Objective vs subjective tarot reading

The question sounds methodological — a matter of technique — but it carries something older underneath it: the soul's need to be met by something that is not itself. That is the real tension the tarot reader navigates, and the tradition has never fully resolved it.

The clearest statement of the problem comes from Pollack, who refuses to let "objective" mean what it usually means:

"The Tarot is objective because it bypasses conscious decision, but it is not impartial. On the contrary it attempts to push us in certain directions: optimism, spirituality, a belief in the necessity and value of change."

This is a precise and useful distinction. The objectivity of the tarot is procedural: the shuffle removes the ego's control over which cards appear. That removal is what allows synchronicity to operate — what Jung and Pauli identified as the acausal principle by which meaning emerges from random pattern. The cards are not impartial in the sense of being value-neutral; they carry a philosophy, a symbolic architecture built up over centuries. But they are objective in the sense that the ego did not choose them. The randomness is the point.

Hamaker-Zondag frames the same tension from the other side. When a reader reaches immediately for a book's fixed meanings, she is satisfying the conscious mind's demand for order — but at the cost of the unconscious's actual speech. The symbols in the cards, like the symbols in dreams, may have generally valid meanings recorded in the literature, but "each one who works with the tarot possesses a unique emotional make-up and has highly personal reactions." The general meaning is the floor, not the ceiling. A purely "objective" reading — one that simply applies codified interpretations — depersonalizes the encounter and forecloses what the image might be saying specifically to this soul in this moment.

Yet the opposite error is equally real. A reader who works entirely from felt response, trusting intuition without any grounding in the tradition's accumulated symbolic knowledge, is not accessing the unconscious — she is accessing her own subjectivity, which is precisely what the shuffle was meant to bypass. As Pollack puts it, "the subconscious gets in the way of the unconscious." Personal emotion, wish, and fear can masquerade as intuition. The reader who trusts feeling alone "can be led away from the truth as well as towards it."

What both writers are circling is the same problem Jungian dream work faces: the image arrives from somewhere that is not the ego, but it must be received by an ego capable of holding it without either collapsing into projection or retreating into mechanical interpretation. Hall describes this in the context of active imagination and dream amplification — the ego must take a stance toward the contents of the objective psyche, neither simply evoking them nor reducing them to personal association. The tarot reading is a version of this same requirement.

Jodorowsky pushes the question further by insisting that the cards themselves have no fixed meaning at all — they are what he calls "fluid symbols" rather than "arrested symbols." The arrested symbol says: this card means this, and only this. The fluid symbol remains generative, demanding that each reading reconstitute meaning through direct encounter. On this view, the very concept of an "objective" reading is a category error — an attempt to impose Aristotelian logic on a system whose power derives precisely from its resistance to single definition. The tarologist's level of consciousness determines the quality of the reading; the cards themselves "have no qualities."

This is where the tradition's internal disagreement becomes productive rather than merely confusing. Pollack and Hamaker-Zondag want to preserve the tradition's accumulated wisdom as a necessary counterweight to subjective drift. Jodorowsky wants to dissolve the tradition's authority entirely in favor of direct encounter with the living image. Neither position is simply wrong. The tradition's symbolic vocabulary is real and hard-won; it represents centuries of souls working with these images. But a vocabulary is not a sentence. The reader must still speak.

The practical resolution most depth-psychological readers arrive at is something like this: learn the traditional meanings thoroughly enough that they become second nature, then set them aside during the actual reading and let the image work. The knowledge remains available as a resource — a way of amplifying what the image presents — without becoming a script that forecloses what the image might be saying beyond its codified meaning. This is the balance Pollack describes as "the necessary combination of intuition and conscious knowledge," the left hand and the right hand working together.

What neither purely objective nor purely subjective reading can do is what the tarot is actually for: to bring the soul into contact with something it did not already know it knew.

  • synchronicity — Jung's principle of acausal meaningful coincidence, the theoretical ground for why divination works
  • active imagination — Jung's technique for dialoguing with unconscious contents, closely related to the interpretive stance required in tarot work
  • Rachel Pollack — portrait of the author of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
  • Karen Hamaker-Zondag — portrait of the Jungian astrologer and tarot practitioner

Sources Cited

  • Pollack, Rachel, 1980, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
  • Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, 1997, Tarot as a Way of Life
  • Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 2004, The Way of Tarot
  • Hall, James A., 1983, Jungian Dream Interpretation