Secular tarot reading

Secular tarot reading is the practice of working with the seventy-eight cards as a psychological instrument rather than a divinatory one — a structured encounter with symbolic imagery that bypasses predictive claims entirely and redirects attention toward self-knowledge, the dynamics of the unconscious, and what depth psychology would call the individuation process.

The shift is not merely cosmetic. When the cards are stripped of their fortune-telling function, what remains is a remarkably coherent symbolic vocabulary. Place (2005) traces the Major Arcana to Renaissance hieroglyphic art — images designed, in the tradition of Horapollo's Hieroglyphica, to communicate directly with the soul rather than to encode propositional content. Jung's distinction between sign and symbol is decisive here: a sign has one fixed meaning; a symbol, as Nichols (1980) puts it, "stands for something which can be presented in no other way and whose meaning transcends all specifics and includes many seeming opposites." The trumps are symbols in this strict sense, which is precisely why they resist reduction to a lookup table of predictions and reward the kind of amplificatory engagement Jung brought to alchemical imagery and dream material.

When we make an insightful approach to the analysis of its symbolism, it can become a source of inner enrichment and psychological growth, and prediction will take second place to accurate and clear self-insight. Working with the tarot can become a way of completely accepting yourself and your life, and of learning to cope with the ups and downs.

Hamaker-Zondag (1997) draws the analogy to fairy tales: just as Little Red Riding Hood works on a child not through its literal content but through the symbolic logic it enacts, the cards work on the reader through images that activate unconscious contents before the rationalizing mind can intercept them. The deck that resonates emotionally — the one that produces unease, fascination, or inexplicable attraction — is already doing psychological work, regardless of whether any reading has begun.

Greer (1984) pushed this further by dismantling the traditional prohibition against reading for oneself, arguing that the cards are uniquely suited to self-directed inquiry precisely because they bypass the tendency to read one's own desires and fears in a linear way. Her numerological framework — Personality, Soul, and Shadow cards derived from the birth date — translates the ego-Self axis into a portable practice. The Major Arcana, in her schema, speak to archetypal energies that need expression; the Minor Arcana describe the situation; the Court Cards identify the mode of acting. The spread becomes a grammar for self-examination rather than a window onto fate.

Jodorowsky (2004) arrives at the same destination by a different route. His decisive move is the distinction between "fluid symbols" and "arrested symbols": fixed interpretive schemas ossify the living image, while fluid engagement demands that each reading reconstitute meaning through direct encounter. He is unambiguous that the cards function as a mirror of the soul, not a projection of its future — the reader's task is to see the reflection honestly, including the projections, identifications, and avoidances that the images call up.

Pollack (1980) grounds the secular reading in synchronicity: the random shuffle does not predict events but produces a meaningful configuration, because meaning emerges from events rather than being imposed on them. The cards are objective in the sense that they bypass conscious decision, but they are not impartial — they carry a philosophy, an orientation toward consciousness and change, that shapes what the encounter can disclose.

What secular tarot reading refuses, then, is the pneumatic promise embedded in most popular tarot culture: the idea that the cards will tell you what is coming, that fate has been written, that the right spread will deliver certainty. Jodorowsky names this directly — the notion that "everything has been written" depreciates present action and substitutes passive reception for genuine self-confrontation. The secular reader does not consult an oracle for relief from the anxiety of risk. The cards are useful precisely because they do not deliver that relief; they return the reader to the symbolic life already underway in the psyche, and ask what is actually happening there.

  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist whose soul-making framework informs depth approaches to symbolic practice
  • individuation — Jung's term for the lifelong process of becoming a whole person, which the Major Arcana are widely read as mapping
  • synchronicity — Jung's principle of meaningful coincidence, the theoretical basis for why a random card draw can carry psychological relevance
  • active imagination — Jung's technique of dialoguing with unconscious contents, closely related to meditative tarot work

Sources Cited

  • Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, 1997, Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot
  • Greer, Mary K., 1984, Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for the Inward Journey
  • Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 2004, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards
  • Pollack, Rachel, 1980, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness
  • Nichols, Sallie, 1980, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
  • Place, Robert M., 2005, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination