Self Healers Summer Week 1: The Fool, The Magician and the High Priestess... Oh My.

Jun 20, 2024

Welcome to week one of Self Healers Summer. For the next six weeks, we’ll be going on a self-reflective journey using tarot as a way to bypass our conscious mind and get to the inner wisdom of the subconscious.

Last week in the introduction post, I broke down my way of reading and using tarot which I’ve affectionately named, Tarot for Reclamation, because you know I love a good brand symmetry moment. So if you missed it and you aren’t sure what all this is about, go read that post first.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Caught up? Great!

I’m battling the urge to word vomit all the cool things about reading tarot on you right now. I will happily do that in a private session or in my self paced masterclass for this that I’ll be releasing at the end of this challenge. So I sat in my hammock swing and thought about where would be the most valuable place for us to start?

And instantly I knew.

The Fool’s Journey.

Like I said last week, traditional tarot cards are broken into two categories: the Major Arcana (22 trump cards) and the Minor Arcana (56 suited cards). If you have a tarot deck that you’d like to use for this challenge go ahead and get it out now and start sorting through the deck. Separate the suited cards and you should be left with 22 cards where each card has a number and a character on it. Things like: the Fool, The Magician, the High Priestess, The Star…

These are the Major Arcana cards. Take them out of your deck and put them in order (most decks have them numbered with roman numerals but if not the guide book that came with your deck will listen them in order for you).

I’ll post a graphic below for anyone not in possession of a tarot deck:

Take a moment, put your feet flat on the floor, sit up straight and inhale. Fill up your lungs. Hold it for a beat or two and then exhale it all out. Now look at these and just let yourself take them in. Notice what you notice. And notice how you maybe don’t notice much. Either way it’s fine. (See I told you this challenge would be easy!)

The cool thing about these cards, their characters, and the art and symbolism used to convey them is that they are based in some deeply archetypal imagery that resonates with our unconscious mind. So whether you have a thought about them or you don’t, you’re still doing it correctly.

The Major Arcana

Some of you may have noticed that these 22 cards seem to flow along a narrative. If that is something you noticed, you’d be accurate! The Major Arcana represents aspects of our inner journey of growth, maturity, death, and rebirth. This collection of cards and images is called, “The Fool’s Journey”. As the very first card in it is The Fool card. As you look, notice now that I’ve mentioned a narrative how you can start to see a plotline developing. It’s one you’re already familiar with. We all are. The naive young person full of hope and excitement sets off, as they go they are developing and learning. Their divine feminine is emerging as well as their divine masculine. They experience love and a yearning for spirituality or connectedness. They become more mature and tentative. Their fortunes shift. They are forced to see things through a different perspective to be able to grow. Something is coming to a natural end and they learn how to be patient. A storm of life arrives and disrupts everything throwing their journey into chaos. They have to learn that the only thing prolonging their suffering is themselves and that knowledge moves them to the next phase. Things become illuminated with this newfound maturity. They are entering into a next chapter of growth. And it culminates with deeper insights and completion with the World card at the end. And the cycle starts again. ;)

It is not reflective of one’s journey from birth to death. But of the life/death/life cycle that is constantly going on in and around us. We experience lots of seasons of being fresh and new at something, learning, growing, dealing with struggles, and coming out the other side better for having learned from it. And we start again with something new to learn. You see?

The Major Arcana cards are known as “trump” cards in a reading because when they come up, we are invited to view the issue at hand through the lens of this inner journey. For example, if you were stressed about your career and finances and a major arcana card came up, you’d be invited to look at your inward resources instead of at your external ones.

The Fool

We begin this journey with The Fool. Before we go any farther I want to clarify that the word fool used here is not meant to denote stupidity or anything negative but rather, a childlike naivety. If you look at the art depicted on this card you’ll notice the main character looks happy and excited, they have their little pack ready to head out on an adventure. The sun is shining. Their arms are wide open ready to experience it all! But look at their face. This character is oblivious to the cliff they are about to walk off of. They are completely unaware of the hardships and lessons they will endure out in the world.

The Magician & The High Priestess

As the fool begins the journey, they encounter the Magician and the High Priestess. This can be thought of as an an encounter with another character or just as an encounter with another aspect of self. (I personally like the latter way of looking at it.)

The Magician and High Priestess are two sides of a coin, opposite energies. He represents the masculine, active, conscious. The magician is the force that allows us to impact the world around us through a concentration of will and power. He mixes his elements to create something new.

The High Priestess represents the unconscious. She is potentiality. She is the fertile ground in which that concentration of will and power is planted to become something that grows. You could also view this as light and shadow aspects of personality or conscious and unconscious.

The Magician card reflects power, resourcefulness, manifestation, and inspired action. On the less healthy side of things it could also be shedding light on untapped or unused talents or manipulation of things. The Magician is a master manifestor and represents the energy that now is the time to move forward on a goal, to take action! On the table in front of the magician are the various suited elements with which he can create endlessly. He is tactile and is actively and externally creating.

The High Priestess card reflects intuition, sacred knowing, the unconscious. On the less healthy side of things she may denote hidden secrets from oneself, a lack of connection to intuition. She sits at the threshold between the conscious and unconscious and teaches it’s mysteries. She can travel between realms. She ushers us through the veil (so to speak) to a deeper knowing. This card reminds us of our own connection to wisdom within ourselves.

If the magician is doing the high priestess is knowing. They are two counterparts as we need both together to be the most effective. Inspired action disconnected from our own intuition and wisdom about things may lead to us working hard on something that is out of alignment for us or not useful. And sitting around tapping into our own intuition without the ability to take that knowing and turn it into something tangible won’t move us forward on this journey. They are counterparts, you see. They are both within us all.

A New Perspective

shallow focus of person holding mirror — Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash

There are lots of times in life when we choose to suspend what we know to think about something in a completely different way in order to create a new set of rules for the sake of perspective or fun. I’ll give you an example…

If you and I were to sit down at a chess board with a small child that had never seen a chess board before. You would tell start to tell him how each piece can move. The king can only move 1 space at a time but the queen can move any. The knight moves in an ‘L’ shape instead of in straight lines… and the child might look at you as if you were insane. They’d pick up a piece to test your rules. They may try to move the knight in and see that they could, in fact, move it in a straight line. And the king piece can be lifted and set down many spaces from it’s original position. And we’d giggle as you explain that of course PHYSICALLY yes the pieces can be moved in any way but that for the sake of the game, we were going to look at things differently and we were going to believe that they could only move in these certain ways. Doing so would open up a whole new world of creativity, strategy, and fun for us.

For the next few weeks, I want you to think about all of this with me in a different way. I’m not saying it’s the only way, or the one right way. I’m just saying it’s my way and if we agree to look at it like this, a new world of creativity, strategy, and fun insights will become available to us. Can you do that for me?

Let’s think of these cards during this 6 week challenge as tiny mirrors. We are not going to be viewing them as divination or future-telling. They are not the only answers either, they are simply a glimmer of something we couldn’t quite see before. Think of these cards as mirroring something back to you that you didn’t even know you knew. They are not showing you something far removed from you like the future or information about someone else. They are inviting you to see something from a new angle of yourself.

It’s time to grab your journal.

person opening book near coffee cip — Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Unsplash

We are starting off with a few journaling prompts based off what we saw today. Use as many of these as you like. And free write the answers that come to you to write without censoring. You don’t have to show anyone what you write in these exercises so there is no need to edit yourself.

Journal Prompt #1:

Looking through the major arcana cards as a narrative for life’s natural life/death/life journey of growth, what comes to mind as the part of that journey I might be in right now? How does this part of my story feel to me? What aspects of the Fool do I see in myself at this point in my journey? What value is there in those aspects? What pitfalls are there?

Journal Prompt #2:

Read this description of the Fool card from Biddy Tarot. What can I learn from the fool right. now? Where has dread, worry or self doubt been keeping me stuck? What attributes of the fool would aid me in moving through those with less suffering? What judgements do I have about the Fool? Where do I judge myself in similar ways?

Journal Prompt #3:

Do I resonate more with the Magician or the High Priestess? In who’s energy do I feel that I spend more of my time? In what ways could I bring that more into balance? What would my life look like and how would it feel if I brought those energies more into balance this week?

I have opened comments up so everyone participating can ask questions, share their journaling insights if they wish, share reflections or interesting reactions they had as they read and journaled… use the comment section like a breakout room. I’ll be checking in as well.

The Reclamation by Becka Robinson

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