Acausal connecting principle tarot

The acausal connecting principle is Jung's name for the operative logic behind divination — the claim that two events can be meaningfully related without either causing the other. He introduced the term in his 1930 memorial address for Richard Wilhelm and developed it fully in his 1952 essay "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle." The principle stands in direct opposition to causality: where causality traces how D arose from C from B, synchronicity asks why A′, B′, C′, and D′ — inner and outer events of entirely different kinds — appear together in the same moment. Jung's answer is that they share the qualitative character of that moment; they are, as he put it, "exponents of one and the same momentary situation."

This assumption involves a certain curious principle which I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.

The I Ching was Jung's primary laboratory for this idea, but the logic extends directly to Tarot. Both oracles depend on the same structural move: a random procedure — coin tosses, yarrow stalks, the shuffle of cards — is used precisely because it removes conscious control. The causal chain is broken deliberately, so that what Pollack calls the "acausal synchronicity" can take over. The randomness is not a defect; it is the mechanism. As Pollack observes in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980), the synchronistic principle can only operate once the causal one has been suspended — any method of producing random patterns gives the principle a chance to work.

This is where Tarot and the I Ching part company with astrology, at least structurally. The planetary chart is fixed at birth; the cards are shuffled again each time. Pollack notes that this dynamic quality troubles those whose sense of authority derives from the vastness and permanence of the cosmos — the planets are "mighty beings, ponderously moving through the sky," while cards seem trivial. But the depth-psychological reading refuses this hierarchy. The shuffled deck is not less authoritative than the natal chart; it is differently authoritative. It reads the qualitative character of this moment, not the moment of birth. Place, writing on Hermetic correspondence in The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (2005), identifies synchronicity as the psychological translation of the ancient axiom "as above, so below" — the principle that inner and outer reality are not separate domains but aspects of a single psychophysical structure.

Von Franz extended Jung's account in a direction that matters for understanding why divination works at all. In Creation Myths (1995) she draws on Jung's concept of "absolute knowledge" — the idea that the unconscious, in synchronistic events, appears to know things that have not yet occurred. Divinatory methods tap this stratum. The hexagram or the spread does not predict the future by tracking causes; it discloses what the unconscious already holds about the constellation of the present moment. The oracle works because "it," the unconscious constellation, knows about facts which have not even yet occurred.

Hamaker-Zondag, working explicitly within Jungian method in Tarot as a Way of Life (1997), treats the Major Arcana as a map of the individuation process — the same archetypal sequence Jung traced clinically — and the reading as a synchronistic event in which the cards that fall reflect the psychic situation of the querent at the moment of the spread. The cards are not causes; they are co-expressions of the same moment that the querent's inner life is also expressing.

One clarification worth holding: Jung himself was careful about the limits of the claim. He acknowledged that synchronicity, as a principle, is difficult to demonstrate experimentally precisely because situations are unique and cannot be repeated. The only criterion of validity in an I Ching reading — and by extension a Tarot reading — is whether the observer recognizes the text or image as a true rendering of their psychic condition. This is not a weakness of the method; it is its nature. The oracle does not offer proof. It offers, as Jung wrote in his foreword to the Wilhelm translation, something for "lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom — if there be such."

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East
  • Jung, C.G., 1960, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
  • Wilhelm, Richard, and Baynes, Cary F., 1950, The I Ching or Book of Changes
  • Pollack, Rachel, 1980, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1995, Creation Myths
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 2014, Psyche and Matter
  • Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, 1997, Tarot as a Way of Life
  • Place, Robert M., 2005, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination