Tarot and the Collective Unconscious

The latest episode of The Side Woo with host of the Tarot Diagnosis podcast Shannon Knight, MSd

This past week on The Side Woo, I spoke with the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Shannon Knight of The Tarot Diagnosis. Shannon is a Johns Hopkins-trained psychotherapist with a love for tarot. As I discovered after listening to her podcast that’s not the only thing we have in common.

In our conversation, we talk about why a universal reading, like the ones she does in her podcast, can resonate with so many people at once.  Why does it sometimes feel like we are all going through the same thing?

It’s something that I’ve experienced doing tarot and mediumships readings, and have heard about from therapists where there’s a match between practitioner and client where both parties are going through some iteration of the same problem. But in addition to that, Shannon says there are often themes in any given week around what issues are coming up for her patients. This often helps decide what to do an episode about.

Is that because of astrology or what, I wonder. Regardless of why, it’s something I have noticed as well just from paying attention to podcasts like Shannon’s, and is in fact what made me want to talk about this topic with her in the first place. What happened is for a few months before I reached out, the card readings that she and her former co-host Luna covered each week so closely mirrored my own challenges at the time that I was kind of gobsmacked - and even wrote this post about the idea, although wasn’t ready to mention her yet because we hadn’t recorded our episode.

In case you think I’m projecting or being dramatic, the themes of The Tarot Diagnosis so closely aligned with my own experiences that in the same week, both Shannon and I became solo podcast hosts - albeit for very different reasons. And so I contacted Shannon after she posted this episode about her experience.

This commonality or for a lack of a better term, healing themes, made me think about the role of therapists, healers, and creators who work in healing modalities, and how we might act as a channel for experiences that ultimately serve a greater good. In other words, we have to go through the thing before we can help others with their problems. Or even that we are going through it because we are meant to help people.

I don’t want to glamorize or gloss over suffering. And I don’t want to believe that we have to suffer in order to serve others, but this idea makes me feel like there might be some rhyme and reason to what would otherwise be a chaotic world of meaningless pain. (yikes)

It’s my theory that tarot works so well at helping us through our challenges because tarot itself has been created as a representation of the collective unconscious from which we pull our universal knowledge and understanding of life. This Jungian concept, which ultimately describes the way that our brains have evolved to see patterns, obviously hadn’t been created yet in the 1500s when tarot imagery was first invented, or even in the 1800s when tarot began to be used in divination.

But Rachel Pollack, author of 78 Degrees of Wisdom, makes a compelling case for the connection between the two. According to Pollack, the 22 major arcana cards (The Fool through The World) are Jungian archetypes, or personas, that we embody at different times in our lives on our way through the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is a narrative arc found in ancient myths and articulated by Joseph Campbell in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces. Coming full circle to Jung, Campbell says that these narratives evolved from the collective unconscious as a way to help us mortals make sense of our trials and tribulations as soon as we could tell a story around a campfire.

By connecting the progression of tarot cards to this common mythological structure, Pollack was able to position the cards as tools of the universal human experiences that transcend race, religion, and class, and fit naturally into Jungian psychology- which is why I think it’s so brilliant that The Tarot Diagnosis explicitly connects the two.

Side note: I will say the original cards were unfortunately very Eurocentric and heteronormative (except for The World card which features a fully enlightened, intersex person on it), but there are a lot of alternative decks out there now.

For those looking to geek out on this intersection of ideas, I created a crash course on Tarot and the Hero’s Journey. In it, we follow each of the 22 major arcana cards through the beats of Campbell’s narrative arc. It helps to have that big-picture understanding in addition to knowing the meaning of each card for a more in-depth reading. The class is available for purchase on The Side Woo website. I’m also open to doing another live class if I get enough people interested.

I love tarot as a tool for personal growth and a mirror for the human experience. I hope to write more about it in the coming months as I start working on my own tarot deck.

Do you get into tarot? How do you find yourself using it and when?

Some art happenings:

• I have two pieces in the inaugural show at Personal Space in Vallejo, CA. Check it out!

• I am part of a group show at The Pit Palm Springs called Moving Mountains with artists Laura Berger, Rosson Crow, Annie Hémond Hotte, Max Jansons, and me. The show closes this weekend but can be checked out online.

• I am in an upcoming exhibition Vantage at Good Mother Gallery in Los Angeles, opening September 2nd to kick off the start of a new art season. Come say hi if you are around!