REAL-TIME POSITIONING VS. MAP DATABASE

BEING FOUND

As suggested in the Quick Start guide, people’s usual interaction with Tarot is to bring it questions, in search of answers. 

In this respect, Tarot is just like Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze (or whatever GPS navigation system you use) in showing us where we are and suggesting where to go next. You ask a regular GPS system how to get to the grocery story, and it tells you. Similarly, Tarot will show you your current location, suggest possible routes, update you when you move, and recalculate when you go off course. 

Call this Tarot’s “real-time positioning” function.

Tarot is a spiritual GPS that finds you.

This is a very helpful image to keep in mind because most everyone knows about GPS systems, and it’s an easy way to explain what Tarot does and why people value it. Tarot empowers us to see ourselves and our situation with greater clarity, compassion, and creativity—so our choices can be better informed. 

It’s also helpful because it implies a very important point: you are always in the driver’s seat and what you end up choosing is ultimately your responsibility. Have you ever heard stories where individuals blindly followed their GPS directions into dangerous or disastrous situations, even when their own eyes and common sense suggested otherwise? In 2012, for example, three Japanese tourists visiting Australia drove their rental car onto a boat ramp and into Moreton Bay, which their GPS mistakenly identified as a road. They were forced to abandon the vehicle and swim to shore as the car became submerged. 

Incidents like these are so frequent they have been nicknamed “death by GPS” in some circles.

Make a bad choice—hurt yourself or someone else—and it’s never an acceptable excuse to say, “But Tarot made me do it.” 

We are wise fools in wanting answers, but that wisdom becomes genuine foolishness if we become slaves to whatever Tarot says, or we never do anything unless and until we first consult Tarot. 

I readily admit that there was a phase in my relationship with Tarot when I fell for this. I would consult the cards for everything. Whether I should wear that red tie or this blue one. Matters large and small. What I discovered is that the cards stopped speaking to me. My spiritual GPS system stopped working. I realized that Tarot works best when consulted only when absolutely necessary, for the big issues. 

If you ever encounter a Tarot reader who tries to groom you into a codependent relationship with the cards–-so that you don’t do anything unless you first get your cards read—run! Run away! That Tarot reader has violated Tarot ethics. They should be charged for malpractice. 

THE MAP OF THE HUMAN JOURNEY

Beyond this, there is a third and last reason for why the “Tarot as spiritual GPS” image is important: It brings up the point that real-time positioning requires an up-to-date, complete, and accurate reference map. Tarot can’t help people discover where they are if the map of the human journey it’s drawing on is somehow inadequate. Think again of those poor Japanese tourists, whose GPS system mistook a body of water for a road!

The rest of this chapter introduces Tarot’s map of the human journey. How it is complete. How it is reliable. 

MINOR ARCANA OVERVIEW

DAILY-LIFE PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE

Tarot’s map of the human journey comes in two interlocking parts, and the first part is called the Minor Arcana.

• 56 cards in total
• 40 numbered Pip cards, in 4 Suits
• 16 Court cards, in the same 4 Suits

The Minor Arcana essentially maps out the various daily-life circumstances we happen to find ourselves in: situations, relationships, conflicts, opportunities, setbacks, emotions and reactions, choices and consequences.  

It maps out the motions we are going through day by day: the patterns of love, labor, longing, struggle, and change that we find ourselves caught up in. 

THE FOUR SUITS

Tarot’s map of ordinary, everyday experience is organized into four Suits: Pentacles, Wands, Cups, and Swords.

Each Suit names a basic condition of human life—and the kind of skillful response that condition requires. We live as embodied beings in time. We are shaped by biology and history, by temperament and circumstance, by family systems and cultural expectations. How we love, struggle, work, and dream grows from this shared human situation.

Together, the four Suits mirror four recurring tensions that every person must learn to navigate:

lack and replenishment
potential and actualization
isolation and connection
vulnerability and integrity

Pentacles

Pentacles speak to embodied life and its ongoing needs. To live as physical beings is to face rhythms of depletion and renewal:

Hunger calls for nourishment.
Thirst calls for refreshment.
Fatigue calls for rest.
Illness calls for care and healing.
Desire calls for intimacy, satisfaction, and release.
Money is spent and resources dwindle, so they must be earned and restored.
Homes, tools, and systems wear down, break, run out, or are lost—so they must be maintained, repaired, or replaced.

Notice the pattern: our physical and material needs are never solved once and for all. Appetites are satisfied for a time, but hunger returns. Bank accounts fill and empty. Roofs leak. Bodies age. Because resources continually diminish or change, a rhythm of lack and replenishment undergirds being alive.

Pentacles, then, are the Suit of physical well-being in a world of finite resources—and of the steady work required to meet those needs with stewardship, effort, and care.

Wands

Wands speak to the inner propulsion of human life: the drive to grow, to express, to risk, to create, to become.

We are born with potentials that want to become real. They are not identical to physical appetites, but they can be just as insistent. This aspirational current includes:

basic vitality and forward-leaning energy
restlessness that reaches toward “something more,” even before it can be named
curiosity and interest that hint at developing abilities
images and ideas that surface as daydreams, sketches, or sudden intuitions
a hunger for challenge, risk, and adventure
the desire to strive, excel, and achieve

When these aspirations are blocked, scattered, ignored, or chronically delayed, they rarely remain neutral. Untapped potential often turns inward as frustration, bitterness, cynicism, envy, burnout, or self-doubt. There is a kind of moral pressure in being alive: what is within us wants expression.

Wands, then, are the Suit of aspiration—of the spark that wants to become flame—and of the discipline required to bring latent potential into living form.

Cups

Cups speak to relational life: the truth that we do not become whole in isolation.

A newborn cannot survive without nurture. An infant deprived of touch fails to thrive. Adults who live with chronic loneliness show measurable strain in body and mind. And while each generation may wrestle hard-earned wisdom from suffering, it cannot simply hand that wisdom to the next like an heirloom. We must re-learn old truths in our own bloodstream.

In short: we come into the world still-forming. We require resources beyond ourselves—especially other people—in order to become ourselves.

Cups name the longings and necessities that shape that relational becoming:

nurture and care
touch and intimate closeness
bonding and secure attachment
friendship and affection
community and belonging
meaning and purpose larger than one’s own life

Needing these things is not a defect. It is part of what it means to be human. Without them, the self drifts, dulls, fragments, or closes down. With them, the self learns trust, delight, grief, forgiveness, and the capacity to love without disappearing.

Cups, then, are the Suit of relational longing and fulfillment—the heart’s search for resonance, intimacy, belonging, and meaning.

Swords

Swords speak to the reality of risk: to be human is to be vulnerable.

We have bodies that can be injured, hearts that can be broken, and hopes that can be shattered. Because harm is possible, we are shaped to notice threat—reading cues, scanning for danger, and mobilizing survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Swords name what happens when truth meets risk. The moment we name what is real—what we need, what we fear, what we will no longer tolerate—we enter a world where conflict, loss, betrayal, and grief are possible. Yet this same realm is also where we develop clarity, boundaries, courage, and resilience.

To live with integrity in a world where harm exists is to practice the Swords rhythm of danger and response:

Fear calls for discernment.
Conflict calls for courage and clear speech.
Betrayal calls for boundaries and wiser trust.
Loss calls for grief—and the strength to keep loving.
Injustice calls for accountability and moral clarity.
Confusion calls for honest thinking and grounded perception.
Injury calls for repair, learning, and resilience.

Swords, then, are the Suit of preserving integrity in the face of danger: perceiving threats clearly, responding wisely, and transforming pain into clarity, healing, and strength.

A Final Note On The Four Suits

Notice how each Suit is framed as a human condition paired with a skillful response:

Pentacles: lack and replenishment
Wands: potential and actualization
Cups: isolation and connection
Swords: vulnerability and integrity

THE COURT CARDS

Through the four Suits, Tarot’s map can locate you in ordinary life: material reality (Pentacles), desire and creativity (Wands), relationship and meaning (Cups), and truth under pressure (Swords). Each Suit contains fourteen cards: Ace through Ten, plus four Court cards.

The numbered cards (the “Pips”) often describe what is in play—what energies are rising, what needs are pressing, what dynamics are unfolding. But no one lives these energies in the abstract. People show up bringing themselves: their temperament, their history, their fears, their hopes, their habits of coping, their way of using power.

Sometimes those “people” are literal: caregivers, friends, teachers, colleagues, partners, teams, communities.

Sometimes they are internal: the parts of you that speak with different voices and different logics—the responsible part, the anxious part, the defiant part, the tender part, the part that wants to flee, the part that wants to fix. Even in solitude, you carry an inner community.

That is what the Court cards add to Tarot’s map. They speak less about what is happening and more about who is showing up—and how.

Tarot imagines this through two dimensions at once:

Suit as motivation
Rank as developmental mode

Suit as Motivation

In the Court cards, Suit represents what is driving a person—or an inner aspect of the self—toward action. The outward situation may look the same, but the inner engine can be completely different.

Consider a career change. The external move might be identical—a new job, a new field, a new schedule—but the motive underneath it can vary radically. The Suit helps answer the diagnostic question:

What is this move really in service of?

When Pentacles is the motivation, the impulse is practical and material.
Stability is the aim: better pay, steadier hours, long-term security.
Benefits matter: healthcare, retirement, predictable time off, sustainable workload.
Tangible results matter: building something reliable that rewards steady effort over time.

When Wands is the motivation, the impulse is creative and forward-moving.
The ache of unrealized potential is the driver: room to grow, build, lead, invent.
Momentum is the aim: challenge, novelty, autonomy, the thrill of possibility.
Impact matters: ideas taking form, visible creation, the feeling of being alive in one’s work.

When Cups is the motivation, the impulse is relational and values-aligned.
Meaning is the driver: work that feels humane and true to who one is.
Culture matters: respect, belonging, emotional safety, collaboration.
Fulfillment matters: work that nourishes the heart, strengthens community, and leaves the person more whole.

When Swords is the motivation, the impulse is integrity under pressure.
Harm may be the trigger: toxicity, chronic burnout, ethical compromise, the slow loss of self-respect.
Truth is the driver: naming what is real—this is not working; this is costing me.
Clarity matters: clean boundaries, honest speech, and work that allows one to stand for what genuinely matters.

Same outward change. Different inner engine.

Rank as Level of Development

From motivation, turn to developmental mode: Page, Knight, King, Queen.

Many Tarot traditions treat the King and Queen as “adulthood” and leave it at that. But our lives do not end at adulthood. Experience ripens. Perspective deepens. Memory and integration become distinctive capacities. In this framework, Queen follows King to restore what modern culture often forgets: elderhood as a real stage of human development.

These ranks are not labels of worth. They are modes of agency—ways a person (or an inner part of the self) shows up. A single individual can move through several modes in the same week—or the same day.

Have you ever been deep in responsible mode—focused, task-driven, “adulting”—and someone suddenly puts their phone in your face to show you the funniest cat video? In an instant, seriousness gives way to another part of you: playful, impulsive, delighted.

Welcome to your inner King and your inner Page.

After a moment of indulgence, the King part of you tends to return: back to it. Time is tight. The deadline is coming. The King may even chide the Page for distracting him.

Pages and Kings reflect different orientations to life because they symbolize different developmental modes, each with its own core question.

Page — How does the world work?
Knight — Who am I becoming?
King — What am I responsible for?
Queen — What truly matters now?

Now revisit the career-change example. Once you know which Suit is driving the desire for change, Rank shows how the person—or inner part—is approaching the moment.

Pages: The Mode of Discovery

The Page approaches career as exploration. They are learning what “work” even is—sampling possibilities, trying on roles, discovering what evokes enthusiasm or boredom. Their guiding question is: How does the world work?

Pages follow curiosity down surprising paths. They take internships, switch majors, start entry-level jobs, shadow mentors, and learn by trial and error. Their gift is openness and a willingness to learn.

Their shadow is drifting: staying in experimentation so long that commitment never arrives. At its best, this mode forms something priceless—a budding sense of direction.

Knights: The Mode of Commitment

The Knight approaches career as a quest. Having found something to believe in—or at least something worth pursuing—they throw themselves into it with zeal, ambition, and energy. Their guiding question is: Who am I becoming?

Knights take risks, push limits, and learn fastest by doing. They want momentum and mastery, and they often develop real competence quickly. Their gift is courage and intensity: the willingness to stake themselves on a path.

Their shadow is over-identification: mistaking motion for meaning, or burning out in the effort to prove themselves.

Kings: The Mode of Stewardship

The King approaches career as something to build and sustain. Having developed competence, they carry responsibility—not only for themselves, but for others who depend on their stability. Their guiding question is: What am I responsible for?

Kings lead teams, manage systems, keep promises, and make hard calls. They measure results, juggle demands, and feel the weight of consequence. Their gift is reliability: the power to make things work in the real world.

Their shadow is becoming over-identified with duty—forgetting that structure exists to serve life, not replace it.

Queens: The Mode of Eldership

The Queen approaches career through the lens of time. They have seen patterns repeat—successes that turned hollow, innovations that came full circle, ideals that required revision. Their guiding question is: What truly matters now?

Queens look beyond immediate results to the longer story being written. They carry memory and perspective: what has been tried before, what tends to happen next, what costs are hidden inside certain choices. Their influence often comes through mentoring, storytelling, and quiet correction rather than direct control. Their gift is integration—bringing history into dialogue with the present, and rooting vocation in wisdom and legacy.

Their shadow, when imbalanced, is disengagement: retreating into “I’ve seen it all” cynicism instead of offering the medicine of experience.

The Courts, Summed Up

The Court cards make Tarot’s map more precise because they track two vital dimensions at once:

motivation (Suit)
developmental mode (Rank)

Together, they help you recognize how a person is showing up in a situation—whether that person is across the table from you, or living inside you as an inner voice.

MAJOR ARCANA OVERVIEW

MOTION VS. MEANING

The Minor Arcana shows life in motion—full of choices, complications, joys, setbacks, and surprises. Through the four Suits (and their Court cards), Tarot can locate you with real precision in the everyday texture of experience.

But for many people, that is only the beginning.

Imagine three people in the same outer circumstance. John, Elizabeth, and Frank have each come to the end of a relationship. Outwardly, the loss looks similar: an empty apartment, quiet evenings, grief settling into new routines. But inwardly, each person is living a different story.

John’s story is about structure. The relationship did not have—or did not sustain—the kind of frame long-term love requires. Commitments may have been vague, responsibilities uneven, boundaries unclear, plans unshared. Over time, the partnership weakened not because affection vanished, but because what protects love from drift was never fully built—or fully tended.

Elizabeth’s story is about change. The relationship ended not because either partner meant harm, but because life shifted—as life inevitably does. A job offer pulled one person across the country. A health crisis reordered priorities. Inner growth carried one partner toward a direction the other could not share. Even good fortune can part people: success, inheritance, or a long-awaited dream can turn the wheel in ways no one expected. Here the loss is less a failure than an encounter with change itself.

Frank’s story is about bondage and release. He is leaving a relationship he once defended, only to realize it required ongoing self-betrayal. The attachment was braided with guilt, fear, and control—patterns that felt “necessary” or even “normal” precisely because they kept the peace, avoided conflict, or preserved a familiar identity. When the truth finally broke through, the ending came with a jolt: what he had been tolerating could no longer be justified.

My point is this: if, as Tarot readers, we rely only on the Minor Arcana, we can describe the breakup in detail—its moods, conflicts, losses, and daily adjustments. But when a person asks the deeper questions—Why? What is this teaching me? What kind of growth is being asked of me?—the Major Arcana becomes essential.

Enter the Major Arcana.

John can understand what happened more clearly once we see a Major pattern at work: the Emperor. The Emperor teaches that lasting relationships do not happen by accident. They require structure—clear commitments, shared responsibilities, steady effort, and the willingness to protect what you are building. Love may be warm, but it also needs a frame strong enough to hold it.

Elizabeth can meet her situation with more compassion once she recognizes the Wheel of Fortune turning beneath the breakup. The Wheel reminds us that relationships exist within larger currents of time and chance. Seasons shift. People evolve. What once aligned may fall out of rhythm. The teaching here is not blame, but humility: to stay centered as life moves, to bless the turning, and to trust that change carries seeds of renewal.

Frank may be helped by seeing two Major energies working together: the Devil and the Tower. The Devil names the binding pattern—the guilt, the fear, the compulsions, the bargains that masquerade as love or loyalty. The Tower is the rupture: the moment truth breaks through denial and a false structure collapses. The impact can be disorienting, but it is not punishment. It is release.

Sometimes more than one Major is at work in the same event. The Major Arcana does not replace the Minors; it reveals the deeper pattern moving through them.

For John, Elizabeth, and Frank, the outward motion is the same: a breakup. The Minor Arcana describes the lived reality—dividing possessions, changing routines, navigating grief. The Major Arcana reveals the deeper story: a call to build real structure (the Emperor), an initiation into acceptance of life’s turning (the Wheel), or liberation from a binding illusion (the Devil and the Tower).

The Minors tell you what is in motion. The Majors tell you what it means—and what kind of growth it is asking of you.

THE MAJORS AS SOUL DNA

The Major Arcana reveals the inner through-line of a life. It offers insight into how identity unfolds, how consciousness deepens, and how character takes shape over time.

In this book, the Majors are approached first and foremost as a developmental map: a symbolic grammar of how a human being becomes whole. 

In that sense, the Majors are analogous to DNA. DNA encodes patterns of physical growth; the Major Arcana portrays patterns of inner growth—archetypal potentials that shape the evolution of consciousness. Not fate, but formative possibility. When an archetype is persistently disowned or left underdeveloped, the result is often distortion: brittleness, repetition, compulsion, and unnecessary suffering. Read this way, the Majors become a map of what wholeness is asking from us.

This developmental map has an internal structure. The ranked Majors form three cycles of seven cards each. Seven has long symbolized completeness in many cultures; Tarot reflects that logic by how each of the three cycles describes a distinct developmental crisis and resolution in the soul’s life. 

Call each of these cycles of seven Majors a “Septenary.” 

Self-Birth (I–VII)

Self-Maturation (VIII–XIV)

Self-Transcendence (XV–XXI)

The Fool (0) stands apart as the traveler who moves through them all. 

THE FIRST SEPTENARY OF SELF-BIRTH (I–VII)

The first drama opens with the Magician: the spark of intention, the one who glimpses a world that could be and tries to draw it down into the world that is. But intention alone does not produce a self. The question is how raw will becomes effective agency.

What instincts must be acknowledged? What capacities must be developed? What structures must be built? What choices must be made—again and again—until a person can take their place in the world as a responsible adult? 

The first Septenary maps the formation of the coherent human self—the birth of personality, purpose, and the capacity to act.

THE SECOND SEPTENARY OF SELF-MATURATION (VIII–XIV)

The second drama opens with Strength: the recognition that genuine power is not force, but inner governance. By now the self formed in the first Septenary has agency—but it also meets its limits. Much of life lies outside its control, beyond its understanding, immune to its old strategies.

The question shifts. It is no longer, “Can I act?” It becomes, “Can I act wisely?”

How can the instincts and capacities formed in the first Septenary be refined, moderated, and made ethically trustworthy? What does it mean to live intentionally rather than reactively? How does the self learn patience, proportion, discernment, and responsibility in the face of complexity?

This second Septenary maps maturation: the movement from instinctive living to conscious, accountable personhood.

THE THIRD SEPTENARY OF SELF-TRANSCENDENCE (XV–XXI)

The third drama opens with the Devil: the energies we exile, repress, deny, and fear. Tradition paints the Devil as the opposite of God, but Tarot’s deeper suggestion is more demanding: nothing is finally lost, no energy is beyond redemption, and what is disowned returns—either as bondage or as transformation. 

Here the question intensifies again. It is no longer only, “Can I act wisely?” It becomes, “Can the self be liberated from its own distortions—and awakened into a deeper identity?”

This Septenary explores the movement from bondage to freedom, from illusion to revelation, from separateness to reunion. It is the drama of transformation: the self, having been formed and refined, restores what was lost in the long process of becoming a self—both the shamed, cut-off parts and what Jung called the ‘golden shadow’: joy, purpose, and belongingness to the Divine. 

In future chapters, I will explore the cards in each Septenary in depth and show how these three dramas unfold toward resolution.

SYNCHRONICITY

One additional thing to note about the Soul-DNA archetypes of the Major Arcana is their ordering power. Each Major carries a distinct pattern—as if it has a magnetic field—and when that pattern becomes active in you, your experience begins to arrange itself around it. Emotions, ideas, conversations, recurring themes, even the “random” details of a week can start to echo the same shape. You begin to recognize a storyline: Ah. This is Empress season. Or: I’m living Temperance right now. Or: Something Tower-like is breaking through.

Have you ever seen iron filings scattered on paper suddenly spring into order when a magnet is placed beneath it? The Majors can feel like that. When you look through the eyes of the Empress, the world appears differently than when you look through the eyes of Temperance, or the Devil, or the Tower—not because reality is invented by your mind, but because different archetypal patterns highlight different meanings and demands within the same reality.

Carl Jung called this kind of meaningful alignment synchronicity: coincidence infused with meaning—events that coincide in time and seem profoundly related, yet do not appear to be linked by a normal chain of cause and effect. He proposed synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle: a way inner and outer realities can correspond through meaning rather than mechanism. 

Here is Jung’s classic story.

A patient of his—a brilliant young woman—was deeply identified with her rational mind and could not connect with her unconscious. She was sharp but defended, weary, and cut off from mystery. Nothing Jung tried could penetrate her intellectual armor.

Then one day she reported a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. As she spoke, Jung heard a soft tapping at the window. He turned, saw an insect striking the glass, opened the window, and caught it in his hand. It was the nearest thing to a golden scarab found in that region. He presented it to her and said, in essence: Here is your scarab.

Dream and world suddenly rhymed. The outer event did not “prove” the dream; it answered it. And that answer broke something open—shifting her stance toward the unconscious and making room for transformation.

As I read it, this is Tower energy expressing itself through synchronicity: a rupture in a defended worldview, a shock of correspondence that dislodges certainty and makes space for a truer structure to appear.

And we don’t need only famous stories to see this pattern. Every time the cards are laid out, synchronicity is at work. The spread arranges itself into an image of the seeker’s inner situation and the Soul’s current lesson. 

Tarot readings are synchronicity made visible.

CONCLUSION: AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

I’ll leave you with a story much older than Jung’s—one that captures Tarot’s full map of the human journey, with both parts, Major and Minor, held together.

Almost four centuries before the birth of Jesus, around 375 BCE, Plato told what he called the Allegory of the Cave.

People, he said, live as prisoners in a deep cave, watching shadows flicker on a wall by firelight. The shadows are not nothing—they do reflect something real moving behind them—but they are partial. If you have never seen the source, you can mistake the projection for the whole of reality.

In a similar way, the life we live day to day is full of shifting shapes: desires and setbacks, conflicts and consolations, work and longing, loss and new beginnings. The Minor Arcana names this lived weather of experience. It helps us locate ourselves in real time.

But sometimes the soul asks for more than location. It asks for meaning.

Plato says that one prisoner breaks free. Drawn by the hint of greater light, he climbs upward. His eyes adjust slowly. The fire that once seemed bright is revealed as a smaller light. Then he emerges into daylight, and for the first time he sees the world by the sun itself.

The point is not that the cave was “false,” but that it was incomplete.

So too with Tarot. The Major Arcana does not replace the Minor Arcana; it illuminates it. The Minors tell you what is happening. The Majors reveal the deeper pattern at work—what this moment is asking of you, what it is shaping in you, what kind of growth is trying to be born.

And in Plato’s telling, the story does not end in the sunlight. The liberated one returns to the cave. He returns with a new sight, able to recognize the shadows for what they are—real, meaningful, but not the whole. He returns to live, to act, to help, to love: to bring greater light into ordinary life.

Greater light above. Lived life below.

A GPS needs both real-time positioning and a trustworthy map.

Major Arcana, Minor Arcana.

Tarot’s spiritual GPS system charts the full journey of the soul.