Divination: The Art of Reading Archetypal Forms
Musings on tarot, dreams, synchronicity, and the unconscious depths
“The archetype there can be defined as a structure which conditions certain psychological probabilities, and oracle techniques are obviously attempts to get at these structures.”
— Marie Louise von Franz, On Divination and Synchronicity
Divination has been used across cultures as a means to connect with higher wisdom, to discern the will of the gods. It is an acknowledgement that mysterious forces underlie the fabric of consciousness. By creating a bridge to this realm, we gentle the rigid sense of control we have on our lives. When we divine, we beckon the unconscious to speak by creating the necessary environment to invoke synchronicity, where an event in the outside world coincides meaningfully with a psychological state of mind.
What’s fascinating about this technique is that nearly anything can be used for divinatory purposes: reading tea leaves, interpreting cloud shapes, scrying in a mirror, tossing bones. The medium is not what’s important, but rather, the state of mind it moves us into. It turns the waking world into a dream-like state where seemingly mundane objects carry symbolic significance. Our engagement with these symbols unlocks meaning from the depths and connects us to the psyche’s instinctual frameworks.
Thus, I see divination as the art of activating the archetypal psyche and interpreting its forms. This process serves as a catalyst, energizing and drawing up unconscious knowledge. We project insights that emerge onto the mediums we interact with—the clouds, the bones, the tea leaves—and the stream of understanding carries the same numinous quality that all unconscious contents possess. It’s why the process feels divine, holy, magical.
Although my opinion is rooted in a psychological interpretation, it’s not meant to drain the sense of mystery and wonder from the act. What exactly is the unconscious? By what means does it have understanding that seems prophetic in nature and uncannily insightful? How does it appear to dissolve boundaries between psyche and matter, producing events that ring with undeniable meaning, beyond coincidence?
These are the questions I continue to hold with curiosity. The position helps me stay grounded when I begin a process of divination. I am a conduit, a channel that opens to the great cosmic field of the unconscious depths.
Navigating the Archetypal Landscape
“Just as a physicist cannot predict a unique event completely accurately, an oracle cannot predict a precise psychological event. But it can give an "expectation list," which can cast an image of a certain area or qualitative field of events and predict that something is going to happen within that field. There is a certain psychological probability because of what Jung calls the collective unconscious.”
-Marie Louise von Franz, On Divination and Synchronicity
When I practice divination, most commonly in the form of tarot readings, I notice a shift as the field of ego awareness lowers. I seem to enter a kind of flow state. The rhythm of my voice begins to change. Images, insight, understanding begins to piece together into a form that I can interact with. In the moment, I’m never certain where it comes from. It’s as if I’ve dipped my hands into a deep well, a roaring waterfall; I am receiving, but I am not the origin.
It’s easy to feel pulled into this experience, or to mistakenly believe that we alone are the great source. That is an inflation1, where the territory starts to get tricky. Without proper discernment, perhaps proper training and understanding of these vast dynamic energies, we misunderstand the signal (or become overwhelmed by its intensity). We believe we can interpret the realm of the gods with perfect accuracy, can predict events yet to come, or perhaps see perfectly into a present or past situation.
Rather, as von Franz’s quote above reminds us, what this process does is condition a field of possibilities. With a discerning archetypal eye and a humble ego perspective, we can explore the landscape of the activated archetypes. This alerts us to potential outcomes, behaviors, emotional dynamics, images and symbols, struggles. When we tune into the right frequency, it feels like magic or some form of clairvoyance, as the insight often strikes to the core of the situation with clarity.
This is what it is like to wander through the archetypal environment of the psyche. From the simple viewpoint of consciousness, it is an incredible, expansive experience. Divination allows us to sharpen this skill, to refine our relationship to the unconscious.
Another form of divination I practice is dream incubation, the act of setting an intention or posing a question to receive a dream in response. Although we are asleep when the insights come through, it is a process that also activates the unconscious.
Some time ago, I set an intention before bed to have a dream that would provide guidance on the current landscape of my life. This is the dream I had:
I am sitting down with a client and they want to look into four areas of their life and figure out how to balance them. I drew the Sun tarot card and then cracked an egg that had three yolks in it (two large and one small).
The bright yolks reflected the luminous quality and face of the sun in the tarot card. I had a sense that there were two main areas of life that stood strong and should lead the development of the smaller one. And the fourth, still nascent, would likely follow.
This dream features two forms of divination — cartomancy, reading the symbols of tarot cards, and oomancy, working with eggs. This is not the first occurrence of seeing tarot in my dreams. I think the classic cards have such a concentrated archetypal essence that it makes sense for the psyche to draw them into the dreamscape. But I’ve never worked with eggs in a divinatory manner nor dreamt of it.
The mixing of mediums was fascinating for me to contemplate upon waking. Not only did the incubation produce a striking dream that spoke to my inquiry, it wove in other forms of divination that held further symbolic meaning. From this, I honed in on specific images and their archetypal field of insights:
The Sun: In the tarot, it speaks to themes of joy, triumph, optimism, a sense of beauty and appreciation, a thirst for life, feeling powerful, vitality, consciousness rising, emerging from darkness2.
The Egg: A symbol of new beginnings, holding all manifest potential within, that which is waiting to be released and born into existence. It is the promise of new life, the container of possibility.
The Quaternity: A four-fold structure that provides wholeness and stability. In this case, implied through the three yolks and potential fourth.
All together, the divinatory insights led me to shift focus on identifying and building up the two major areas of life that seemed most stable. Rather than fussing on how to balance many moving parts, I concentrated my efforts on vocation and a specific personal relationship. Now, nearly a year later since I had this dream, I can say with certainty that these actions created the proper container for the other seeds to blossom.
Life feels more like the themes present in The Sun than ever before. The dream spoke to the possibilities that laid before me because an archetype was constellated within. It was up to me to navigate the archetypal landscape through the choices I made, the behaviors I nurtured, the images I used as a guiding light.
I’m constantly striving to carve out space for the mystery of the unconscious to be known. Divination, whether through dreams or working with tarot, has enriched so many areas of my life. To keep balance through it all, I ensure that the questions I pose are rooted in maintaining agency, not surrendering my power to a random card pull or a dream that floats in through the night. I can listen to the whispers of the depths with discernment. I look for the symbolic meaning, the archetypal essence, and utilize it to inform a path forward.
Join the conversation
What forms of divination do you practice? Have you experienced a sense of "flow" during divination? How did it feel? How do you interpret symbols and insights from practicing divination?
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The Artemisian’s membership is a community and educational platform for those drawn to deep inner work, archetypal exploration, and personal transformation. Our studies bridge Jungian psychology and archetypal systems (such as dreams, mythology, tarot and alchemy), providing a framework to understand the psyche, build a relationship to its images and symbols, and apply the insights to your journey of growth and becoming.
An archetypal inflation happens when we become identified with the contents of the unconscious, leading to an exaggerated sense of self, amongst other symptoms.
These themes are drawn from Tarot Definitions - a practical companion and "cheat-sheet" for working with the cards, designed by
and I.
Sometimes ill get into a flow state and start writing in my notebook, it often feels more like the words are conjuring themselves through me rather than me writing them out of my own will, and when im done with the process ill have a new page in my notes that helps me understand the concept im busy thinking of at that time. After i am done writing ill “coincidentally” see something online or in real life that confirms and adds onto my original notes, following this i will see many of the same set of triple numbers which i always intuitively know the meaning of, and when looking up their meaning its always completly resonant with my situation at that time. Ive also gotten experiences like these from dreams and active imagination sessions but most of the time it comes from writing and meditations. By the way i love the way you explain this process as it makes more sense in your words than most peoples writings ive read on divination/constellating.
I remember a few years ago I was reading Descent to the Goddess—the part about the seven levels—and I looked up at the sky and saw a cloud shaped exactly like a seven, alone in that part of the sky. It was uncanny. This happened around the time I was ready to move on and return to London after spending some time back in my home country. It was synchronicity, rather than divination, but it made me aware that indeed, you can “read” anything.