–Mariana is one of my favorite tarot teachers. In this video she describes the overlap of Jungian psychology and tarot. Jung was essentially a mystic and this is something that makes his psychology very applicable to tarot. She talks about Jung’s knowledge of the tarot, though it was very little, there are a few quotes from him that she shares. He clearly saw divination as a real phenomenon, one he himself experienced within his own dreams. Jung thought the major arcana of the tarot were archetypal images and ideas that mingled with the flow of the unconscious, producing an intuitive method that allows us to understand life more deeply and see the present moment more clearly. Jung’s students, for example Marie-Louis von Franz, wrote extensively on divination and Mariana has taken their work and applied it to the archetypal tarot approach she teaches, and that I follow as well. In this approach we use divination to divine what is happening right now, rather than what might happen in the future. One of Jung’s ideas was that whatever exists inside us as unconscious material will project outward and we will label it as fate. Our internal state is mirrored in the external world. This means that what happens to us has meaning, and is not separate from the conditions of the psyche.
Mariana has a new book coming soon:
Louis, Mariana. 2026. Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche. Newburyport, MA: Weiser Books.
And another book about a Jungian approach to tarot is the following:
Gad, Irene. 2004. Tarot and Individuation: A Jungian Study of Correspondences with Cabala, Alchemy, and the Chakras. 2nd ed. Woodbury, MN: Nicolas-Hays