Stepping into the tarot card

The instruction to "step into" a Tarot card is not a metaphor. It is a precise phenomenological operation — one that the best Tarot psychology has borrowed, knowingly or not, from a much older account of how images work on the soul.

The theoretical ground was laid by Corbin, whose concept of the mundus imaginalis — the imaginal world situated between sensory perception and pure intellect — insists that images are not representations of something else but substantive presences with their own intelligence. Hillman drew this directly into archetypal psychology, arguing that the therapeutic aim is "a work in service of restoration of the patient to imaginal realities" and that "the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination" (Hillman, 1983). To step into a card is to enter that middle realm: not to analyze the image from outside, not to translate it into concepts, but to be received by it.

Bosnak's work on embodied imagination gives this the most precise phenomenological description. Writing from his conversations with Corbin, he quotes the Iranian philosopher directly:

"The relationship of interiority expressed by the proposition 'in', 'inside of', is inverted. Spiritual bodies or entities are not in any world, nor in their world, in the same manner as a material body is in its place or may be contained in another body. On the contrary, their world is in them."

This inversion is exactly what happens when the practice works. You do not enter the card the way you enter a room. The card's world enters you — or rather, you discover that you are already inside it, that what felt like your interior life is actually participation in the image's medium. The bull in Bosnak's clinical example does not exist inside Berthe; Berthe finds herself absorbed into the bull's world, shaped by its vectors of heat and thrust and longing. The same logic applies to the Fool at the cliff's edge, or the Hermit holding his lantern in the dark: the question is not what these figures symbolize but what it feels like to inhabit their posture, their light, their exposure.

Nichols, reading the Tarot through Jung, calls the cards "projection holders" — hooks that catch the imagination and return to consciousness what the psyche has cast outward (Nichols, 1980). But projection-holder is still too passive a term. Hamaker-Zondag goes further, treating the cards as catalysts for active imagination in Jung's precise sense: not passive reception but a sustained dialogical encounter with an autonomous presence (Hamaker-Zondag, 1997). The card is not a mirror; it is an interlocutor.

Greer's workbook formalizes the entry through visualization — relaxation, grounding, then a deliberate crossing of the threshold into the card's pictorial space — and asks the practitioner to notice what changes in the body, what figures speak, what the environment feels like from inside (Greer, 1984). This is not imagination in the debased modern sense of fantasy or make-believe. It is what Corbin called imaginatio vera: a cognitive act, a genuine mode of knowing, as legitimate as sense perception or rational inference.

What the soul tends to do with this practice is instructive. The pneumatic pull — the desire to ascend, to reach the luminous cards, to identify with the World or the Star and leave the Tower behind — is almost universal. The practice becomes psychologically honest only when the practitioner can step into the difficult cards with the same willingness: into the Moon's disorientation, into the Ten of Swords' finality, into the Hanged Man's suspension. The image does not promise resolution. It offers presence. And presence, in the imaginal register, is already more than the soul's usual strategies of avoidance can provide.

  • mundus imaginalis — Corbin's concept of the intermediate imaginal world, the ontological ground for working with images
  • active imagination — Jung's method of sustained dialogue with autonomous psychic contents
  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology, who made imaginal restoration the aim of therapy
  • Robert Bosnak — portrait of the analyst who developed embodied imagination as a clinical and phenomenological method

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
  • Bosnak, Robert, 2007, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel
  • Nichols, Sallie, 1980, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
  • 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