Author: danigirl

Tarot and Myers-Briggs Personality Indicators

Discovering my Myers-Briggs personality type back in 2010 or so rocked my world. I’d only vaguely heard about the MBTI before, and took the assessment as an exercise during a leadership course through work. Learning about my personality type and how it affects things like how I take in information and stimulus, how I interact with the world and others, and seeing it in the context of how it affects my behaviours, was a lightning bolt of insight that has had long-lasting effects for me. It was one of the first times I had a clear and deep insight into the mystery that is me, and I have used it to great success in understanding my relationships with others, and how their personality types govern their behaviours as well. Having grown so appreciative of knowing my MBTI, it was a shock of recognition to see the same deep understandings into my life possible through tarot cards.

Are you familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)? It’s rooted in Carl Jung’s theory of personality as expounded in his book Personality Types. Jung believed that we are governed by four primary cognitive functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Each of these manifests itself in one of two orientations, either extraverted or introverted, yielding a total of eight “dominant” functions. Elaborating upon Jung’s work in subsequent decades, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers refined the theory by adding two secondary personality types, “judging” and “perception”, which also take extra- or introverted forms. These two extra elements, in combination with the others previously mentioned, yield a possible of 16 personality “types,” each of which is represented by a four-letter abbreviation. (Source)

Myself, I am an ENFP, the most introverted of the extroverts. Reading the characteristics common to other ENFPs was a huge series of “aha!” moments for me. So many things about me crystallized into cognizance when I started looking into it: how I am happiest on my own in a crowd, how I think through any situation  by speaking to others about it, how I love to interact with other humans but find it exhausting, how I am driven to find connections and meaning in the chaos of human experience. (Hello, tarot cards!) So while I’m far from an MBTI expert, I certainly am grateful for the insight into my own personality that I’ve received through the lens of MBTI.

I’d only scratched the surface of learning about tarot when I started seeing the parallels between MBTI and tarot. Both are deeply connected to Jungian psychology, with ideas of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Both use an external tool to help you elicit, categorize, and make sense of patterns and behaviours that are already ingrained within you. Neither tells you something that isn’t already there. Both can be used to help you understand your own motivations from an objective perspective. Both are adored and reviled by opposing camps. 😉

The four suits of tarot are each representative of an element, and can be linked directly to the four Jungian primary functions of MBTI as follows:

Wands -> Fire -> Intuition

Cups -> Water -> Feeling

Swords -> Air -> Thinking

Pentacles -> Earth -> Sensation

Further, in tarot the “court” cards are the Page, Knight, Queen and King of each suit, and are often seen as representative of people or personalities in our lives (as opposed to the major arcana, which are archetypal experiences, and the minor arcana pip cards, which cover, in the words of Rachel Pollack, “aspects of life as people actually live it.”) So we have 16 court cards and 16 MBTI personality types, each combining various levels of the four primary functions / elements. While I see this as too much of a coincidence to be an accident, I am not quite proficient enough in either MBTI or tarot to ascribe a court card to each personality type, but this blogger seems to have taken a good run at it. I’m not sure I’m 100% on board with his interpretations, but I think I’ll need a little more experience in both tarot and MBTI to figure out how to ascribe the dominant and auxiliary functions correctly to more perfectly match up the court cards and personality types.

I definitely see myself doing more research into MBTI and tarot – there are just so many linkages. How about you? Are you a fan of MBTI or tarot or both, and have you noticed the strange congruence of personality types, suits, elements, and court cards? What has your experience been?

Taking a walk with the elements of the tarot

We’re still pretty much on isolation lockdown here and the weather has been cold and more like the end of winter than the beginning of spring. Today, though, the sun was shining and I took a long walk along my muse, the beautiful Rideau River. As I walked, I noticed how the elements of the tarot were all around me.

Of course, the flowing river is water, element of the suit of cups, and our link to intuition and emotion. It’s in the dewdrops on the leaves, and in me, too. The ground beneath my feet, still saturated with melted snow and smelling so deliciously of mud and springtime, is of course the solid, grounding element of earth. That earthly pentacles energy is also in the rocks, the trees, the greening grass and shrubs, and all the things we can touch and feel and hold.

The cool spring breeze ruffling my bangs back off my face is the air, element of the suit of swords; the same sweet air I breathe deeply as I stand at the edge of the river and sigh happily. And last but not surely not least is the element of the action-oriented wands: fire. I feel it on my face as I turn up to let the blazing sun imprint a few more freckles across the bridge of my nose. I feel that fiery energy, too, as I use the strong muscles of my legs and my core to climb up a small embankment. I feel that powerful life energy in the tiny buds on bare branches, biding time like the Hanged Man until the moment when they unfurl into the sunshine, heralding the end of a long winter and the arrival of summer at last.

I’m so grateful to the tarot for giving me this framework to appreciate the delicate balance of the elements of life’s energy all around me on a beautiful and exquisitely ordinary spring morning. I promise myself that I’ll remember this moment, this feeling of connecting to the elements of the universe, as I move through my day. I take with me the gift of mindfulness, and of gratitude for the fiery energy, the sweet-smelling air, the grounding earth and the endlessly flowing water, connecting me to the world, and to myself.

Tarot Reading: Advice for parenting a teenager

I gave a friend a tarot reading the other day, and thought I’d share it here. She’s got a teenage boy, and had asked for insight on how to balance a tough-love approach with giving him freedom to grow, especially as he struggles with peer pressure.

I asked the cards for insight into her relationship with her son, and some guidance on how to handle his need to grow and rebel versus her need to control and stay sane. I pulled three cards: The Empress, The Six of Wands, and the Emperor.

I laughed when I drew these cards because the Empress and Emperor are classic parental archetypes of mother and father energy. Hello Captain Obvious! Seriously, the cards are screaming DO YOUR JOB, this boy needs to be parented and hard. The Six of Wands is called Victory, and here is obviously the chaotic energy of a young person burning to be out on the path of their life. Together, the tableau says the seeker needs to exert traditional parenting energy to keep her son on the path, but it will end with great success.

The Empress is full of nurturing mother energy, and the Emperor is a no-nonsense but kindly sovereign who rules with benign but unmistakable control. His throne is made of stone – this is not a person who compromises. The Empress, on the other hand, is full of round, soft curves, draped on a comforting pillow. The Six of Wands, bursting with the fiery action-oriented energy of the wands, is bookended between them, saying the seeker and her husband really need to find the balance between the softer and firmer approach in dealing with his burning youthful energy. 

Wands are about action and motion, and they’re hard to contain. Their element is fire, which means they’re always on the go. Like fire, they can be beneficial when controlled and a disaster when out of control – just like a teenager. 😉 I think this card shows how he’s really feeling peer pressure as well – it’s like the crowd in the photo represent his friends and acquaintances, egging him on. That’s the force his parents need to control and mitigate between the Empress’s nurturing nature and the strictness of the Emperor’s rules.

In a traditional sense, we could read the mom as the Empress and the Emperor as dad, but I think in a more modern sense, both parents can be each card. Digging a little deeper, if you look at the colour of the background of the cards, you can see that both the Empress and the Emperor have reds and yellows in the background, contrasting the bright blue of the Six of Wands. The seeker needs to make sure she and her husband are standing together as a unified force, providing clear and firm boundaries and expectations, and providing a united front in showing what those limitations are.

To see two major arcana (the Empress and Emperor) in a three card reading is unusual, and the major arcana are usually indicative of significant crossroads or decision points in our lives. (The minor arcana are more like the quotidian scenes that make up our everyday experiences.) The overall message here is that the seeker needs to find that balance between control and nurturing in order to help their son along his path to being a successful adult.

Isn’t the tarot good at telling you what you already know? What do you think of this reading? Would you interpret anything differently?

If you’d like to request a reading for yourself, please see my “request a reading” page for details.

My fangirl moment over Rachel Pollack, tarot pioneer

I have been reading Rachel Pollack’s seminal tarot book, 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness. You don’t have to spend very long in the world of learning tarot before someone recommends this book to you. Written as two books (one each about the major and minor arcana) in 1980, it has been through many reprints and updates and since combined into a single tome. I’m half way through it, and have been happily marking up my copy with a pencil, adding underscores, asterisks and even exclamation marks as various insights and connections hit home for me. I seriously love this book.

I have an entire series of blog posts that I would like to write one day, riffing off how this book is blowing my mind. Today, however, on a completely separate front, my mind was blown by her again. For all the times I’ve heard her mentioned or seen her work cited, I never before today realized that she’s transgender. (A lot of the references seem to say transsexual, but as that’s a term that’s fairly anachronistic now, I’ll assume she’d be okay with the more modern term transgender.) Since one of my kids is non-binary and several of my friends are trans, I’m equal parts surprised and delighted that this seems to be a non-issue when people talk about Rachel Pollack. I genuinely hope that this is a sign of trans acceptance in the world.

After a little googling, I pieced together that Rachel, born in 1945, came out as trans to her partner and students (she was a teacher at SUNY) in 1970 at age 25, and had gender-confirming surgery six years later. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to be out as trans at that time, when even being out as gay was a difficult road. (One of my pet projects at work is as a Positive Space facilitator, teaching workshops on the acceptance of gender and sexual diversity in the workplace, so I have some insight into societal acceptance and tolerance when it comes to LGBTQ folks.)

As if being a tarot goddess, accomplished writer and lecturer, and a trans elder weren’t enough to make her an absolutely fascinating human, she’s also apparently well-appreciated as a science fiction author and comic book artist, too. She’s known for a DC Comics book called Doom Patrol, where she introduced a trans character named Coagula to the storyline.

But wait, there’s more! If that weren’t cool enough, I stumbled across the fact that through DC Comics, she created a Tarot deck called Vertigo with illustrator named Dave McKean, and my all-time favourite author Neil (swoon!) Gaiman wrote the introduction for the accompanying book. My mind is so blown right now I’m having trouble deciding which thread to pull next!

All that to say, I’m now a card-carrying fan girl for Rachel Pollack. In the not-too-distant future, I’ll get a more coherent post out about all the things I love about 78 Degrees of Wisdom. Have you read it? What did you think?

Five free online resources for learning tarot

There are a zillion sites on the interwebs for learning tarot, and I think I’ve probably visited more than half of them in the past few months. (There are so many, in fact, that it made me wonder if there was any reason to add my voice to the clamour. And yet, here we are!) I have found, though, that there are certain sites and certain voices that I’ve returned to again and again. Here then is my quite subjective lists of five sites whose voice and style resonated with me as I’ve walked down the path to learning tarot as a tool for reflection and mindfulness.

Biddy Tarot

The Biddy Tarot site has an amazing amount of free resources for learning tarot, if you don’t mind working your way around the rather constant pitches for her paid classes and courses. She has extensive card meanings, including descriptions, keywords, interpretations and reversals, plus a lot of general insight into the suits, the Fool’s Journey, spreads, and other aspects of tarot. I love Brigit Esselmont’s style and approach to tarot, and I find it deeply resonates with me. I liked the imagery on her card meaning pages so much that I bought my own copy of the Everyday Tarot mini deck. And if you like podcasts, she has more than a hundred of short podcasts on a lot of different aspects of tarot that I’ve found insightful and entertaining.

LearnTarot.com

The LearnTarot.com site is in many ways the opposite of Biddy Tarot, in that it was developed in the early days of the internet and looks like it hasn’t been updated in more than a decade. No flashy graphics, no sales pitches, but some really great fundamental information about tarot card meanings and interpretations. Don’t be put off by the charmingly anachronistic look of this site; it’s one of the most useful and comprehensive tarot sites I’ve come across, with a full and free online course in many aspects of tarot reading, including exercises you can work through to reinforce your learning. It takes a bit of work to find what you want on this site; click on “individual card descriptions” to get to the (stark) menu of card interpretations, but don’t overlook the wealth of other information available in the main menu.

Tarot Elements

This site is a rabbit hole of interesting occult tangents: elemental dignities, tarot card counting, correspondences, numerology and astrology. But, it also offers clear and concise keywords and summaries to help you understand the meaning of all the major and minor arcana. I particularly like the daily oracle interpretation she offers of each card, and what daily insight that card might offer. If you don’t own a tarot deck, you can get a free daily reading simply by clicking on a card back on her daily oracle page.

This Might Hurt tarot

This site is a little different from the others. Isabella Rotman is a graphic designer, comic book artist and tarot lover. I’m not even sure how I stumbled across her site, but from the moment I saw her cards, I felt an immediate frisson of connection. She recently designed a (gorgeous) modern, inclusive tarot deck that still retains links to the Rider-Waite-Smith system, and I absolutely love her card descriptions and interpretations. If it weren’t for the prohibitive and painful current exchange and shipping costs, I’d own this deck already. As it is, I have her card meanings bookmarked and refer to them often.

The Labyrinthos Academy app

Want to gamify your tarot learning? I found that once I’d started building a basic tarot vocabulary, the Labyrinthos Academy app for iPhone was quite handy in testing and reinforcing my understanding of basic card meanings. It’s a free app, and aside from flash-card like testing for keywords, you can use it for basic spreads and daily tarot card pulls. The blog section on the Labyrinthos site has some very interesting articles on a range of topics, from simple spreads to deep dives on topics such as Jungian archetypes and tarot history. My only complaint is that my old eyes sometimes find the cards a little hard to read on my relatively small iPhone screen. Sigh.

So, there you have it. Five of my favourite tarot places on the interwebs, when it comes to learning basic tarot card meanings for mindfulness and self-awareness. Do you have any resources to share? I’d love to hear if you have any favourite sites you find yourself visiting again and again.