through a three-row architecture. The top row — Magician through Chariot — she calls the Realm of the Gods, where the hero is still largely possessed by archetypal forces he has not yet made his own. The middle row runs from Justice through Temperance, the Realm of Earthly Reality and Ego Consciousness, where the young ego sets out to establish itself in the world. The bottom row, from The Devil through The World, is the Realm of Heavenly Illumination and Self-Realization, where the hero's energies turn decisively inward and the self — in Jung's sense, the totality of the psyche — begins to emerge as the true center of gravity. Pollack independently arrives at a similar tripartite structure, reading the three groups of seven as consciousness, subconscious, and superconscious — the outer concerns of social life, the inward search, and finally the confrontation with the great archetypal forces themselves.

The Fool is the figure who makes this architecture possible. He is numbered zero, which means he belongs everywhere and nowhere — he can appear at any point in the sequence, and he does. Nichols reads him as the self as an unconscious prefiguration of the ego, citing Jung directly:

The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject. . . . The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.

Banzhaf's most radical thesis concerns the Fool's reappearance at The Sun as the "pure fool" — the figure who has traversed the entire sequence and arrived back at something structurally indistinguishable from the naïveté he began with, but now conscious. This is the difference between the naive fool who sets out and the pure fool who returns: not ignorance but the suspension of accumulated certainty, which is the psychological precondition for genuine individuation rather than mere ego-consolidation.

Place situates the whole structure within Renaissance Neoplatonism, arguing that the tarot trumps are a secular Neoplatonic rosary — a heroic journey through three layers corresponding to the three parts of the Platonic soul: appetite, will, and reason. The hero in the tarot is not Christ but Everyman, which is precisely what makes the deck universally applicable across cultures and centuries. Hamaker-Zondag makes the same point from a clinical direction: the Major Arcana represent the individuation process, the Minor Arcana show how that process plays out in the texture of daily life, and the two together constitute what she calls the Way of the Hero in oneself.

What the depth-psychological readers share is a refusal to treat the tarot as a fortune-telling device and an insistence that its sequential logic is doing real psychological work. The cards do not predict; they mirror. Each card is a stage in a process that every human being undergoes, whether consciously or not — and the sequence as a whole maps the movement from unconscious possession by archetypal forces to what Nichols calls the fully realized self, "bodied forth as a graceful dancer" in The World, where "sense and nonsense, science and magic, father and mother, spirit and flesh, all flow together in a harmonious dance of pure being."

  • Hero's Journey — the monomyth's three-stage arc of departure, initiation, and return
  • Hero Myth — Neumann's reading of the hero as the archetypal grammar of ego differentiation
  • Sallie Nichols — depth-psychological hermeneutics applied to the twenty-two trumps
  • Joseph Campbell — portrait of the comparative mythologist who named the monomyth

Sources Cited

  • Banzhaf, Hajo, 2000, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero
  • Nichols, Sallie, 1980, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
  • Pollack, Rachel, 1980, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
  • Place, Robert M., 2005, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination
  • Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, 1997, Tarot as a Way of Life
  • Jung, C.G., 1951, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self