Tarot cards operate at the intersection of symbolism, psychology, and intuition. At their most fundamental level, they are a tool for reflection, a structured system of imagery
designed to prompt deeper thinking about a situation, relationship, or question. Whether one approaches tarot from a spiritual perspective or a purely psychological one, the
mechanics of how a reading works remain broadly the same.
A standard tarot deck contains 78 cards, divided into the 22 cards of the Major Arcana and the 56 cards of the Minor Arcana. Each card carries a distinct image loaded with symbolic content, figures, animals, landscapes, celestial bodies, and objects that have accumulated layers of meaning across centuries of esoteric tradition. Before a reading, the reader typically shuffles the deck Whilst concentrating on a question or area of focus, then lays a selection of cards in a predetermined pattern called a spread. Each position within the spread holds a specific meaning, past influences, present circumstances, hidden factors, likely outcomes, and the card that falls in each position is interpreted in relation to that positional meaning.
The interpretation itself draws on several layers. The card's traditional symbolic meaning forms the foundation. Its imagery, colour, posture, direction of gaze, objects present, adds texture. Whether the card appears upright or reversed (upside down) can shift or deepen its meaning significantly, with reversed cards often indicating blocked energy, internalised themes, or complications. Finally, the relationships between cards within the spread are considered, as cards rarely speak in isolation; they converse with one another, creating a narrative.
Practitioners often disagree about precisely why tarot works. Those with a spiritual or metaphysical orientation often believe the cards connect the reader to higher guidance, the subconscious mind, or universal energies, that the shuffle is not random but meaningful. From a psychological standpoint, Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity is frequently invoked: the idea that the cards appearing in a reading are meaningfully connected to the querent's inner state, not through cause and effect, but through a deeper correspondence between outer events and inner experience. Jung himself was deeply interested in tarot imagery, seeing in it a map of universal archetypes present in the collective unconscious.
Others approach tarot in a more grounded way, treating it as a sophisticated projective tool, similar in function to a Rorschach test. The cards provide a set of images rich enough that the human mind naturally projects its own concerns, fears, and desires onto them. In doing so, thoughts and feelings that might otherwise remain unexamined are surfaced and made available for reflection. From this perspective, tarot works not because the cards are magical, but because structured symbolic reflection is itself a powerful cognitive and emotional process.
The role of the reader is central to how tarot functions in practice. An experienced reader brings knowledge of the cards' traditional meanings, sensitivity to the querent's situation, and the interpretive skill to weave individual card meanings into a coherent and useful narrative. Readings are rarely about rigid prediction; they are more accurately described as an exploration of possibilities, tendencies, and underlying dynamics.
In this sense, tarot functions less as a fortune-telling device and more as a conversation, between the cards and the reader, between the reader and the querent, and between the querent and their own inner world. The cards hold up a mirror, and what a person sees in that mirror is shaped as much by what they bring to the reading as by what is printed on the card itself.
More of this approach and understanding can be found in the work of Carl Jung and other Jungian psychologists
The relationship between Jungian psychology and tarot is genuine, intellectually rich, and perhaps closer than many people realise, though it is important to distinguish between
what Carl Jung himself said and did, and how his ideas have been applied to tarot by later practitioners and theorists.
Carl Jung did not write extensively about tarot, and he never developed a formal system connecting his psychology to the cards. However, he was aware of tarot and referenced it in his work. In his 1933 seminar on the psychology of Kundalini yoga, Jung mentioned tarot cards as one example of how the unconscious expresses itself through symbolic imagery. He viewed the cards as a set of archetypes rendered in pictorial form, a visual vocabulary drawn from the deeper layers of the human psyche.
Jung was also deeply interested in divination systems more broadly. He wrote the foreword to the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, engaging seriously with the idea that a structured symbolic system could reveal meaningful patterns in a person's inner life. His concept of synchronicity, the theory that events can be meaningfully connected without being causally linked, provided a theoretical framework within which tarot could be understood without requiring supernatural explanation. A card appearing in a reading, from a Jungian perspective, is not magically chosen; it is meaningfully chosen, reflecting an unconscious correspondence between the querent's inner state and the outer event of the card's appearance.
The most obvious and compelling point of connection between Jungian psychology and tarot lies in the Major Arcana. Jung proposed that the human psyche shares a layer he called the collective unconscious, a deep reservoir of inherited psychological patterns and images common to all people across all cultures. These patterns he called archetypes: universal figures and themes that appear spontaneously in dreams, myth, religion, and art regardless of cultural origin.
The 22 cards of the Major Arcana map onto Jungian archetypes with striking coherence. The Fool represents the Self at the beginning of the individuation journey, open, unformed, and full of potential. The High Priestess embodies the Anima, the feminine principle in the male psyche. The Emperor and Empress reflect the archetypal Father and Mother. The Devil card corresponds closely to Jung's concept of the Shadow, the repository of repressed desires, fears, and aspects of the self that the conscious mind refuses to acknowledge. The Tower reflects psychic rupture and the painful but necessary collapse of false structures. The World suggests the completion of individuation, the integrated, whole Self.
Jung described the process of individuation as the lifelong journey toward psychological wholeness, in which a person gradually becomes aware of and integrates the various parts of their unconscious, the Shadow, the Anima or Animus, the Persona, and ultimately the Self. Many Jungian-influenced tarot practitioners read the sequence of the Major Arcana as a map of precisely this journey, sometimes called The Fool's Journey, a narrative arc moving from innocent beginnings through trials, temptations, and transformations toward integration and completion.
From a strictly clinical Jungian perspective, tarot functions most usefully as what psychologists call a projective tool, an ambiguous stimulus onto which the psyche projects its own contents. In this respect it functions similarly to the Rorschach inkblot test. The rich, symbolically dense imagery of tarot cards invites the viewer to find meaning, and what they find reveals something real about their inner world.
Several Jungian analysts and psychotherapists have incorporated tarot into their practice on precisely this basis, not as fortune-telling, but as a way of opening up material from the unconscious that might be difficult to access through direct conversation alone. A client drawing a card and responding to its imagery spontaneously may surface associations, fears, or desires that structured talk therapy had not yet reached.
The most significant figure in developing a formal Jungian approach to tarot is Sallie Nichols, whose 1980 book Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey remains a landmark text. Nichols systematically analysed the Major Arcana through a Jungian lens, exploring each card as an expression of archetypal energy and tracing its psychological significance with both scholarly rigour and genuine depth. The book is still widely read and recommended by both tarot practitioners and those interested in analytical psychology.
Robert Wang and Angeles Arrien similarly explored the connections between Jungian concepts and tarot imagery, and the broader field of transpersonal psychology has continued to develop frameworks in which tarot sits comfortably alongside dreamwork, active imagination, and other depth psychological practices.
It is worth noting that mainstream academic and clinical psychology does not formally endorse tarot as a therapeutic tool, and most practising Jungian analysts would use it cautiously if at all. The connection between Jungian thought and tarot is most alive in the overlap between depth psychology and spirituality, a space occupied by many thoughtful practitioners, but one that sits at some distance from institutional psychology.
Nevertheless, the intellectual kinship is real and substantive. Jungian psychology offers tarot one of its most coherent and respectable theoretical foundations, and tarot offers Jungian ideas a vivid, accessible, and surprisingly sophisticated symbolic language in return.
Tarot and numerology are two of the oldest tools in the Western esoteric tradition, and their connection is neither accidental nor superficial. Numbers are woven into the very
structure of the tarot deck, and understanding numerology unlocks a layer of meaning in readings that pure card-by-card memorisation cannot provide. For many practitioners,
numerology is not an optional add-on to tarot study, it is one of its foundational languages.
The tarot's relationship with number begins with its structure. The deck contains 78 cards in total, a number that is itself numerologically significant, reducing to 15 and then to 6, the number associated with harmony, responsibility, and balance. The Major Arcana consists of 22 cards, numbered 0 through 21. The Minor Arcana contains 56 cards divided across four suits, each running from Ace (1) through 10, plus four court cards. This architecture is not arbitrary. The numerical sequencing of both the Major and Minor Arcana carries deliberate meaning, and reading that meaning requires an understanding of what each number symbolically represents.
In numerology, the numbers 1 through 9 each carry a distinct vibrational quality, with 10 representing completion and the return to a new cycle of 1. This sequence plays out identically across all four suits of the Minor Arcana, meaning that the Four Aces share a common numerological theme, as do the Fours, the Sevens, and so on, regardless of which suit they belong to. This creates a powerful cross-suit framework for interpretation.
One (the Ace) represents beginnings, raw potential, and undivided energy, the seed of everything that follows. Two governs duality, balance, and the tension between opposing forces. Three signifies growth, creativity, and the first flowering of an idea into form. Four brings stability, structure, and consolidation, the solid foundation. Five introduces conflict, instability, and challenge, the disruption that prevents stagnation. Six represents harmony, resolution, and a return to equilibrium after the turbulence of five. Seven is the number of reflection, inner work, and reassessment, a pausing to take stock. Eight carries themes of mastery, momentum, and the exercise of power or skill. Nine represents the near-completion of a cycle, fulfilment, but also the complexity that comes just before an ending. Ten is both completion and the threshold of a new beginning, often carrying a sense of culmination that can feel like either triumph or excess.
The Major Arcana's relationship with numerology is equally rich. Each of the 22 trump cards carries a number from 0 to 21, and these numbers deepen the cards' meanings considerably. The Magician is numbered 1, the initiating force, the point at which potential becomes action. The High Priestess is 2, duality, mystery, and the unconscious. The Empress is 3, abundance, creativity, and fertile growth. The Emperor is 4, authority, structure, and order.
For cards numbered above 9, numerology applies the practice of reduction, adding the digits together to find a root number. The Wheel of Fortune, numbered 10, reduces to 1, a new cycle turning. Justice at 11 reduces to 2, reflecting the balance and duality at its core. The World, numbered 21, reduces to 3, a culmination of creative expression and integrated wholeness.
The number 0, assigned to The Fool, holds special significance. In numerology, zero represents infinite potential, the void before manifestation, and the state of pure possibility, a perfect expression of the Fool's nature as the soul before its journey begins.
The formal integration of numerology into tarot was largely codified by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 19th century. The Golden Dawn drew on Kabbalistic tradition,
particularly the Tree of Life, a diagram of ten emanations called the Sephiroth, each associated with a number and a set of qualities. The ten pip cards of each Minor Arcana suit were
mapped directly onto the ten Sephiroth, giving each card a precise position within a vast cosmological system. This Kabbalistic numerological framework remains the foundation of most
serious esoteric tarot study today.
For the working tarot reader, numerology offers an invaluable shorthand. When several cards of the same number appear in a spread, multiple Threes, for instance, it signals that the theme of that number is especially active in the querent's situation. A spread dominated by high numbers suggests cycles nearing completion; one filled with low numbers points to fresh beginnings and early-stage energies. Numerology transforms individual card meanings into a coherent symbolic grammar, giving readings greater depth, consistency, and interpretive power.
The Boston Tarot is the website of Dr. Elliot Voss, an internationally renowned astrologer/astrologist who has been studying the heavens, tarot, and numerology for over forty years.
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