Archetype

For the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, an archetype is a universal symbolic form of the collective unconscious, such as the Mother, the Wise Old Man or the Shadow. Applied to tarot, the term is used to read the Major Arcana as fundamental figures of human experience: the Empress as creative mother, the Hermit as sage, the Devil as shadow. Jung himself mentioned the tarot, but this reading developed mainly after him, among tarot authors.