TAROT - Fool's journey
The Meaning of Life
What, then, is the Meaning of Life?
Since the dawn of human consciousness, this question has followed us like a luminous shadow: Why am I here? From where do I come? Where am I going?
Each being, in secret, carries this silent quest within — the longing to reconcile the visible and the invisible, Spirit and Matter, the finite and the infinite.
The Fool’s Journey is not merely a tale drawn in archetypes; it is the sacred map of the soul’s descent into the dense realm of form, and its eventual
ascent toward illumination.
Each Major Arcana becomes a threshold, an initiation — the alchemical crucible in which the self is dissolved, purified, and reborn.
The Magician ignites the first spark of consciousness, the awareness of Will. The High Priestess guards the lunar mysteries of intuition and the unseen.
The Lovers teach the art of polarity — of choosing, uniting, transcending. And when we reach Death, we confront the black phase of alchemy: nigredo, the necessary dissolution before any new creation can emerge.
Thus, the path of the Tarot mirrors the path of the alchemist. Both are the science of transformation — not of metals alone, but of the human soul. Lead must become gold; ignorance must become wisdom. Through the cycles of calcination, dissolution, conjunction, and sublimation, the seeker refines the raw matter of experience into the pure essence of being.
This journey is not linear; it unfolds in spirals, in echoes, in returns — like an invisible thread guiding us back to our origin. It is the eternal Hero’s path, where curiosity leads to trial, trial to revelation, and revelation to metamorphosis. At the end of the pilgrimage, the World card stands as the opus magnum, the Philosopher’s Stone — the state of wholeness where opposites are reconciled, and the human and the divine are one.
Carl Jung reminds us that myths, symbols, and archetypes are not fictions but mirrors of the collective soul. The Tarot, like the alchemical furnace, reveals the operationsof transformation taking place within us. Each card, each symbol, is a mirror of our own multiplicity — our shadow, our light, our infinite potential.
To walk this path consciously is to participate in the Great Work — to discover, through experience, that the meaning of life is not a distant answer but a living process. It is the dance of dissolution and rebirth, of separation and union. It is the art of remembering that the gold we seek has always been hidden within the lead of our own being.
And perhaps this is the wisdom our age most needs to recover: that every human life is an alchemical vessel, every encounter a distillation, every sorrow a purification — all leading, in the end, to the radiant simplicity of being fully awake.
MYTHS and HEROES
Exploring the Archetypes that Populate Our Unconscious
The unconscious speaks in the language of symbols. It does not reveal itself only in our involuntary or compulsive behaviors: it has two privileged pathways
through which it crosses the threshold to converse with the conscious mind. One is dream; the other is imagination.
These two channels are refined modes of communication that the psyche has developed, so that unconscious and consciousness may speak to one another,
collaborate, and mutually enrich themselves.
The unconscious is the creative source from which all that evolves into consciousness emerges, gradually shaping the entirety of each individual’s personality.
From this raw, shadowy matter our conscious mind is formed, expands, and unfolds to embrace the latent qualities we carry within. From this hidden treasury
arise strengths and gifts we never knew we possessed, though they have belonged to us since the beginning.
Myths, fairy tales, and the ancient schools of wisdom often transmit, in symbolic form, the stages of inner transformation. In these stories, the journey toward
the discovery of the Higher Self — with its trials, obstacles, sudden breakthroughs, and initiations — is disguised as an outward journey: the hero’s quest.
Always, the same pattern is found in this “myth of the hero with a thousand faces,” whether he is called Gilgamesh, Rama, Orpheus, or Siegfried. For all these
heroes partake in the same eternal quest: the search for the meaning of life.
Thus myths and tales make the teachings of transformation accessible to the common understanding, transmitting truths to those who might not grasp them
directly. Yet they remain bound to the cultures, languages, and literary mediums of their time. It is not surprising, then, that humanity sought a more universal
language in which to express the archetypes of psychic transformation: a visual language, capable of resonating immediately in the soul of the perceiver without
the mediation of words. Images that reveal the stages of the path, the inner metamorphoses — and that carry teachings transcending the limits of time,
language, and culture.
Carl Jung affirmed that mythology and literature draw their power from their ability to embody these universal archetypes that awaken the human soul.
The simplest, most direct way to give form to an idea is to visualize it — to see it in the mind’s eye as vividly as if it were alive. Just as the physical eye
can only see what already exists in the outer world, the inner eye beholds what already exists in the invisible realms of spirit. To visualize an archetype is,
in a sense, to materialize it in our world, while simultaneously awakening what lay dormant in our unconscious.
Every image formed in the mind is a real substance: it is “the form of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Idea and thought are real; if we remain
faithful to the inner images, they will one day take form in the objective world.
By contemplating mythology or studying its symbols, we reactivate the power of imagination and step into a dimension of the psyche neglected in modern times.
We do so through dreams as much as through mythic images. These images move us, stir us, awaken emotion — and carry us into a state in which everything
falls into place, where we behold the world for what it truly is: profoundly magical.
SURREAL realm
SURREAL - symbols and DREAMS
The unconscious speaks in images — in the fluid, volatile language of symbols and dreams. It expresses itself not through reason,
but through imagination: the most refined bridge between the invisible and the visible.
Dream and imagination are the two luminous corridors through which the unconscious communicates with consciousness, allowing
the depths of the psyche to reveal themselves to the surface of awareness.
The unconscious is the creative source from which all that evolves into consciousness emerges. It is the dark womb of possibility
where our forgotten powers and unshaped potentials sleep, waiting to be called into being.
Myths, fairy tales, and the ancient schools of wisdom transmit, in symbolic form, the stages of inner transformation. What they describe outwardly as the hero’s quest — the trials, deaths, and resurrections — mirrors the soul’s own evolution. In every culture, the same pattern repeats: the search for the Self, the journey toward the meaning of existence.
Yet humanity longed for a more universal language — one capable of expressing these archetypes beyond the limits of words or geography.
It found it in the language of images: in the Tarot, in mandalas, in the spontaneous visions of dream and art.
Carl Jung affirmed that these symbols embody the universal forces that shape the human soul. The Surrealists, echoing this, rediscovered
imagination as a sacred faculty — not a form of escapism, but an act of creation.
For the imagination does not invent; it reveals. It shows us the invisible architecture beneath the surface of things. To imagine is to participate
in the world’s continual creation — to transform perception into revelation. When we engage with symbols, myths, or archetypal art, we awaken
the forgotten depth of our own psyche. We begin to see that the universe itself is woven from images — and that reality is not only rational,
but profoundly poetic. In this awakening, everything regains its secret shimmer: stone becomes alive, time breathes, and every gesture holds a hidden meaning.
We remember that the world was, and still is, magical.
The Fool begins where reason ends — on the threshold of the unknown, one step away from the abyss. He carries no plan, no map, no certainty —
only trust in the invisible. He is the wanderer who embodies the first surreal gesture: the refusal to accept reality as closed or complete. His leap into the void is not folly,
but faith — the pure act of imagination creating itself as it moves. Each step of his journey gives birth to a new world. The Magician, the Priestess,
the Lovers, the Hermit — these are not others he meets along the way, but fragments of his own being taking form before him.
In the surreal landscape of the Tarot, deserts turn into oceans, towers become fountains of stars, and paradox is the only law. The Fool’s path is
not progress, but metamorphosis. It unfolds in spirals of revelation, not in straight lines of logic.
Creation itself is the ultimate surreal act: the universe dreaming through us.
The artist and the Fool are twin expressions of this mystery — both dissolve the borders between dream and matter, both dare to let the unseen take form.
Jung called this process individuation; André Breton called it the fusion of dream and reality.
Both point toward the same awakening: the realization that the human being is not separate from the cosmos but its mirror, its experiment in consciousness.
To walk the Surreal Path of the Fool is to live as an open question — to embrace uncertainty, to follow coincidence as oracle, to welcome contradiction as teacher.
It is to perceive life itself as a work of art in continual creation.
Perhaps this is the ultimate wisdom of the Fool: that only by surrendering to wonder can we glimpse the truth; that meaning is not something to be found, but something we create as we walk; that the path and the traveler are one —and that in losing our way, we finally find ourselves.