Ongoing Process

As part of my recent exploration the Western Mystery Tradition, I have begun examining the structure and symbolism of the Tarot (specifically the Waite-Smith deck).  I came upon Joan Bunning’s excellent instructional site, Learning the Tarot, and was intrigued by her description of the court cards of the minor arcana as a personality system similar to, among others, the Myers-Briggs.  Having been a fan of MB for some time and seeing that there were 16 such cards and 16 MB types, I immediately wondered if a direct correlation could be drawn between them.

It was first a bit tricky to correlate, as the Tarot is based on two sets of four (the suits and the ranks) and the Myers-Briggs is based on four sets of two (the polarities of the four dichotomies).  Clearly, each Tarot set would have to encode two MB sets.  After pondering it for a while, it seemed like the Tarot suits corresponded to the MB functions (Sensing/iNtuitive & Thinking/Feeling).  That left the Tarot ranks to represent the MB attitude (Extrovert/Introvert) and lifestyle (Judging/Perceiving), which felt like a reasonable fit.

Pattern in hand, I set about discerning the content.  I started with Thinking, which seemed very clearly a Sword trait.  To complete the MB function pair, I chose iNtuitive as it seemed more in line with the pure discernment of Swords and had a more air quality to it, which is the associated element.  Moving on to the rank, I thought that King was easily Extrovert and Queen equally Introvert.  To finish out the Queen, I thought she seemed to have more of a Perceiving quality.

I’ll skip the rest of the play-by-play, but I proceeded in a similar manner until I had filled in all 16 links.  Here’s what I came up with:

INFP - Queen of Cups
INFJ - Knight of Cups
INTP - Queen of Swords
INTJ - Knight of Swords
ISFP - Queen of Pentacles
ISFJ - Knight of Pentacles
ISTP - Queen of Wands
ISTJ - Knight of Wands
ENFP - Page of Cups
ENFJ - King of Cups
ENTP - Page of Swords
ENTJ - King of Swords
ESFP - Page of Pentacles
ESFJ - King of Pentacles
ESTP - Page of Wands
ESTJ - King of Wands

I think it’s pretty interesting.  Of course, I could be entirely wrong.  :)  But if I’m not, being an INTP it would appear that I am also the Queen of Swords, which I think fits me pretty well.  This interpretation is also spot-on in that I find I am still growing out of the INTJ of my youth, which is the Knight of Swords and reads like my high school biography.

All in all, very cool.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Geek, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.