Tarot and Archetypes: Why the Cards Don’t Need Jungian Terms to Be Jungian
- Rachel Oblak, LCMHC
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
I read Tarot for years before I studied Jung. So by the time I entered Jungian analytic training, I already knew the Empress. I knew the weight of her, the particular quality of her sovereignty, the way she could mean fertility in one reading and creative authority in another and a kind of sensual self-possession in a third. She was a figure I'd sat with. She wasn't a concept waiting to be named.
Which is probably why, early in my Jungian training, I felt something sink when I signed up for a one-day class on Tarot and archetypes and the instructor pointed to the Empress and said, "This is the Mother archetype." As the class went on and more cards got assigned more labels, I watched the Tarot I knew—alive, layered, multivalent—get flattened into a vocabulary list.
I've said before that a pregnant Empress is almost a deal-breaker for me when considering buying a Tarot deck. The Empress does carry something maternal at times. But to call her Mother is to meet someone and decide that the most important thing about her is one role she sometimes plays. It misses her. And once I'd studied enough Jung to understand what an archetype actually is, I realized the move was missing something on the other side too—it was shrinking the Mother as much as it was shrinking the Empress.
That experience shaped how I approach the intersection of Tarot and Jungian psychology in my own teaching. Jungian psychology and Tarot have a deep kinship. In fact Jungian psychology influences the Tarot zeitgeist more than people realize, even when they're not seeking a Jungian lens on the cards. But I've noticed that people who want a more deliberate psychological approach often reach for exactly what that class offered me—Jungian labels mapped onto the cards like a key: High Priestess equals Anima, Emperor equals Father, Sun equals Child, and so on.
The problem is that this kind of 1:1 mapping flattens both systems. It reduces Jung's archetypes to labels and strips the Tarot cards of the very complexity that makes them powerful. The good news is that you don't have to choose between Jungian depth and Tarot's own symbol system. Tarot is already archetypal—which means you can study it through a Jungian lens without betraying the language the cards already speak.
What Do We Actually Mean by “Archetype”?
I’ll start by saying that an archetype is an instinctive blueprint, but to talk about what that really means, I want to first dispel a few myths and talk about what an archetype is not.
1. An archetype is not a specific character or caricature. In literature, you might hear “archetype” used almost interchangeably with “trope,” but psychologically an archetype isn’t a specific, definable type of character. Rather, it’s an instinctual pattern that we never see directly. We only ever see a specific, limited expression of an archetype through the images, symbols, and motifs it produces, but the archetypes themselves are far bigger than any one of those. Jung differentiated them by talking about the archetype “as such” (the non-defined, potential energy) and the archetypal image (the particular expression of it).
For instance, the Madonna in Renaissance paintings is a particular expression (archetypal image) of a Mother. While Jung seemed to think Mother was itself the main archetype, I would go further and say that Mother is still imaged and can be broken down into even further instinctive energies such as gestation or nurturance (plus more)—energies we just happen to associate with a feminine parent.
No single archetypal image can hold all the complexity that comes with an archetype, which is why you can get so many diverse faces of them across stories: the Good Mother, the Devouring Mother, the Dead Mother, the Smothering Mother, and more.
2. An archetype is not an identity. Sometimes people try to identify which archetype they are, but anyone who is over-identified with a single archetype is probably locked into living out only certain aspects of their life to the neglect and detriment of other needs and instincts.
For my own understanding, I’ve found it helpful to think of the archetypes like a color wheel, with the instincts as the theorized primary colors which can be mixed and matched to get an array of hues. The “primary colors” are not specific people, but instinctive behaviors and patterns.
For instance, the Devouring Mother is a specific hue of Mother, but it isn’t unique to Mother. Tiamat is a devouring parent who happens to be a mother. Saturn is the devouring parent in the form of a father. Both get represented in nature in various species that will eat their offspring. It’s an example of how the instinct to procreate sometimes goes awry. If we were to use my example of the color palette, we might say that the devouring parent comes from blending the instinct to procreate/nurture with the instinct to nourish oneself with the instinct to destroy what feels threatening.
We could go on and continue to break down the “color” combinations for each type of image, but you get the gist.
It’s important to emphasize that Jung didn’t invent archetypes...he merely pioneered their inclusion in psychological theory. He identified the colors he saw in the materials he was studying, but he also wore his own tinted glasses from his time period—his cultural biases and limitations—which heavily influenced what he saw and how he interpreted it.
His particular perspective can be valuable, but insisting on his language is like approaching art history by first buying a beginner’s watercolor palette from Michael’s and then insisting that all art only contained those particular color combinations. Where a painting contained a lapis blue but our palette only had sky blue, we might find ourselves insisting that all blue was sky blue or that a purple we’d never seen before didn’t exist.
Symbol systems like Tarot, the I Ching, Astrology, and all the various mythologies are all their own particular color palettes, which is why when I’m working with or teaching Tarot, I don’t force Jung’s language onto the Tarot system by trying to rename the cards.
The Problem with Mapping Jung onto Tarot
Let me return to the Empress to show how this flattening works in practice. As I described, it's not untrue that she has elements associated with fertility and nurturance, but that's only one facet of her.
To reduce her to that one facet robs her of her other attributes connecting her to broader themes related to the Feminine that aren't about a parent-child relationship—such as her sovereignty and sensuality— and blocks someone from noticing where other cards express qualities of nurturance, comfort, or nourishment. To call her Mother is to shrink her.
One of the dream interpretation principles I’ve come to value is that images are not accidental. If the setting of a dream is a childhood home, that's not a random choice but a meaningful one. If we dream of our first-grade teacher, that's because that person is important to what the dream is trying to communicate. If we dream of a mother but it's not our personal mother, that too is saying something that isn't random. In the same vein, mothers existed at the time that Tarot was invented. If the card was meant to be Mother, it would be named “Mother.” Being named “Empress” carries an element that is intended, not accidental.
Additionally, because there are so many faces a mother image can wear that don’t easily follow from the Empress, we are then forced to look for the facets of the Mother that are left out, which could lead to mistakenly labeling another card as the Bad Mother or Devouring Mother in an attempt to flesh out the other side of the archetypal energy. This gets messy fast, fails to contend with the actual energies and instincts it’s meant to capture, and loses sight of the Tarot cards themselves.
Tarot doesn't need Jungian labels imposed on it because it already has its own symbolic vocabulary—one that predates Jung by centuries. Like many mythologies and fairytales, Tarot was first passed on through oral traditions that allowed it to gain collective depth and integrate influences from other mythological motifs, Catholic and Jewish mysticism, Astrology, Alchemy, and Gnosticism.
It is its own mythic system, preserved pictorially across centuries, with multivalent meanings that are expansive and responsive to context. That richness is partly why no single guidebook can capture all the nuance of the cards. Fluency in archetypal Tarot comes not from memorization but from the ability to understand the rich depth and layered complexity of the symbols throughout Tarot—how they connect to and reference other cards in the system and how they connect to and reference motifs beyond it.
Where Jung and Tarot Actually Meet
So if a Jungian approach to Tarot isn't about relabeling the cards, what is the real relationship between Jung and Tarot? It's the attitude. There are a number of Jungian assumptions that we can bring to Tarot that help us engage the cards more deeply.
1. What is coming up from our unconscious wants to be understood. This is a basic way in which Jung really differed from Freud in his attitude toward the unconscious. While Freud believed that dreams were cryptic because the unconscious was trying to hide a forbidden wish while also expressing it, Jung believed that the images we received were actually trying to be specific and understandable, but that there was a kind of communication breakdown between our conscious mind and our unconscious. Dream analysis, active imagination, and symbolic thinking are all ways we can attempt to bridge that gap. Jung’s approach to understanding symbols also applies to Tarot, and in turn, Tarot can inform our understanding of the images we receive in dreams and fantasies.
2. The opposites pull to be worked with and balanced. One area where Jungian theory and Tarot really overlap is in the way they approach duality. Both emphasize the importance of the opposites. For Tarot, this appears in the way that the masculine and feminine are represented throughout the cards—Emperor/Empress, King/Queen, Hierophant/High Priestess, Fool/World—as well as the ways that many cards emphasize working with the opposites, such as The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, or Justice.
Similarly, Jungian theory asserts that we carry the opposites within us, and whenever our conscious selves are over-identified with a one-sided position, it constellates the opposite in the unconscious and calls up a compensatory response from within. In many ways, the work of a lifetime is figuring out how to balance the polarities within us over and over again.
3. We are in a process of transformation. Both Tarot and Jungian psychology look to alchemy as a symbol for transformation. In volume 9 of his collected works, Jung even said that he believed the archetypal heart of Tarot was about transformation. I agree! That’s also what individuation is about. Like the Fool at the start of the Tarot, we all start off innocent and naïve and move through themes of loss, love, change, destruction, stagnancy, rebirth, imbalance, and balance multiple times throughout our lives, meeting the instincts, energies, and patterns that shape us along the way.
4. The eternal is not separate from the mundane. In Jungian analysis, everything a patient talks about becomes part of the image, which can be analyzed like a dream, even if we’re talking about something as boring as grocery shopping or a flat tire. When looked at in the right way, archetypal themes begin to emerge in even the most commonplace things.
Tarot works similarly: it can help us sit back and see when bigger energies are showing up in the day-to-day. One of my favorite parts about knowing Tarot beyond the dependency of memorization or looking cards up in a book is the way that a card will come to mind without my even drawing it simply because I can recognize that the current situation is speaking to the energies that card represents.
As you can see, the Jungian approach isn’t in the labels but in the way that symbolic thinking is used towards understanding life and the way images are engaged with as messengers from the unconscious.
Why This Matters for How You Read
By shifting away from the application of terminology and unburdening the cards from being stand-ins for theoretical concepts, you free yourself to see where the Jungian concepts can show up in any card depending on the context.
Shadow is no longer about a single card but about any card that expresses a quality or attribute you may have disowned or left undeveloped—something asking for integration. The archetypal energies in Tarot become visitors rather than fixed identities, alive and responsive to the moment rather than pinned to a chart.
And the readings themselves change! When you stop reaching for a predetermined label and start letting the image speak on its own terms, you make room for the card to say something you didn’t expect. That’s where the real insight lives—not in what you already know about the card, but in what your unconscious is trying to show you right now through the card.
This is exactly the approach I teach in my course, More Than a Fool’s Errand: Tarot’s Gateway to the Soul. Rather than overlaying a Jungian vocabulary list onto the cards, the course helps you learn Tarot’s own symbolic language so you can meet the cards on their terms—and let them meet you on yours.
Honoring Both Systems
The best way to honor both Tarot and Jung is to let each system do what it does without forcing one into the shape of the other. Jung gave us a way of thinking about symbols—an attitude of curiosity, depth, and respect for the unconscious. Tarot gives us a symbolic language with its own history, its own coherence, and its own depth. When you bring the Jungian attitude to the Tarot system rather than the Jungian vocabulary, you get something far more alive than any correspondence chart could offer.
Put away the beginner’s palette. The cards have their own colors. Let them show you.
