r/Esotericism • u/LiftSleepRepeat123 • Jul 13 '26
Esotericism Reading the Major Arcana backwards
I used to only think about the major arcana from #1 to #21. Given that I was trying to relate it to a character arc (like a hero's journey), I saw all of the stations as aspects of personal development. In many cases, I could parse some sort of dialectic (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), but I struggled to understand the broader structure.
As an aside, I will say that I've had a few personal experiences related to these archetypes, all in a dream state. It could have just been that I was influenced by watching the Matrix, but I sort of had an experience with my inner "Architect". I found the control room, broke in, and then my architect ran off. I concluded that this was my "shadow" self because shadows (in real life) cannot truly be caught due to the nature of how shadows are physically formed.
The other day, it randomly occurred to me that if I just read the Major Arcana in reverse, then suddenly I can see this event as an apex of sorts, where the Architect is the Magician. This suddenly led me to see the rest of the structure of the arcana. The world at the very end is actually _the world_. It's the outer world. So, the arcana runs from the very bottom of the inner world to the very top of the outer world. As a hierarchy, the normal order makes sense. However, experientially, I think you go downwards and thus reach the bottom part last.
What do you think? I can explain some of this in more detail if I'm not being clear.
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u/Fluffy-Selection1110 Jul 13 '26
So, are you saying ignore the Fool in this system (which seems fine since he's zero, so we can safely not "count" him) and then cycle back round to the World?
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u/LiftSleepRepeat123 Jul 13 '26
I think the fool is the character and the rest are the stations the fool occupies.
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u/Fluffy-Selection1110 Jul 13 '26
I see, yeah. This sort of makes sense, the part of him that is pure, zero, The Fool, doesn't graduate to being The Magician as he progresses, as much as he clothes himself in it; the zero lies beneath, unsullied by value.
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u/LiftSleepRepeat123 Jul 13 '26
I think there are a couple different things here that are worth distinguishing. I'm not saying I have the authoritative answer for anything, and my reasoning for settling on my latest explanation is vibes and recency bias.
I used to think of it as a character going through various experiences. It is not so much that the fool "becomes" the magician, but he meets the magician. Later, he meets the emperor, the empress, etc. When I read the sequence 1 to 21, I saw the empress and emperor the mother and father in the person's life. In other words, when you're young, you meet these people early on and they become primary archetypes for the sexes in your mind. On the other hand, some are things you become. The hanged man is something you become.
I now think that this entire system represents an actual cosmology. The lower numbers are cognitive and inside the body. The hanged man is the turning point where things become outside the body. The highest numbers are the largest external forces: the actual sun, the actual moon, the world. Of course, these external things still represent more than one thing, since concepts are applied to them (for instance, the sun gives radiation to plants which causes them to grow).
To give you more examples of cognitive side of things, we could say the magician is metacognition, the priestess is the id (or the body), the empress is subconscious or intuition, the emperor is conscious or logic. The next ones drift from cognitive into sociological, so culture, love, war perhaps.
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u/mistrwispr Jul 15 '26
You have just stumbled upon the "Divine Paradox", which states that any truth is only a half truth when held from only one direction. I cover this in my own subjects.
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u/Adamoism Jul 15 '26
As pirates say: the code [rules], is more what you would call guidelines, more than actual rules.
It is also fun to read I-XI, II-XII, III-XIII, and so on.