What Is Tarot, Really? A Jungian Perspective

The Smith-Waite Tarot deck that I feature in my Tarot Course

As a Jungian and depth psychotherapist and a long-time Tarotist, I spend a lot of time at the intersection of psychology and symbolism. There are many tools that can give voice to the collective and personal unconscious elements the reside within each of us, but Tarot is one of my favorites. It’s simultaneously systematic yet open-ended, personalized yet universal—not unlike our own psyches. But for those who aren’t already versed in its symbol system, it can seem hieroglyphic. Let’s demystify it a bit.

Tarot Vs. Oracle

At its most basic, Tarot is a style of card deck featuring a specific sequence and number of cards—78 in total. It’s actually the precursor to the modern playing card decks you might have grown up with. Yes, there's even a Tarot card game that you can learn to play. The earliest Tarot decks can be traced back to the 1400s in Italy, though the tradition may be even older than that.

People often confuse Tarot with Oracle decks, which also use art in a symbolic way. The distinction is actually quite simple. Just as sparkling wine can’t be called Champagne unless it’s made in the Champagne region of France, a deck of cards can’t be called Tarot unless it contains a specific sequence of cards corresponding to the Tarot symbol system.

And that symbol system is what makes Tarot so enduringly powerful. Across those 78 cards, Tarot depicts archetypes and universal aspects of the human experience—themes of love, struggle, transformation, loss, creativity, power, and renewal. Its continued relevance is evidenced by the fact that people have continuously found it resonant for centuries, despite dramatic shifts in culture, technology, and belief systems. When you understand the symbols and how they connect to the circumstances you’re facing, the cards can function as a mirror to your unconscious, helping you explore and make sense of the underlying instincts, choices, and broader life themes at play in your life.

Is Tarot Fortune-Telling? A Psychological View

As a rule, I don’t tell people what to believe, and that holds true with regard to whether you should believe in psychic abilities or not. That’s for you to figure out. However, there are psychological explanations for how Tarot works that don’t require a belief in anything esoteric.  

We are pattern-finding and meaning-making creatures. Given the opportunity, our brains will find shapes in clouds, hear songs in white noise, or see our family constellation in an ink blot. We tell ourselves stories all the time through dreams and fantasies, and we recognize ourselves in the stories we encounter in movies, books, or songs.

Tarot works the same way. When a reading feels like magical foresight, it’s because you’re recognizing something meaningful about yourself through the cards. The act of shuffling and selecting cards invites your unconscious to make links to relevant material within you. Each reading becomes a kind of projective adventure—no fortune-telling required.

Does Tarot Predict a Fixed Fate?

Not in the least. Tarot can help you identify underlying unconscious dynamics, larger archetypal themes or patterns, and a range of potential approaches to whatever life is throwing at you. But it cannot tell you exactly what will happen in the future. I think this remains true even if you want to argue that some sort of psychic talent is involved.

You’re not a tree rooted in place, just waiting for life to happen to you. You have agency. You have the ability to adjust your choices with more consciousness. And because so much depends on the choices you make in any given moment, nothing can predict exactly what will happen.

That said, I do think Tarot can help you wrestle with your destiny. Let me explain what I mean by that.

Fate vs. Destiny

Jung wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Sometimes we start out feeling like we’re living a “fate”—a fixed pattern we lack any sense of control over. Despite our best efforts, we find ourselves doing the things we swore we’d never do, re-encountering the same relationship patterns across multiple partners, or living our parents’ mistakes all over again. Often, that fate relates to something we’re unconsciously playing on repeat. While our conscious mind pushes in one direction, our unconscious is quietly railroading us toward something else.

Often, the things we struggle with and repeat are themes we’ll come back to over and over throughout our lives. They have an archetypal seed that’s important for us to develop within ourselves, but we have to work through and untangle the way it’s playing out destructively first.

By becoming more conscious of the rigid way we’ve been living these patterns, we can shatter that sense of fatedness and shift them in new directions. That process of wrestling with what’s unconscious and bringing it into the light often has a profound effect on our sense of who we are and what we’re meant to do in the world.

Photo by Narmin Aliyeva

A “destiny,” unlike fate, isn’t fixed or guaranteed. It refers to an inner sense of “this is where I’m intended to go” or “this is who I’m meant to become.” It connects with our sense of purpose and with self-actualization, consisting of a pull from deep within. Even those repeated patterns can be understood as attempts by something essential within us to reach consciousness. When it fails to break through, it tries again by guiding us back into the same situation. To reach our fullest potential, we have to work to get there. And to do that, we need to be in dialogue with our psyches.

Tarot provides a language for that conversation to happen, one where “fates” can be identified, made conscious, and transformed. That doesn’t mean it becomes all within our control. We are still subject to the whims of chance or the consequences of other’s actions, even our own limitations. But that tension between what we can control and what we can’t is part of what we have to wrestle with—and is one of the archetypal themes Tarot speaks to in its symbolism.

Is Tarot a Religion?

It’s not a religion or a belief system, and it doesn’t conflict with atheism or any particular spiritual belief.

Tarot is a little like mythology. You don’t have to literally believe in Greek deities to find resonant meaning in Psyche’s struggle to reunite with Eros or in Orpheus’ journey to retrieve Eurydice from the underworld. These myths endure not for their literal truth but for how they address archetypal themes we all struggle with—love, suffering, death, creativity. Tarot works similarly, but with a notable added dimension: its capacity to blend these themes in ways that create new and personalized narratives, unique to you and the moment you’re in.

Rather than functioning as a religion, Tarot serves as a tool for narrative exploration. It offers an opportunity to reflect on your experiences from alternative perspectives and to engage with the deeper currents running through your life from the collective unconscious.

A Tool for Going Deeper

Across the many domains of my professional practice, I am focused on increasing the autonomy of the people I work with by helping them access deeper self-knowledge and personal insight. I created my Tarot course “More Than a Fool’s Errand: Tarot’s Gateway to the Soul” with the goal of empowering people to learn the symbolic vocabulary of the cards and use it to unlock the powerful stores of wisdom they carry within.

I hope this post helps to dispel some of the myths and answer some of the questions that you might have on a Jungian psychological approach to Tarot. If you’re curious to learn more, my next post covers practical tips for how to study and deepen your connection with Tarot on your own, including ways to let the cards come alive beyond what any guidebook can teach you.