Tarot and the question of symbolism
Posted on April 14, 2020 by Jinpa Smith, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Symbols help us to work with stories. I also use tarot cards in my practice, which clients find useful to access unheard parts of themselves.
I love reading about the origins of tarot. I am by no means an expert and I am certainly not a historian. But I always wonder about the overlap between historical knowledge, intuition and what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’ – the idea that there are universal archetypal structures in the unconscious mind we all share. Over the last few years, I have been more and more drawn to what is called an ‘open reading’. in tarot. This means that we rely less on fixed or inherited meanings when we read, and more on the patterns or stories that present themselves.
How much do we include our knowledge of colour symbolism, for example, when red means passion or danger to a westerner, and luck and happiness to someone in China? How do we decide whether to lay a framework of our collective understanding of symbolism onto a card, or to react to it in the moment, and in relation to other cards? And can we even do that freely?
We can ask ourselves the same questions in coaching – when the language a client uses reveals metaphors or symbols that reveal a hidden story, an unspoken voice. Some people talk in the language of journeys, others in food and still others in the cycles of nature. Does the collective agreement about their language matter, or is the symbol so intertwined with the way they experience the world that we can approach it fresh?
