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 according to the four Suits: Pentacles, Wands, Cups, and Swords. 

Each Suit reflects a core dimension of human life. We live as embodied, mortal beings, navigating particular circumstances in time. Our experiences—and our efforts to flourish—are shaped by both our biological inheritance and the communities/cultures that formed us.

Together, the four Suits mirror back to us one part of what it means to be human: to have bodies that age, to inhabit this moment in history, and to carry both the ancient imprint of evolution and the living imprint of our social conditioning. How we love, struggle, work, and dream grows from this shared condition.

Pentacles

Pentacles tells the story of our embodied life and its ongoing needs. To live as physical beings is to supply what is lacking and to replenish what is depleted:

• Hunger calls for nourishment.
• Thirst calls for refreshment.
• Fatigue calls for rest.
• Sexual desire calls for intimacy, satisfaction, and release.
• Illness calls for healing and care.
• Money is spent and material resources dwindle, so they must be earned and restored.
• Stability in our home, work, and physical environment can shift, so it must be maintained and renewed.
• The physical goods our well-being depends on wear down, break, run out, or are lost—so we must replace and repair them.

Note how 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. Tools erode, roofs leak, bodies age. Because resources continually diminish or change, a rhythm of lack and replenishment undergirds being alive.

Pentacles, then, is the Suit of physical well-being in a world of finite resources—resources that inevitably run down and must be replenished through effort, stewardship, and care.

Wands

Just as all acorns come with an inner propulsion to become oak trees, so all human beings are born with latent strengths and passions longing for expression and fulfillment.

Wands concerns this aspirational side of human nature. We are born with potentials that want to become real. They are as insistent as appetites, but at a higher level. These inner propulsions include:

• A basic vitality and forward-leaning energy.
• A restlessness that reaches toward “something more,” even before we know what it is.
• Curiosity and interest that hint at developing abilities.
• Creative images and ideas that surface as daydreams, sketches, or stray 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 can sour. Untapped potential does not remain neutral—it can curdle frustration, bitterness, cynicism, envy, burnout, or self-doubt. The Gospel of Thomas puts it plainly: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Wands, then, is the Suit of aspiration—of the inner spark that wants to become flame, and of the work required to bring our latent potentials into living form. 

Cups

To be human is to be unfinished in isolation. A newborn cannot survive without nurture. An infant deprived of touch fails to thrive. Adults who suffer loneliness show measurable strain in body and mind. And generations before us may wrestle hard-earned wisdom from suffering—yet they cannot simply hand it to the next generation like an heirloom. Each generation must re-learn old truths in its own bloodstream, sometimes at the cost of repeating the past. In short, we come into the world still-forming, requiring resources beyond ourselves—especially other people—in order to become ourselves.

The Suit of Cups symbolizes this relational becoming. We are not “defective” when we need mirroring, tenderness, and belonging; we are human. We do not know ourselves truly until we are met, tested by experience, and shaped by love. Without this, the self drifts, dulls, fragments, or closes down. What completes us includes:

• 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.

Cups, then, is the Suit of relational longing and fulfillment—the heart’s search for resonance, intimacy, belonging, and meaning. It tells the story of how we become whole not by standing alone, but by being faithfully connected to what is beyond the solitary self—both to one another, and to the larger purposes that give life depth.

Swords

To be human is to be vulnerable: to have a body that can be injured, a heart that can be broken, and hopes that can be shattered. Because harm is possible, we are shaped to notice threat—scanning for danger, reading cues, and mobilizing instinctive survival responses: fight, flight, or freeze.

The Suit of Swords tells the story of 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 step into a world where conflict, loss, betrayal, and grief are possible. Yet this same realm is also where we develop clarity, boundaries, courage, and resilience. We are cut—and we learn how to bind wounds. We are frightened—and we learn discernment. We grieve—and we learn how to accompany others.

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, is the Suit of preserving integrity in the face of danger—perceiving threats clearly, responding wisely, and transforming pain into clarity, healing, and strength.

Note how each of the above four Suits are framed as a human condition together with a skillful response (lack/replenishment; potential/actualization; isolation/connection; vulnerability/integrity). 

THE COURT CARDS

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

The numbered cards (called “Pips”) often describe what is happening in the situation—what energies are rising, what needs are pressing, what dynamics are in motion. But no one lives these energies in the abstract. People show up bringing themselves: their cares, their experiences, their hurts, their hopes. These are either people around you, or the “people” within you–your inner parts.

You can see this outer web of relationships everywhere–caregivers, friends, teachers, colleagues, partners, teams, communities. And you can see the inner web every time you talk to yourself: the part of you that feels like “you” meets other voices and impulses with their own angle, urgency, and logic. Even in solitude, you carry this inner community.

That’s what the Court cards add to Tarot’s map: they symbolize how people show up to the situations in their lives and what they bring. Tarot envisions this as a combination of a particular  motivation (suit) and a particular level of development (rank).

Suit as Motivation

In the context of the Court cards, Suit represents the motivation that propels a person–or an inner aspect of the self–toward action.

Take the example of a career change. The external move might look the same—a new job, a new field, a new schedule—but the inner motive can be completely different. The Suit tells you what is driving the change.

When Pentacles is the motivation, the impulse is practical and material:

• The person seeks stability: better pay, steadier hours, stronger long-term security.
• They want benefits that support real life—healthcare, retirement, predictable time off, sustainable workload.
• They value tangible results: building something reliable that rewards steady effort over time.

When Wands is the motivation, the impulse is creative and forward-moving:

• The person feels the ache of unrealized potential and wants room to grow, build, lead, or invent.
• They want a role with momentum—challenge, novelty, autonomy, and the thrill of possibility.
• They crave impact: to see their ideas take form, to create, to make a mark, to feel alive in their work.

When Cups is the motivation, the impulse is relational and values-aligned:

• The person longs for work that feels meaningful, humane, and true to who they are.
• They want a culture of care: collaboration, respect, belonging, and emotional safety.
• They seek fulfillment—work that nourishes the heart, strengthens community, and leaves them feeling more whole.

When Swords is the motivation, the impulse is integrity under pressure:

• The person may be responding to harm—toxicity, chronic burnout, ethical compromise, or the slow loss of self-respect.
• They are cutting through denial and naming what’s true: this is not working; this is costing me.
• They want clarity and clean boundaries—work where they can speak honestly, protect their wellbeing, and stand for what they believe matters.

Same outward change. Different inner engine. The Suit answers the diagnostic question: What is this move really in service of?

Rank as Level of Development

From motivation, turn to level of development: Page, Knight, King, Queen.

In many Tarot traditions, Queen and King are both treated as “adulthood,” and the life span beyond competency gets blurred. But our lives do not end at adulthood. Experience ripens into something distinct: perspective, memory, integration, and the capacity to guide without needing to control. In this framework, I place Queen after King to restore what modern culture often forgets: elderhood as a genuine stage of human development.

Have you ever been in a situation where you’re 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, your 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. Naturally! Pages and Kings reflect different orientations to life because they symbolize different stages of development, each with its own primary question.

Court Card	Life Stage	Core Question	Primary Orientation
Page	Child	How does the world work?	Learning & discovery
Knight	Youth	Who am I becoming?	Identity & risk
King	Adult	What am I responsible for?	Work, duty & leadership
Queen	Elder	What truly matters now?	Wisdom, memory & integration

These 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 of these in the same week—or the same day.

Now revisit the example of a career change. Once you know which suit is driving the desire for change, rank shows how a person (or inner part) is approaching the moment.

Pages: The Stage of Discovery

The Page approaches career as exploration. They are just beginning to learn what “work” even is—sampling possibilities, trying on roles, discovering what evokes enthusiasm or boredom. Their guiding question is: What calls to me?

Pages follow curiosity down surprising paths. They take internships, switch majors, start entry-level jobs, shadow mentors, learn by trial and error. The Page’s strength is openness and willingness to learn. The Page’s danger is drifting—staying in experimentation so long that commitment never arrives. At its best, this stage forms something priceless: a budding sense of direction.

Knights: The Stage 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: How far can I go?

Knights work hard, take risks, push limits, and try to prove themselves. They want momentum and mastery, and they often learn fastest by doing. The Knight’s gift is courage and intensity; this stage forges skill, confidence, and capability. The Knight’s danger is overidentifying with the mission—mistaking motion for meaning, or burning out in the effort to become someone.

Kings: The Stage 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, hold households together, make hard calls, and keep promises. They measure results, juggle demands, and feel the weight of consequence. The King’s gift is reliability: the power to make things work in the real world. The King’s danger is becoming over-identified with duty—forgetting that the structure exists to serve life, not replace it.

Queens: The Stage 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 endures?

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. The Queen’s gift is integration—bringing history into dialogue with the present, and rooting vocation in wisdom and legacy. The Queen’s danger, when imbalanced, is disengagement: retreating into “I’ve seen it all” cynicism instead of offering the medicine of experience.

The Courts, Summed Up

Tarot’s spiritual GPS becomes more precise because the Court cards track two vital dimensions at once: motivation (suit) and 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 complications, choices, joys, setbacks, and surprises. Tarot’s capacity to track this unfolding is remarkable. Through the four Suits (including their Court cards), the Fool’s beginner mind can locate itself in the everyday texture of experience with startling precision.

But will it be enough?

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

John’s inner story is about structure. The relationship did not have—or did not maintain—the frame that long-term love requires. Perhaps commitments were vague, responsibilities uneven, boundaries unclear, plans unshared. Over time, the partnership became unstable not because affection vanished, but because the relationship lacked the sturdiness that protects love from drift. The foundation wasn’t tended, and what was not protected could not endure.

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

Frank’s inner story is about bondage and release. He is leaving a relationship that he believed was good, only to realize it was a kind of captivity. The bond was braided with guilt and negativity—an attachment that felt meaningful precisely because it fed emotional cruelty and control, while simultaneously justifying it. When the truth finally broke through, the ending came suddenly, explosively, and with a humiliating clarity: he could no longer defend what he had been defending. The relationship did not simply end. It shattered.

My point is this: if, as Tarot readers, we rely only on the Minors to help John or Elizabeth or Frank locate themselves, the only thing we will be able to say is that they are going through a breakup. But the moment a person asks the real questions—Why? What is this teaching me? Where do I go from here?—the Minor Arcana alone becomes a limited spiritual GPS.

Enter the Major Arcana.

John can understand what happened more clearly once we see the 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 bring greater compassion to her situation 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 the seeds of renewal.

Frank will be helped tremendously by seeing two Major energies working together: The Devil and The Tower. The Devil names the binding pattern—the guilt, the coercion, the emotional captivity that masquerades as love or loyalty. The Tower is the rupture: the moment truth breaks through denial and the false structure collapses. The impact can be disorienting and humiliating, but it is not punishment. It is release.

For John, Elizabeth, and Frank, the outward motion of their lives is the same: a breakup. The Minor Arcana describes the daily 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 happening. 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.

Yet there is more here than a set of psychological themes. In an esoteric reading, the twenty-two Majors, together with the relationships and contrasts among them, can be approached as a symbolic map of the soul’s development: a way of naming the deep patterns by which a human being becomes whole. The purpose, shared by all of us, is not perfection but integration—the gradual gathering-in of what is split, denied, undeveloped, or fragmented.

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

Tarot can also be read as a visual primer on Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic metaphysics. In Rider-Waite-Smith imagery, many readers notice Tree of Life resonances—for example, the High Priestess’s veil is embroidered with palms and pomegranates arranged in a tree-like pattern often associated with the Tree of Life. Some readers also interpret the Ten of Pentacles’ ten coins through a Tree of Life lens, as a symbolic echo of the ten Sefirot.

A standard Tree of Life diagram pictures the emanation of unity into multiplicity: the Many flowing from the One. 

In the language of this book, that descent and return can be summarized in three phases: Self-Birth, Self-Maturation, and Self-Transcendence.

Because the Fool is unranked, he does not represent a specific moment within these phases. He is, rather, the one who begins the pilgrimage and goes on to experience what the other twenty-one ranked Majors symbolize. The Fool is the archetype of overflow—the moment the soul steps into time, risk, embodiment, and unfolding experience, saying yes to the adventure before it knows what the adventure will cost.

THREE SEPTENARIES, THREE DRAMAS

Across many cultures, seven has long symbolized completeness: the seven-day creation week and Sabbath rhythm in Jewish and Christian traditions, seven heavens in Islam, and the sevenfold chakra map in Indian yoga traditions, among other examples. Tarot reflects this symbolic logic in its internal structure: the ranked Majors can be read as three groups of seven (3×7 = 21), with the Fool (0) standing apart as the initiatory wanderer who moves through them all.

Call each group of seven a “Septenary.” Each Septenary is inherently dramatic because each describes a distinct developmental crisis and resolution in the soul’s life.

The First Septenary of Self-Birth (I–VII)

The journey 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 vision alone accomplishes nothing. The real question is: how does raw intention crystallize into effective agency? What instincts, desires, structures, and choices must enter the picture to bridge the immense gap between imagining a life and actually living one? 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 arc begins with Strength: the recognition that genuine power is not force but inner governance. The ego developed in the first Septenary discovers its limits: so much of life lies outside its control, beyond its understanding, immune to its old strategies. This Septenary asks: what does it mean to live intentionally rather than reactively? How can the instincts and capacities formed in the first Septenary be refined, moderated, and made ethically trustworthy? This is the maturation from instinctive living to conscious, responsible personhood. 

The Third Septenary of Self-Transcendence (XV–XXI)

The third act opens provocatively 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 audacious: nothing is finally lost, no energy is beyond redemption, and what is disowned returns—either as bondage or as transformation. This Septenary asks the most daring question of all: how does the self, having been formed and refined, awaken to its deeper identity as participating in the Divine? The movement from bondage to liberation, from illusion to revelation, from separateness to reunion, is the drama of the third Septenary.

In future chapters, I’ll 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.