Anytime one engages with material from the unconscious, insights that have been lurking in the Soul can finally be communicated and integrated. I will be referring to the unconscious as the Self or Soul, essentially being the same thing. This mysterious part of ourselves contains wisdom from experiences of this life and surrounding lives, wanting to work with consciousness throughout time to fulfill needs, desires, and relationships. Some people find themselves not really loving partners, careers, or homes anymore. What caused this shift? How do you answer what you really want versus what you really need? Why do you get lonely or aggressive when you’re drunk? All of this can definitely stem from when we were children, and oftentimes working with the unconscious will take you back to childhood experiences, but our society is built in a way that doesn’t appreciate these instincts or Essence. Listening to oneself, and every aspect of oneself, can help with understanding those basic needs and how our Personality ends up obscuring them from childhood wounds. Not only can this communication open up through Tarot, but also through dream work, breathwork, and inner work tools like the Enneagram.
An individual’s unconscious material can be very different from the next. Because we’re all operating different Personality type structures and attempting to get closer to Essence in all the wrong ways, there is unending material to sort through when doing inner work. Tarot can definitely capture these dynamics, just like one nights’ dream can capture the dynamics of how a dreamer is relating to an issue. But just like how my dream material is extremely personal and different from someone else’s, each Enneagram core type will relate to a Tarot card differently. Not only do the Essential Qualities longed for by each type illuminate through the archetypes of the Major Arcana, but the way the personality is getting the Essential Quality wrong can also be shown. The Major Arcana represent archetypal energies that a person passes through in stages of their lifetime. An Essential Quality is a pure form of Essence or Being that the Ego/Personality desires to obtain in life, but normally fails to do so as they become stuck in patterns that are comfortable and predictable. Imagine as a very basic example, an Essential Quality of Love (not to be related to Enneagram Type Two). What happens when you go through life loving all the wrong people? But you love Love, what could you possibly be doing wrong? Once you discover that Love can only come from within, and you acknowledge the pure form of energy that Love takes, you can start to see how much you’ve been looking for it in other people, and quite frankly anybody that seemed to make you feel Love. If a person with this tendency were to pull The Lovers card, this concept can be illuminated in a highly more nuanced way. The archetypes of the Tarot cards are a direct message from the unconscious of a querent, and once a conversation can open up between the unconscious and consciousness, the pattern can be revealed and a person can now become aware and make more present-focused decisions or associations.
The archetypes of the Major Arcana can point out and reveal our type’s relationship to Essence:
The Fool is the Soul pushing Ego/Personality out of the way to obtain Essence. This push will feel risky, terrifying, and unexplainable, but yet rewarding in the long term.
The Chariot is the battle between what is right for the Soul and what is comfortable for the Personality. Shedding the patterns of the Personality as a vehicle that’s no longer serving you can give an opportunity for the Soul to expand and grow into something more fitting.
The Devil can show what the Personality is ashamed of or avoiding, and how that can create a boundary destroying Essence. The Personality consistently ‘fails’ at acquiring Essence, but through the relationship with this ‘failure’ it has now created the illusion of entrapment. Allowing the Soul to properly connect with Essence lifts that illusion and frees itself from the ‘failures’.
Peering into the symbolism of each card and identifying what universal conflict is occurring can help a querent of a specific type become more aware of their Essential Quality. To begin, let’s start with identifying the Essential Qualities of the nine types:
Type One – Integrity
Type Two – Love
Type Three – Value
Type Four – Depth
Type Five – Insight
Type Six – Truth
Type Seven – Freedom
Type Eight – Power
Type Nine – Harmony
In the suffering caused by losing the Essential Quality, an Enneagram type will exhibit a Passion. Identifying a Passion can help see how the Personality is taking more control than the Soul. This is a helpful tool when trying to identify what exactly the Personality is doing ‘wrong’ to obtain Essence. What part of the Personality is being threatened and abandoned as depicted in The Fool? What exactly is the Personality ashamed of when The Devil appears? The nine types’ Passions are:
Type One – Anger
Type Two – Pride
Type Three – Vanity
Type Four – Envy
Type Five – Avarice
Type Six – Fear
Type Seven – Gluttony
Type Eight – Lust
Type Nine – Sloth
This now breaks down the cards in a more specific way. A type Nine may pull The Fool and realize that Sloth has been sabotaging Harmony, and to truly experience Essence, being with oneself fully will create a large shift. A type Seven may pull The Devil and realize they’ve been ashamed of their own Gluttony, which creates a self-inflicted limitation, and contradicts actually experiencing Freedom. Each individual will relate to these equations in a much more nuanced way depending on what sort of insight has been requested at the time of a reading, and any surrounding cards can help identify more specifics as well. Within these blog posts, I will expand on this concept playing out with each card of the Major Arcana.
Even though discovering ones’ core type can reveal a whole series of these patterns immediately, it can still cause confusion in day-to-day life, decisions, and reflections as the Personality will continue to try and hide itself. This is where Tarot can shine a light on the ‘mess’. Can’t decide how to approach a situation coming up in life? Not sure on whether to pursue a potential new partner? Wonder how your type influenced a moment or event in the past? Conjuring up the right question or genuine curiosity to bring to a Tarot reading can strengthen your unconscious and conscious relationship. We’ll never fully ‘break’ our patterns or ‘kill’ our Personality, but working with it can help us not get stuck in a hole that was actually quite predictable and avoidable.
Unsure of your Enneagram type? Don’t just take an online quiz if you’re serious about this work. The information online, and what’s used to conduct those quizzes, is coming from a misinterpretation of the Enneagram. Refer to these resources, and consider the typing services they offer:
Big Hormone Enneagram Podcast
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