The Jungian Tarot and Its Archetypal Imagery (Jungian Tarot Trilogy)
Robert Wang's scholarly work has been heralded by many Jungians as an exceptional and clear introduction to the complexities of Jungian philosophy. It also serves as a major contribution to the history of tarot.First published in 1988, The Jungian Tarot and Its Archetypal Imagery is intended to be a visual introduction to Jungian philosophy. The key is the archetypal image encountered through creative visualization or, as Jung called it, "active imagination." It is a process which may, theoretically, lead to discovery of a true Inner Self. Such creative visualization is at the heart of all mystical and religious systems, from those of the ancient world, to the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, to Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism, to Alchemy, and to the remarkably creative occult exercises of the nineteenth century.Those familiar with Dr. Wang’s earlier work, The Qabalistic Tarot, will be comfortable with his attribution of tarot cards to that central diagram, the Tree of Life. Wang considers this glyph to represent a hierarchy of archetypes and, indeed, a sort of road map of the collective unconscious. One of his main efforts in this exploration of Jungian philosophy is to demonstrate parallels between it and Hermetic Kabbalah, a system which has been essential to Western mysticism since the Italian Renaissance.Wang explores Jung's ideas about regressions from the personal into the collective and considers them to be commensurate with the Kabbalistic method of working backwards from the lowest level of the Tree of Life (the material condition), through the upper levels which symbolize not only the enlightened Self, but a condition of non-being which transcends all consciousness, personal or collective.This book also attempts to address a loose correlation of pantheons, under the file categories provided by tarot. It may be argued that ideas which emerge repeatedly across cultural boundaries lend credence to the postulate of archetypes which, in the minds of most people, is merely an interesting and remote theory. Wang is of the opinion that to rapidly skim across ancient concepts of, for example, a mother goddess, is to consider the various faces of the Mother archetype represented in tarot as The Empress. And, again, the main reason for making such a comparison is to determine if the "true" nature of an archetype is revealed by those areas where far-removed cultures have deities with similar qualities. In this regard, the earliest mythologies seem to be the most useful.Just as Carl Jung brought the overview of a scientist to the age-old question of man's potential for self-knowledge, Wang has used his background as an art historian to explore how Jung wanted to understand the nature of consciousness, and—ultimately—to solve the problem which so engaged the Greeks, the relationship between the one and the many.