Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
Tarot and Symbolon symbolism. How to read symbols without turning the practice into a “shaman’s tambourine dance”
When a person first comes to working with symbolic systems — be it classic Tarot or the astropsychological oracle Symbolon — their psyche almost always wants to put on a “crown” and know everything. We want to pull a card and have it instantly unpack in our head into a super-insight. But reality works differently. If you have not yet built up an inner library of meanings, the mind either stalls or starts frantically “skimming the surface”, clinging to textbook interpretations.
Over 8 years of teaching Tarot and Symbolon, combining it with daily psychological practice, I have arrived at a clear formula: depth is born only where there is a layered structure. We cannot jump over the steps without breaking the very process of exploring ourselves.
Let’s look at how the methodology of truly reading symbols works, why Symbolon is not Tarot, and how to make the archetypes speak to your unconscious in one language.
The layered cake of perception — a methodology for reading symbols
Reading any card in Symbolon is a gradual, conscious widening of your understanding of what each layer is about. There are three of them, and you have to move through them strictly one after another.
Layer 1 — Psychological (The pure picture)
The first thing we do here, when we draw a card from the deck, is switch astrology off completely. We don’t look at the symbols, we don’t recall the theory. We take the information straight from the picture.
In this respect Symbolon works like an ideal metaphorical associative card (MAC). Your task here is to read the story at a purely psychological level. What is happening there? Who are these characters? What distance lies between them? What emotion is hidden in their postures? At this first layer understanding comes intuitively, through resonance with your personal experience. The picture unconsciously stirs the right triggers in the psyche, and the first thing that suggests itself as the answer to a position in the spread is usually the most accurate.
Layer 2 — Astropsychological (Glyphs of planets and signs)
Only once the card’s story has been lived through and felt do we lift the next layer. We shift our gaze to the corners of the card and look at the glyphs — the astrological signs and planets.
This is where pure synthesis begins. Say that at the psychological level you saw a certain conflict or, on the contrary, a triumph. Now look at which forces stand behind it. If, for example, the Sun and Venus are involved, a concentrate of information should rise in your mind at once:
• The Sun is our Ego, the centre of the personality, showing ourselves, the impulse of “I am”.
• Venus is our choices, tastes, values, our aesthetic surroundings.
Combining them archetypally, we get a quite concrete synthesis: showing off, exhibitions, celebrations, displaying the fruits of your creativity in a very aesthetic, beautiful setting. The glyphs give the psychological story a firm, clear structure. There is no room for random chaos here.
Layer 3 — Natal (Threading it onto yourself)
The deepest stage is the attempt to thread the archetype onto your individual chart. You take this combination of planets and signs and look for it in your natal chart.
Where is your Venus? Which house is your Sun in? How does this myth play out in your real life and destiny? Here the Symbolon card acts as a fine marker that highlights a specific area of your life. At this stage the abstract archetypal picture turns into a reflection of your personal psychic reality.
The energy of the elements. Why Symbolon is definitely not Tarot
Very often practitioners with a strong grounding in Tarot automatically try to “stretch” their past experience over how they perceive Symbolon. And they make a mistake. They start looking in the spreads for the familiar structure of the primal elements: “Which element dominates here? Where are the wands or the cups?”
And this is exactly where it is not about Tarot. The systems are built in fundamentally different ways, and these things have to be kept strictly apart.
In Tarot, reading by the elements is the very first, energetic layer. Astrology has elements too, but their function is different. In a natal chart we calculate the balance of the elements (across 12 signs and 10 planets) to understand a person’s inner essence, their basic temperament. But when we take Symbolon and lay out a spread, an attempt to “energise” the cards through the prism of the four elements breaks the structure built into them. Quite possibly this particular spread is answering specific life or psychological questions right now, and not telling you which energy is active in you today.
In Symbolon the structure is deeper and subtler. Here each of the four elements is divided in detail into its components. We are dealing with 12 signs, which means that each element has three states of matter.
The triangle of development — impulse, stabilisation and transformation
All the magic and evolution of the human psyche is built on the triangle of development. In astropsychology this triangle is embedded in every trine of the elements. To understand the energy of a sign in its pure form, you have to grasp at which stage of the energy’s development it stands.
Let’s look at this using the element of Fire as an example:
Stage 1 — Impulse (Aries)
It is always a powerful, uncontrollable explosion. Pure kinetic energy aimed at release. In Tarot this archetype is vividly reflected in the Emperor arcanum. But look at the Emperor in Tarot — he is static and stable, because his task is to firmly structure this wild initial impulse. If the Emperor archetype is blocked or weak inside the psyche, the energy of Aries turns negative: tyranny, plunder, suppression of other people’s will and destructive domination begin.
Stage 2 — Stabilisation (Leo)
If Aries (Mars) is an arrow pointing upwards, like a release, then Leo (the Sun) is energy aimed at gathering and holding around a centre. In the middle of the sign of Leo there is a dot. This is our “I”, our inner centre, whose gravity has to hold the energy around itself. If your “I” is feeble, faded or traumatised, the energy is not held; it scatters and turns into cheap play-acting.
Stage 3 — Transformation (Sagittarius)
Only when the impulse has been stabilised in Leo can the energy evolve further — into Sagittarius. Here we also see an arrow, but with a crossbar. It is a symbol of crossing the boundary of the material world. It means going beyond limits, striving towards the spiritual world, broadening your horizons. If the previous stages have not been passed through, a person simply will not have the capacity and the energy to make this qualitative leap. All the processes will still go on, but instead of spiritual expansion the psyche will get only illusions and false grandeur.
And every element is built this way: the impulse of action, the process of stabilisation and the process of transformation.
Before trying to synthesise cards, you need to learn to feel these pure archetypes.
How to build up an inner library of meanings
If you feel that the synthesis cards in Symbolon (where two different energies work at once, linking, for example, earth and air, fire and water) come hard to you — slow down. Don’t force your psyche. When you take a complex synthesis card without a solid base, the unconscious starts defending itself and produces chaos instead of an interpretation.
What should a practitioner do?
Go back to the basics. Symbolon has 12 basic archetypal cards (the pure signs and their ruling planets). If you want to build up precisely the energetic, deep layer, lock the synthesis cards away in a drawer for a couple of weeks. Work only with these 12 cards as a “Card of the day”.
Every morning draw one card out of the twelve basic ones. Live it through. Watch how the pure energy of Mars, the Moon or Saturn shows up in your life today. Build up this inner library. And when behind every word — be it Pluto, Venus or Mercury — there stands inside you not dry text from a lecture but a real, dense, hard-earned concentrate of personal experience, the synthesis cards will open up to you by themselves. Easily, deeply and without extra effort.
Take the first step towards reading Symbolon systematically
Depth is not born in a single day — it is built up through regular, layer-by-layer immersion. Right now you can sign up for the course “Symbolon. Initiation by Symbol”.
There we work through real client cases every week, learn to link the symbolism of Symbolon with natal charts and translate the language of the unconscious into plain human language.
Follow this link or fill in the form below — stop reading the cards alone.
