Interpreting the signs of the times: beyond Jung

Abstract

This article introduces the semiotics of Tarot images in the context of human experiences and in the framework of Jung's analytical psychology. It presents Tarot pictures as symbolic representations of the archetypes embedded in the collective psyche. The images can function as symbolic triggers especially significant at the time of socio-cultural transitions, therefore making it imperative to read, interpret, and understand the meanings of those important signs that act out in human culture. The article addresses in particular the Jungian archetype of the Shadow as a sign and symptom, and considers some consequences of its functioning at both individual and social levels. It also posits the necessity of the integration of the Shadow in view of its projection as embodied in some real-life events affecting the collective psyche in the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• culture
• imaginative narrative
• Jung's collective unconscious
• Pauli
• Peirce's interpretant
• praxis
• September 11
• Shadow
• Tarot symbolism

Notes

1. See Meier (2001) with a preface by Beverley Zabriskie; this particular letter is designated in the book as 56P, pp. 81–83. See also Semetsky (2006a).

2. The computational approach needs qualification. At the cutting edge of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, computers are understood as dynamical systems that indeed manipulate “bits”, but these units of information are not reducible to what in physics would be called particles. They are moments in the process of flow represented by analogue (and not digital) information and defined as “bits” within a certain context only; that is, holistically as parts of the greater whole.

3. Imaginative narrative is one example of research methodologies employed by the cutting-edge scientific discipline called Futures Studies.

4. From Foreword by C.G. Jung to Neumann (1969). Jung's Foreword is © 1968 Bollingen Foundation, New York.

5. In Atom and archetypes: The Pauli-Jung letters 1932–1958 (see note 2) there is an earlier unpublished essay by Pauli, written in 1948 and called “Modern examples of ‘background physics’” (Meier 2001, 179–196). Pauli comments on the doubling of the psyche akin to a human birth as a division in two parts out of initial unity. Time-wise, the doubling of the time-series is represented by aion and chronos. At the time, Pauli remained agnostic on “whether the ‘series’ is thought of in temporal terms or as a simultaneous juxtaposition” (Meier 2001, 187) and referred to the idea of the transmigration of souls when the timeless reality of the archetypes is being repeatedly interrupted by a temporal sequence of physical/biological lives and real human experiences.