The Madonna Tarot Deck

When I began writing my book, The Moon & The Priestess – Accessing the Creative Unconscious with Tarot’s Archetypes, I spent a lot of my time thinking about the archetypes depicted in each card of the deck and how they might map across different media. In a previous blog post, I wrote about Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes and what they mean to us both in psychological and cultural terms:

Jung proposed the collective unconscious – “primordial images derived from the history of mankind.” These archetypes, which we have access to from birth, are activated within us such as the ‘Mother’ or the ‘Father’ archetype. Jung was careful to denote that these are not inherited ideas or images but rather ‘patterns of behaviour’ that emerge as a response to contact with an archetype, a process called ‘amplification.’

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I’ve had a life-long obsession with Madonna. When analysing the different archetypes that emerge naturally in the Tarot deck, I started to think about how Madonna has done something very similar throughout her career. Through a process that her fans and the press have dubbed ‘reinvention,’ Madonna has been activating the many archetypes of the feminine and the masculine in all of her multimedia works.

Madonna is first and foremost a visual artist – it is almost impossible to listen to her music without thinking about the images that accompany it, whether from music videos, album artwork, or a performance. That’s in no way meant to denigrate her music – which is an undisputed part of the twentieth / twenty-first century pop canon -but Madonna’s longevity is a result of her visual intelligence and understanding of archetypal images.

She is also one of the most photographed women in history and what makes her so distinctive from her peers is how, from the very beginning, she has always embodied a persona/character/archetype and told a story through the various media she interacts with. It is this quality that has prevented her from remaining static and instead she is always questing, changing how she appears in order to project a new, evolved sense of self. This is why over four decades she remains as compelling as ever.

With this in mind, I thought it would be rather fun to see if, across her entire body of work, I could find enough archetypal images of Madonna to map against the 22 cards of the Major Arcana in the Tarot deck. I was not surprised to find the task extremely easy. Madonna’s uncanny knowledge of visual media, be it cinema, photography, art, religious iconography, or performance, have all provided her with the visual vocabulary that taps into the very nature of being human.

So, isn’t it about time her official shop created a Madonna Tarot deck? I for one would buy it!!

Please note: This Tarot deck was created merely for fun and is not meant for sale or reuse, or to infringe anyone’s copyright.

Paull Blakeman is the author of The Moon & The Priestess – Accessing the Creative Unconscious with Tarot’s Archetypes. Pre-order here.