Part 1:
About The Deck

Part 2:
The Archetypes

Part 3:
The 15 Directions

Part 4:
Readings

UNDERSTANDING  The Spiral Journey Cards ^TM
Part 2: The Archetypes

A Card Set for Co-Creation in Relationship
by Honora Finkelstein and Susan Smily

Understanding the Archetypes

The six "suits" of  The Spiral Journey Cards™ deck make use of six common archetypal roles all human beings will eventually play if they are to become whole, healthy, and integrated. They are the Innocent, the Orphan, the Seeker, the Warrior, the Lover, and the Magician.¹ Indeed, each of us will cycle through each of these roles many times in a single lifetime because every new adventure we encounter, every problem, situation, and relationship will elicit from us a response related to one of these six basic roles.

As mentioned above, we can think of our life experience as a spiraling journey up a mountain; if we are committed to growth and understanding, we’ll find when we come to the end of each adventure that we’ve moved upward on the spiral. And the archetypal roles we play are the vehicles we climb inside and drive in our upward movement. Of course, if we fail to learn a particular lesson, we may just find ourselves driving around in circles instead of moving up on the spiral! But if we commit ourselves to working with the archetypal roles, we find we can identify more easily where we are on our life path with respect to our thoughts, our feelings, our desire for action, and our need for spiritual development. Hence, the cards become a tool for self-understanding and personal growth.

More specifically, the cards were designed to be used as a tool for reflecting or mirroring back to us insights into our relationships with other people, things, and situations. We are never in a vacuum; we are always in relationship to someone or something: our partners, our children, our jobs, our goals, even our laundry! Drawing a card with a particular relationship in mind will offer us a means of identifying first the role we are playing in that relationship and then how we can best go about responding to the relationship from that role, given the other specifics of the card we have drawn (for example, its gift and challenge, its directional pattern, its right or left brain aspect, the energy of youth or maturity it incorporates, etc.)

If we have more than one relationship we’re concerned with (and everyone always has many relationships operating all at the same time), we can draw a card for each. Obviously, at any given time in our lives, we’ll be playing a number of different roles, determined by the number of relationships with which we concern ourselves. And we’ll probably play a different role with respect to each relationship; for example, we may play the lover role with our partner and the warrior role on the job, or vice versa.

The archetypes for The Spiral Journey Cards™ deck are embodied in the pictures; the energy of the archetype is then further refined by the words on the cards, the four directions and the cross corners, the right and left brain/masculine-feminine aspects, the child/grandparent aspects, the lower and upper chakra aspects, etc. When you use your cards, consider the pictures as you work with the meanings of the words on the cards. Look at the patterns of the words, how they are placed with relationship to the four directions and to each other. Then see if you can find any significance with respect to the pictures as to where the words would fall were the directional pattern overlaid on the picture.

For example, in the pattern for the Lover, the word "stability" is the Emotional-Mental connector word on the horizontal axis. Were you to draw that card, you could make the horizontal axis of the picture of the Lover the object for a brief meditation. What thoughts or feelings come up for you as you look at that part of the picture? Is the Lover, in giving from her basket, actually contributing to her stability? Does this imply anything about the balancing influence of giving? How would playing the role of giver in the relationship about which you’re seeking a reflection create a more stable, balanced outcome for all concerned?

(1) These six archetypes are among those described by Carol S. Pearson in her two excellent books on the archetypes of the hero’s Journey, The Hero Within (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986) and Awakening the Hero Within (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1991). For more information on archetypes and the roles to which they relate, we recommend these books.