Again & Again: The Changing Stories of Tarot Archetypes

Twenty-two cards in the tarot’s Major Arcana. I could spend a lifetime with any one of them.

There’s a belief that once you know what a card means, you’re done with it. Learn the keywords, tick it off, move on. But the Major Arcana don’t work that way. They are living archetypes, and like anything alive, they are layered, and rich, and complex and they keep changing. Their stories re-form, re-manifest, arrive wearing new faces. Each time I return to a card it reveals something different to me, about the world, about myself, about the journey. It meets me where I am, it recognises that I am not the same as last time we met so why should it be.

So I think of any card as finished. I go back. And back again. One archetype, explored over months and over years, through different imagery and different seasons of my own life. The cards are not only about the Fool’s journey, they are the journey.

The Tower is one card that has draws me back again and again.

A tower struck by lightning. Flames at the windows. Figures falling, headfirst, into the dark. One image.

It’s the card so many of us flinch from when it turns over. And I understand. In 2019, as I sat doing readings for my clients for the year ahead, the Tower kept appearing. Again. And again. & we all know how 2020 unfolded.

And yet the Tower doesn’t destroy what is solid, or what is true. It tears down the illusion of solidity. The illusion of truth. What falls was never really real in the first place - and that is its gift. The crumbling makes room for something newer, truer, more grounded to rise from the ashes.

Here are just some of the shapes it has taken for me.

As Kali Ma, in Stardust and Fallen Petals

The Tower as a loving but destructive force. Not cruelty, but a fierce love that clears away whatever cannot hold, so that something real can stand in its place.

As the phoenix, also in Stardust and Fallen Petals

Not the falling this time, but what comes after. The rising from the ashes.

In my journal

As Even the Sky Cracks Open
A newer piece, made as a bonus lesson in Arcana Mysteries. Different imagery, the same archetype, the same energy, only morphed. Even the sky, it turns out, is not as solid as it seems.

But returning isn’t only for the cards we love. Some archetypes took me awhile to come to turns with. The Emperor. The Hierophant. Authority, structure, tradition - I kept them at arm’s length for a long time. It was only when I worked with them, again & again, letting their many stories unfold, that I came to a deeper understanding of them, even a re-claimation, and even an appreciation of their gifts. The face I had judged them by turned out to be only one of many. The cards, as ever, a mirror - and not always for the parts we’ve already made peace with.

That may be the quiet gift of returning. An archetype is never just one story. Stay with it long enough and it will tell you another.

So here is what I’d offer you. Choose one card. Perhaps the one that calls you, or perhaps the one you’ve always pushed away. Return to it, not once but again & again. Let it change. Let yourself change alongside it.

Which card keeps calling you back? And which one have you been keeping at arm’s length?