Why Tarot Imagery Speaks To Us
Our bodies have a language and they are constantly speaking to us. We struggle to understand it because we tend to mainly speak the language of cognition. Yet, our bodies communicate through emotion, movement, felt experience, and imagery, never just thoughts. This imagery is the primary language of the subconscious mind. It is why we are drawn to art, creativity, and the imagination. They resonate because they are the native tongue of our deeper self. The emotion is the "charge" of the message.
Our brain is an image engine. It loves image. It must have image. To aim for anything, we need to see it. That is why we need to have vision. To see it in our mind's eye, to visualise it. It is why, when we walk, we lock our eyes on our destination. We have eyes to help us orient ourselves, to see where we are going and what we are aiming for. We buy with our eyes. We eat with our eyes.
The subconscious mind always speaks through imagery and emotion. It communicates through the imagination and, most profoundly, through our dreams. That is why dreams are so profound; they are bringing information from those deeper layers to our conscious mind and our psyche. They surface. They speak in symbols which are, in fact, archetypes.
What Is An Archetype ?
An archetype is a master pattern. An invisible blueprint for a universal idea.
It has no form of its own. It is shapeless, pure potential, living in what Jung called the collective unconscious. A realm beyond images and words. Yet when that formless pattern meets the human imagination, it crystallises. It becomes the Empress, the Hermit, or the Fool.
The image is not the archetype. It is the archetype made visible.
Because the image carries these deep layers, you don’t need to decode it intellectually. You feel it. You recognise it instantly, the way you recognise your own hand in the dark. We don’t learn what a "mother" is—we are born with the shape of motherness already inside us. We are biologically encoded to recognise the pattern of nurturing and protection. That invisible shape is the archetype.
The Empress in Tarot is that pattern dressed up in symbols of fertility and abundance so your conscious mind can engage with her. The image bypasses your rational brain and speaks directly to your subconscious.
Here are the mechanics:
Archetype: The invisible universal pattern.
Image: The visible form that pattern takes.
Recognition: The moment the conscious and subconscious meet.
The Tarot card is a mirror. It doesn't put something new into you; it reflects what was already there. That hit of recognition you feel? That is the archetype waking up.
Tarot - Archetypes & Narratives
The archetype is the static pattern. The character or the force. The narrative is the dynamic movement. The story of how that force plays out in time. In Tarot, they are inseparable yet distinct.
Take the Tower. The Archetype is the Lightning Bolt. The raw, sudden power of disruption that exists in the universe. The Narrative is the falling bodies and the crumbling stone.
The story of a structure that was built on a false foundation and must now come down. When we look at the card, the Archetype (the force) and the Narrative (the event) meet. We are not just seeing an "idea" of destruction. We are witnessing the "story" of a collapse.
Sometimes they exist separately:
The Archetype alone is a pulse of energy. It is "Motherness," "Authority," or "Chaos." It is a potential that sits inside us, waiting.
The Narrative alone is just a sequence of events. It is "I lost my job" or "I moved house." Without the archetype, it is just data.
But in the Tarot, they become One.
The card provides the image where the universal force (Archetype) hits our personal life story (Narrative). This is the meeting point. When we see the Tower, our subconscious does not just see a "pattern of disruption", it sees the specific "story of our own disruption."
The image acts as the bridge. It takes the invisible, timeless archetype and pours it into a visible, timely story. This is why we don't just "know" the card. We experience it. The Archetype wakes up, the narrative begins to move, and the meaning lands in our body as a felt hit of truth.
Stories Are Medicine
We are wired to recognise both archetypes and narratives. This inherent biological design is exactly why Tarot resonates so deeply with the subconscious mind. While the imagery is archetypal, bypassing the rational mind to speak in symbols, the deck itself tells a story. It speaks the story of the Fool, which is the story of every single one of us.
This is the adventure called life. We are the "Hero of a Thousand Faces" embarking on our own journey through the 78 cards. Within them, we experience the full spectrum: the pain, the loss, the hope, the struggle. We do not have to learn how to read this; we are quite literally encoded to understand this code.
Tarot imagery acts as a translator between conscious and subconscious mind. The subconscious sends its wisdom up through symbols, archetypes animated by narrative and the conscious mind receives them to begin making sense of the path. In this way, the card becomes a meeting point, a space where intuition and intellect can finally converse.
For millennia, shamans and indigenous healers understood that stories are medicine. Story is how we make sense of the world and remember who we are. It is why a story often cuts deeper than any modern therapy ever could. When we look at a card, we inevitably project our own inner world onto it. The imagery becomes a mirror, reflecting what lives within us but may have been hidden from view.
We must remember that we are wired for spiritual and transcendental experiences, and that spirituality is not separate from the body. It is through the body that we access it. It is only in the West that we made the mistake of splitting ourselves into parts. Mind here, body there, spirit somewhere else. But we are not separate. We were never separate. When the archetype meets the narrative in the mirror of the Tarot, we find our way back to being whole.