Archetype
Tarot glossary
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) used archetype for inherited patterns he believed shaped dreams, myths and stories across cultures: the mother, the hero, the trickster, the shadow. Jung mentioned tarot only in passing, but from the 1970s and 1980s writers such as Sallie Nichols in Jung and Tarot (1980) read the Major Arcana as a gallery of archetypes, and the idea is now everywhere in reading guides. In this view The Hermit is the wise old man and The Empress the great mother. Archetypes are a way of interpreting the cards, not their origin: the 15th-century makers drew on Christian and courtly imagery of their own time.
