Semiotica 2015; 205: 95–114

Inna Semetsky
The edusemiotics of Tarot: Recovering the
lost feminine
Abstract: The term edusemiotics indicates a novel interdisciplinary field of
inquiry at the intersection of educational philosophy, learning theory, and a
science of signs. The article explores the semiotics of Tarot images as a mode of
informal learning from experiences that are symbolically represented in the
language of images as a feminine mode of expression. As embedded in the
dynamics of semiosis, the process of reading and interpreting Tarot signs estab-
lishes a connection between self and other, subject and object, matter and mind,
thus overcoming Cartesian dualism in practice. The implications are profound as
Tarot edusemiotics contributes to our moral and intellectual growth.

Keywords: Tarot, education, hermeneutics, semiosis, tertium, gnosis

DOI 10.1515/sem-2015-0008

1 Introduction
The term edusemiotics – educational semiotics – was coined by Marcel Danesi
(2010) to indicate a novel interdisciplinary field of inquiry that has emerged as a
result of my research across educational philosophy and semiotics (Semetsky
2010b). Stressing the importance of “sculpting a veritable edusemiotics for the
future” (Danesi 2010: vii; italics in original), Danesi commented that

until recently, the idea of amalgamating signs with learning theory and education to
establish a new branch, which can be called edusemiotics, has never really crystallized,
even though the great Russian psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky had remarked… that the “very
essence of human memory is that human beings actively remember with the help of
signs”… In these words can be detected the raison d’être for establishing a connection
between semiotics as the science of signs, learning theory or the science of how signs are
learned, and education, that is, the practical art/science of teaching individuals how to
interpret and understand signs. (Danesi 2010: vii)

Inna Semetsky, Centre for Global Studies in Education, University of Waikato, 1 Knighton Rd,
Hamilton 3240, New Zealand, E-mail: irs5@columbia.edu

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96 Inna Semetsky

Education today does not exclude popular culture, which is considered to be

one of its resources (Silberman-Keller et al. 2008) encompassing broad phenom-
ena outside academia. These resources influence education even if the dichotomy
between formal and post-formal (cultural) education appears to persist.
Contemporary research in education indicates that popular culture plays a sig-
nificant role in the process of identity-formation and cultural pedagogy located
outside formal educational settings and requiring novel rigorous research meth-
odologies (Steinberg et al. 1999) such as bricolage (Kincheloe and Berry 2005). It is
a bricoleur who acts as the first explorer, tries new strategies, and opens new
avenues for educational research while also taking an ethical stance of helping
people in reshaping their lives. Doing bricolage involves marginalized practices
and the development of transgressive conceptual tools as well as exploring the
breadth and wealth of typically underestimated human cognitive capacities. This
essay addresses just one such marginalized practice that exists at the level of
popular culture: the bricolage of Tarot images and their interpretation, known in
popular parlance as Tarot readings.

2 Tarot and educational semiotics

The educational role of Tarot images remains underexplored and the phenom-
enon of Tarot readings itself is usually located at the very “low” end of culture in
Western societies (Auger 2004). Tarot pictures are historically excluded from
“high” visual art forms such as paintings. This is despite the fact that the
Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris holds a collection of exquisitely painted Tarot
cards documented in the French court ledger as dating back to 1392. The
collection located at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York contains thirty-
five picturesque cards from a full deck of seventy-eight, whose origin goes back
to the middle of the fifteenth century.
Images and pictures do belong to the category of signs (Posner 1989;
Sonesson 1989): “pictures have a continuous structure [that] induces the reader
to… read the picture as if it were a written text” (Posner 1989: 276); this
interpretive or reading process leading to the production of meanings for
human experiences “voiced” by the language of Tarot images. It is on the
basis of this theory that the claim can be made for Tarot representing a modality
of cultural pedagogy and informal learning from experience by means of inter-
preting the symbolism of the pictures and discovering their meanings (Semetsky
2011a). Semiotics generalizes signs to include both verbal and non-verbal and as
embedded in any medium, hence not only broadening the range of sign-systems

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 97

and sign-relations but simultaneously extending the very definition of language

to include its analogical or metaphorical sense. A head start to the specifically
educational value demonstrated by the symbolic language of Tarot was provided
during my presentation at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of
America (SSA) where, while still a post-graduate student, I read a paper titled
“The adventures of a postmodern Fool, or: the semiotics of learning” (Semetsky
2001), which showcased the first picture in the Tarot deck called The Fool
(Figure 1), and which subsequently received the first Roberta Kevelson
Memorial Award for its contribution to the research program promoted by the
Semiotic Society of America.
According to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, edited by Thomas
Sebeok, Tarot readings belong to “a branch of divination based upon the
symbolic meaning attached to individual Tarot cards… interpreted according to
the subject or purpose of a reading and modified by their position and relation
to each other from their specific location in a formal ‘layout’ or ‘spread’” (Sebeok
1994: 99). Such a definition, while acknowledging the images’ symbolic mean-
ings, still reflects a rather stereotypical perception of Tarot reduced to mere
fortune-telling (cf. Heeren and Mason 1984; Lekomceva and Uspensky 1977) as
“a specific instance of persuasive dyadic human communication” (Aphek and
Tobin 1989: 175). This is a perception that I have been systematically decon-
structing in the course of my research summarized in two recent books Re-
Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic
(Semetsky 2011a) and The Edusemiotics of Images: Essays on the Art~Science of
Tarot (Semetsky 2013). Rather, Tarot edusemiotics as a mode of informal peda-
gogy necessarily includes a therapeutic aspect of self-discovery.
The word “education” derives from Latin educare, which means to lead out
as well as to bring out something that is within. The word “therapy” derives
from the Greek therapeia in terms of human service to those who need it.
Education and counseling alike involve either implicit or explicit inquiry into
the nature of the self and self-other relations. Notably, each professional activity
“furthers another’s capacity to find meaning and integrity” (Witherell 1991: 84)
in lived experience as both practices are “designed to change or guide human
lives” (1991: 84). In the context of Tarot edusemiotics, the division between
therapy and education as two disparate disciplines becomes blurred as both
are significant for human development in terms of creating meanings for our
experience that includes the realm of the yet unknown and unconscious.
Contemporary cognitive scientist Ray Jackendoff (2001), who holds an eco-
logical perspective on mind, suggests that even verbal utterances should be
understood semiotically rather than strictly linguistically, that is, in terms of
their establishing a relation between a conscious mental representation (an

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98 Inna Semetsky

Figure 1: The image of The Fool.1

expression) and an unconscious mental representation (a hidden message).

Making the unconscious conscious is the prerogative of Tarot edusemiotics. In
brief, the Tarot sign-system consists of 78 images called Arcana, the 22 Major
Arcana and the remaining 56 Minor. The meaning of the word Arcanum

1 The images in Figures 1 and 2 are from Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, known also as the Rider Tarot
and the Waite Tarot. Reproduced by permission of US Games Systems Inc., Stamford, CT 06902,
USA. Copyright 1971 by US Games Systems, Inc. Further reproduction prohibited.

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 99

(singular) is this creative, but often missing or obscured, element in our experi-
ences, which is necessary to know, to discover in practical life, so as to become
fruitful and creative in our approach to multiple life-tasks situated in the midst
of experiential situations, events, and our complex relationships with others
when we face decisions and choices or encounter moral dilemmas.
Learning occurs not only in formal settings; the concept of learning pertains
to real-life events that can embody significant meanings and values implicit in
collective experiences, the symbolism of which transcends cultural and lan-
guage barriers. As pictorial artifacts, Tarot images represent potentially mean-
ingful (upon interpretation) patterns of thoughts, affects, emotions, feelings, and
behaviors. Cultural artifacts are capable of semiotic or communicative potential;
different objects and events in our life carry cultural, psychological, and social
significance and represent symbolic “texts” to be read and interpreted. Reading
and interpreting diverse cultural “texts” embodied in Tarot images partakes of
semanalysis – a term coined by French cultural theorist and semiotician Julia
Kristeva (cf. Nöth 1995). Semanalysis is a portmanteau word referring to both
semiotics and psychoanalysis and emphasizing interpretation and becoming
conscious of the unconscious. Kristeva’s concept “subject in process” would
have challenged a self-conscious subject as the fixed product of the traditional
educational system. Human subjectivity is continuously produced in experience:
Tarot edusemiotics is equivalent to constructing – and learning – “critical
lessons” (Noddings 2006) that, in their symbolic form, are embedded in the
semiotic process of human experiential growth, both intellectual and ethical.
What is called a Tarot layout is a particular pattern full of rich symbolism; with
images embodying intellectual, moral, and spiritual lessons derived from col-
lective human experiences across times, places, and cultures. Yet the moral of
these symbolic lessons – the very meanings of Tarot signs – may be hiding deep
in the midst of the field conceived by psychologist Carl Gustav Jung as the
collective unconscious.

3 Tarot and depth psychology

Jung commented that the Tarot images “were distantly descended from the
archetypes of transformation” (CW 9: 81). Jung’s student Sallie Nichols (1980),
in her book on Jung and Tarot, pointed out the correlations between Petrarch’s
sonnets and the Major Arcana, the images of which are sometimes called
trumps. Trumps means Triumphs, and in Petrarch’s sonnets a series of allego-
rical characters each fought and triumphed over the weaker preceding one, each
image symbolically winning over its own precursor by the characters becoming

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100 Inna Semetsky

emotionally stronger, more resilient, and more conscious after overcoming the
challenges of emerging life cycle issues. Each Tarot image implies a moral
dimension pertaining to what John Dewey (1988 [1922]) called human conduct.
Becoming aware of the deep meanings of our experiences that were hiding deep
in the unconscious serves as a powerful motivational force to facilitate changes
and transformations at our emotional, cognitive or behavioral levels and thus to
accomplish an important ethical and educational objective. As the images
denote archetypes of the collective unconscious or the universal memory “con-
taining” experiences gained by humankind in the course of its history, their
significance crosses the barriers between times, places and cultures.
The universality of the Tarot themes reflects the view of transpersonal
psychology that basic human values are cross-cultural. Cultural relativism sur-
renders under the fact that Tarot Arcana embody common values grounded in
basic, yet universal, human experiences that include “the commonalities of
birth, death, physical and emotional needs, and the longing to be cared for.
This last – whether it is manifested as a need for love, physical care, respect or
mere recognition – is the fundamental starting point for the ethics of care”
(Noddings 1998: 188). In the context of feminine moral philosophy and care
theory in education, world-renowned philosopher of education Nel Noddings
pointed to such common global human experiences as birth, marriage, mother-
hood, death or separation, even while denying abstract moral universals when
they are understood solely as some predestined rules for our actions. These
archetypal – typical – experiences are reflected in the symbolism of the pictures;
for example, the image of The Empress (Figure 2) stands for motherhood.
Importantly, abstract universal principles as a theoretical construct acquire
embodied reality as concrete, particular, real-life human experiences embedded
in our practical lives in the process of Tarot hermeneutics as the interpretation of
symbols. Etymologically, the Greek words hermeneuein and hermeneia for inter-
preting and interpretation are related to the deity Hermes, a messenger and
mediator between gods and mortals, who crosses the thresholds and traverses
the boundaries because he can “speak” and understand both languages, the
divine and the human, even if they appear totally alien to each other.

4 Peirce’s semiotics: the included middle

In the semiotic framework advanced by Charles Sanders Peirce, meaning is
produced in the triadic relation between a sign and its object when mediated
by the inclusion of a third category called by Peirce an interpretant. This
“included third” defies Cartesian dualism. Genuine signs have a relational

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 101

Figure 2: The image of The Empress.

structure in which a sign corresponds with, or relates to, its object. A relation as
an ontological category rejects dualistic substances as the furniture of the world.
Peirce stated that the universe is “perfused with signs, if… not composed
exclusively of signs” (CP 5: 448). Likewise, the prevalence of relations and
correspondences is a feature of Hermetic philosophy also known as Western
esotericism (Faivre 1994). The Western esoteric tradition is heavily under-
researched in education. Any integral or holistic pedagogical practices that

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102 Inna Semetsky

embody meanings and values tend to be theoretically informed by Eastern

philosophies such as Buddhism or Taoism. Noddings (e.g., 2003 [1984], 2006),
however, urges contemporary educators to become Renaissance people and
have a broad knowledge not only of disciplines and subject matters but also
of perennial philosophical questions.
Renaissance culture was marked by the revival of the Hermetic tradition
and the explosion of visual arts. As Yates (1964, 1966) indicated, the great
cultural explosion in the Renaissance was informed by the Neoplatonic and
Hermetic writings. As a form of thought focusing on deep inner knowledge, or
Gnosis (Greek for ‘knowing’) the Hermetic tradition survived many centuries
into the Christian era. Revived by Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and
Giordano Bruno, it informed the Renaissance, since then being manifested in
a plurality of forms, including the pictorial representation of this knowledge
in the symbols and images of Tarots. Antoine Faivre, Professor at the École
Pratique des Hautes Études at Sorbonne, whose research on Western esoteri-
cism (Faivre 1994) is the first systematic treatment of the Hermetic tradition
published in English, positions Tarot within this philosophical framework
and presents it as one of the forms of intuitive Gnostic knowledge. Faivre
demonstrates that “Tarot, a specific art… is a subject of extensive literature,
both scholarly and popular, and increasingly suffuses our culture [and]
through a hermeneutic of situations and characters, it… opens out upon a
gnosis” (1994: 96).
The Russian-born philosopher and mathematician Peotr Ouspensky (2008),
whose papers are presently held in the Yale University Library Manuscripts and
Archives, posited Tarot primarily as a threefold metaphysical system indicating the
relation between a human soul, the physical or phenomenal world, and the world
of ideas or the noumenal, divine or spiritual, world. Ouspensky pointed out that
Tarot symbolism cannot be learned in the same way as one learns to build bridges
or speak a foreign language: the interpretation of symbols requires the power of
creative thought, intuition, and imagination. Still, Tarot tends to stay a low-status
practice at the level of pop culture even as contemporary Irish abbot and philoso-
pher Mark Patrick Hederman (2003) relates Tarot to education and highlights it as
being one of the most important, even if elusive, symbolic systems. Hederman is
adamant that “each of us should be given at least the rudiments of [Tarot] if we are
even to begin to understand human relationships. This would require tapping into
a wavelength and a communication system other than the cerebral, reaching what
has been called the ‘sympathetic system’ as opposed to the cerebrospinal one
which covers the three R’s of traditional education” (2003: 87).
Tarot edusemiotics, in contrast to the three R’s of conventional education,
encompasses what I call the three I’s model (Semetsky 2011b, Semetsky 2013)

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 103

and enriches education with intuition, insight, and imagination as components

of Gnostic knowledge. Gnosis involves both “intuition and the certainty of
possessing a method permitting access to such knowledge” (Faivre 1994: 19).
Intuition partakes of Peirce’s abductive mode of inference (Semetsky 2005) and
is indispensible for reading and interpreting Tarot’s non-verbal messages, there-
fore helping us in converting real-life problematic situations “from the obscure
into the clear and luminous” (Dewey 1980 [1934]: 266). Dewey considered intui-
tion to be part and parcel of experiential inquiry, and it is in the process of
reading and interpreting Tarot signs and symbols that “the im-plicit is made ex-
plicit; what was unconsciously assumed is exposed to the light of the day”
(Dewey 1991a: 214).
In contemporary discourse, abduction is usually described as an inference
to the best explanation (e.g., Hintikka 1998; Magnani 2001). Peirce, however,
emphasized the feeling-tone of abduction, saying that every abductive infer-
ence involves a particular emotion: “the various sounds made by the instru-
ments in the orchestra strike upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical
emotion… This emotion is essentially the same thing as a hypothetic infer-
ence” (CP 2: 643). Peirce noticed that “the first premise is not actually thought,
though it is in the mind habitually. This, of itself, would not make the
inference unconscious. But it is so because it is not recognized as an infer-
ence; the conclusion is accepted without our knowing how” (CP 8: 64–65), as
if intuitively. Peirce compared abduction with the “insight of females as well
as certain ‘telepathic’ phenomena… Such faint sensations ought to be fully
studied by the psychologist and assiduously cultivated by every man” (in
Hacking 1990: 206). It is by virtue of abduction that a genuine Tarot reader
can translate the silent language of images into a spoken word, thus bringing
the unconscious to our awareness.
While Tarot helps achieve an expanded and intensified scope of awareness
that encompasses the level of meanings and values – that is, the realm of
human subjectivity – it is not altogether foreign to scientific – read, objective –
reason: logic peculiar to signs was defined by Peirce as “the science of the
necessary laws of thought, or, still better (thought always taking place by
means of signs), it is a general semeiotic, treating not merely of truth, but also
of the general conditions of signs being signs” (Peirce CP 1: 444). We learn from
our experiences that are symbolically embodied in pictures and express them-
selves in the language of images. The embodied knowledge is a province of
semiotics: it is the “Third, or mediation” (CP 6: 7) that connects the otherwise
binary opposites of subject and object, mind and matter, self and other. Dewey
stated that “to ‘learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward
connection [that]… becomes instruction – discovery of the connection of things”

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104 Inna Semetsky

(1924 [1916]: 164). The interpretation of images produces meanings as significant

messages; and it is “the constitution of messages [that] forms the subject matter of
semiotics” (Sebeok 1991: 22). The Tarot sign-system functions as a semiotic bridge
that forms a relation between what we tend to perceive, in the tradition of
Cartesian dualism, as binary opposites that supposedly can never be reconciled,
such as mind and body, subject and object, self and other or, on the metaphysical
scale, the human and the divine. Two separate Cartesian substances – res extensa
(corporeal; material; body) and res cogitans (incorporeal; immaterial; mind) –
become integrated via the dynamics of semiosis; the name given by Peirce to
the action of signs across nature, culture, and the human mind.
Peirce defined intelligence as scientific if it could use signs and be “capable
of learning by experience” (CP 2: 227). Deely (2001) points out that Peirce’s
triadic semiotics is rooted in science rather than mysticism and emphasizes
that, for Peirce, logic – notably, triadic logic as semiotics – is an ethics of
thinking and is inseparable from human conduct, that is, ethics as the logic of
our actions in the world. The absence of formal instruction makes learning from
experience via Tarot signs a modality of informal education oriented to making
connections between disparate facts of experience so as to discover its meaning
or value; facts and values coalesce! Tarot edusemiotics entails the ethical
dimension as pertaining to both our thinking and acting. As artifacts, the
Tarot pictures are the products of technê from the Greek word for craftsmanship
or skill. The ancient Stoics developed the idea that virtue itself is a kind of technê
or craft of life based on a proper understanding of the working of the universe.
The artificial pictures are the signs that stand for (as signs, sure enough, are
supposed to do) real experiences embodied in the array of images representing
ancient virtues as the craft of life.
The interpretation of Tarot images produces practical effects in the form of
meanings for experiences and accords with Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “Consider
what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the
whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5: 402). Tarot images symbolically
represent those significant but often hidden from view human experiences, the
meanings of which, when discovered in the process of interpretation, assist
people in negotiating complex relationships with others when facing decisions,
choosing the course of action or encountering moral dilemmas. Yet, “it must be
admitted… that no-one has ever been able to explain how it [Tarot] works”
(Gettings 1973: 9; italics in original). It is edusemiotics that not only explains
the functioning of Tarot, but also presents its structure as a genuine Peircean
triad (Figure 3) in which a sign and what it stands for, its object, are connected
by virtue of an interpretant as the included middle:

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 105

I
(Interpretant)

S O
(Sign) (Object)

Figure 3: A triadic sign.

Significantly, Peirce defined “interpretant [as] the future memory of [man’s]

cognition, his future self” (CP 7: 591). This untimely, future-oriented, dimension
is peculiar to semiotics in general and to Tarot edusemiotics in particular. If we
literally step out of our Cartesian minds, forever separated from the world, and
connect in practice with the material world of our actions – as we do in the
process of Tarot edusemiotics – then we assume a position of what I call “radical
objectivity,” and which is analogous to the implications of the so-called triangle
argument (Figure 4) constructed on the basis of Einstein’s relativity:

Figure 4: The triangle argument.2

2 Reproduced with permission from Figure 5.3 in Kennedy (2003: 63).

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106 Inna Semetsky

The triangular structure above is isomorphic with Peirce’s triad, with the
simultaneous relation established between “me-now” and “me-tomorrow” as if
between a sign and its object; however not via the proverbial view from nowhere
(somewhere on the supernova) but within the here-and-now of a semiotic inter-
pretant represented by the layout of Tarot images that combines all three aspects
of time simultaneously, thus enriching our usual chronological time (Chronos)
with its philosophical, a-temporal or timeless, dimension (Aion).

5 Reading the other: a feminine factor

Philosopher of education Nel Noddings (1993; Noddings and Shore 1984) refers
to Gnostic knowledge in connection with intuition (Noddings and Shore 1984)
and feminine spirituality. She revisits the ancient “Know Thyself” principle:
“when we claim to educate, we must take Socrates seriously. Unexamined
lives may well be valuable and worth living, but an education that does not
invite such examination may not be worthy of the label education” (Noddings
2006: 10; italics in original). Still more often than not, education is equated with
formal schooling (for children) or perpetual training (for adults), thus a priori
marginalizing the realm of lifelong human development and experiential learn-
ing situated amid real-life situations. Such deep inner knowledge can be
achieved by means of self-reflection embodied in the interpretation of Tarot
symbolism. Genuine signs do have a self-referential, enfolded, structure due to
the included middle of an interpretant.
Noddings (2010a) addresses a feminine, maternal ability to “read” her
children as the capacity for empathy coupled with an instinct for survival in
the course of human evolution pertaining specifically to what she calls the
maternal factor. She refers to “the ‘reading’ process” (2010a: 53) in terms of
cognitive apprehension motivated by love and accompanied by the attitude of
care and “empathy [as] the constellation of processes” (2010a: 56) that connects
Self and Other in a relation, which is as such necessarily “ontologically basic”
(also 2003 [1984], 2010b: 390). A relation, which is ontologically, epistemically,
and ethically fundamental, is the major feature of semiotics. A sign, by defini-
tion, is essentially a relational entity that indicates something other than itself
that is not immediately apparent. It needs mediation between itself and its own
other in the interpretive process enabled by the inclusion of the third category of
Peirce’s interpretant into formal logic.
Applying this unorthodox logic to reading and interpreting Tarot signs
permits us to emphatically relate to something essentially other but nevertheless

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 107

potentially understandable, knowable and, ultimately, known. The relation thus

established between the generic Self and Other in our real practical life is
significant and has both epistemological and ontological implications. The
dimension of foremost importance is however ethical, considering that we live
in a time of globalization and uncertain multiculturalism with different values
continuously competing, conflicting, and clashing. In our current global climate
permeated by diverse beliefs, disparate values, and cultural conflicts, under-
standing ourselves and others and learning to share each other’s values is as
paramount for the survival of our species as is the maternal instinct for the
survival of helpless babies.
We can awaken such a maternal caring attitude towards others at both the
individual and social levels via the medium of Tarot: as Marshall McLuhan
famously made clear, the medium is the message. Rather than being “merely a
passive conduit for the transmission of information, [a medium of communication
is] an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities”
(Logan 1986: 24; italics mine). Such a creative, semiotic logic is the paradoxical
and apparently self-contradictory logic of the included middle, the included third,
in contrast to the propositional logic of analytic philosophy based on the princi-
ples of non-contradiction and the excluded middle. Therefore Tarot, despite being
traditionally perceived as mystical and irrational, is still logical. Its logic is a
semiotic logic of the included middle that exceeds narrow instrumental rational-
ity. Peirce’s semiotics as the ground for interpreting Tarot images presents logic
not as the logicians’ invention but as a ratio that is always already embedded in
human praxis and the natural world alike: the whole universe is perfused with
signs connected in one coherent whole via the network of relations. Grounding
Tarot as a semiotic system of signs, images, and symbols in Peirce’s logic makes
this phenomenon open to explanation in rational terms, thus taking it out of the
irrational realm as it is habitually perceived.

6 Word and image: a semiotic turn

Sir Michael Dummett, famous British philosopher of language and one of the
pioneers of the linguistic turn in twentieth century philosophy has a great
interest in what he called Tarot history and mystery (Dummett 1980); he however
presented Tarot as a cultural card game, hence located it outside specific philo-
sophical claims. Taking the semiotic turn, however, not only reverses the disad-
vantaged status of the image as a result of its takeover by verbal signs in the
course of modernity, but can also overcome the persistent philosophical

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108 Inna Semetsky

pessimism expressed by Wittgenstein, who insisted that what we cannot talk

about we must pass over in silence (Semetsky 2010a; Semetsky 2013).
The relationship between word and image has been historically, philosophi-
cally, and ideologically troubled (Shlain 1998). While Neoplatonic philosophy
privileged images, modern analytic philosophy of language grounded in the
dyadic logic of the excluded middle presented verbal signs as the sole means
of directly representing reality. It is important to repeat that the semiotic, or
“pragmatic” (Bernstein 2010) turn is not illogical. The process of reasoning
however is indirect or mediated: Peirce’s logic as semiotics is triadic or analo-
gical, and involves interpretation versus direct representation. In contrast to
Hermetic or Neoplatonic philosophy, to which the principle of analogy was
central, for modern Western philosophy, historically, “there could be no tertium
quid” (Merrell 2002: 204). Such tertium functions as the included third between
two things usually perceived as opposites and is a distinguishing feature of both
Western esoteric thought and of Peirce’s semiotics based on ternary logic. The
third category performs the function of reconciliation, analogy or correspon-
dence between what Cartesian dualism posits as the opposites of A and not-A,
Self and Other.
Analyzing the historically evident conflict between word and image,
Shlain notices “the plunge in women’s status” (1998: viii) as contingent on
literacy taking over nonverbal means of expression, such as image. Even if the
development of literacy has been habitually equated with progress, “one perni-
cious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a
patriarchal outlook. Writing… especially its alphabetic form, diminishes femi-
nine values and with them, women’s power in the culture” (Shlain 1998: 1).
Shlain reminds us of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss challenging the supre-
macy of literacy and insisting that the establishment of hierarchical societies
was linked to the appearance of writing: “misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall
with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word” (Shlain 1998: 3). Noddings
(2010a), describing the two paths to morality in the context of education,
expresses a hope for the convergence between traditional and feminine
ethics. It is via the Tarot edusemiotics that we learn to read, understand, and
relate to “the emotional state, needs, and intentions of others” (Noddings
2010a: 170).
The hermeneutic of Tarot can provide the necessary guidance when a read-
ing assumes the function of an educational aid or a counseling tool that can
contribute to human development (Semetsky 2011a); but also by virtue of its
potential ability to bring back the becoming-woman, using Gilles Deleuze’s
poignant expression (Semetsky 2010c), as symbolic of the lost feminine dimen-
sion in contemporary society that has long subscribed to a solely masculine

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 109

world view embedded in “linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking”

(Shlain 1998: 1; italics in original). Tarot edusemiotics brings into being yet
another, complementary, perceptual mode in terms of “holistic, simultaneous,
synthetic, and concrete” (Shlain 1998: 1; italics in original) qualities that almost
disappeared during the course of modernity in which the verbal word became
the major medium of communication. Deleuze asserted that our ideas are
enfolded so deep “in the soul that we can’t always… develop them” (Deleuze
1993: 49) by using solely cognitive tools: they need to be unfolded by means of
the esoteric, non-verbal language of images. It is during the edusemiotics
of Tarot that we become able to “read, find, [and] retrieve the structures”
(Deleuze 1998 [1968]: 270; Deleuze’s italics) hiding in the depth of the
unconscious and thus “gather… secret idioms from which I extract something
I call my Self” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 84) reconciled with its lost feminine
aspect.
Human subjectivity is produced in relations, both literal and symbolic.
Learning to read the symbolic language of Tarot signs equips us with the ability
to understand the deepest meanings of individual and collective life-experiences.
The implications for human evolution and the expansion of consciousness – what
John Dewey defined as growth – are profound. Dewey pointed out that “What [a
person] gets and gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions and
ideas, is… a widening and deepening of conscious life – a more intense, disci-
plined, and expanding realization of meanings… And education is not a mere
means to such a life. Education is such a life” (Dewey 1924 [1916]: 417).
Winfried Nöth presents a synopsis of a triadic sign, tracing its definitions
and different terminology from Plato, to the Stoics, to Peirce, to Ogden and
Richards (Nöth 1995: 90–91), and notices that in order to construct a semiotic
triangle (Figure 5) connecting, in general terms, sign-vehicle, sense, and refer-
ent, the path of mediation, represented by a dotted line between a sign-vehicle
and a referent, must be present.

Sense

Sign-vehicle Referent

Figure 5: A semiotic triangle (in Nöth 1995: 89).

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110 Inna Semetsky

It is the edusemiotic process of reading and interpreting Tarot images that

functions as an indirect semiotic communication, thereby “filling up” a dotted
line, when a picture after picture falls out until they form a layout of iconic signs
reflecting meaningful structures of experience: “sense is the mediator of the
referent” (Nöth 1995: 89). A pictorial phrase, another one, yet another, unfold
into a narrative describing a symbolic school of life (Semetsky 2011a). The layout
of pictures becomes a visible, material link in a signifying chain of a larger
symbolic order. It represents a synchronic slice within a diachronic, ex Memoria,
unfolding of signs that comprise the semiosphere (Hoffmeyer 1993; Lotman
1990). When past, present, and possible future are combined together (as
indeed demonstrated in the structure of a triangle: see Figure 4) we not only
observe but also, via a triadic relation formed by “the observer, the observing,
and the observed” (Dewey 1991b: 97), consciously participate in the eduse-
miotic process of our evolution and growth: growth in moral knowledge and
intelligence.
Russian semiotician of the famous Moscow-Tartu school Yuri Lotman (1990)
referred to intelligence as being determined by three functions: the transmission
of textual information, the creation of new information, and memory as a
capacity to preserve and reproduce information. The Tarot layout is a pictorial
text transmitting available information, which is being preserved or virtually
stored in the diachronic depths of the collective unconscious, the Memoria.
During readings this text is reproduced for the purpose of re-creating this
information: to revive the memories of the past and the memories of the future,
both co-existing in the present. The information, even if conserved in the field of
the collective unconscious, is being re-distributed, thereby leading to the
appearance of a new “chapter” in the “text” of human experiences as if being
written anew during “reading” the spread of Tarot pictures. It is the Thirdness of
interpretation that “brings information… [it] determines the idea and gives it
body” (Peirce CP 1: 537) in the physical world. The edusemiotics of Tarot is
capable of “rendering literally visible before one’s very eyes the operation of
thinking in actu” (Peirce CP 4: 571).
The structures of narrative knowledge produced in actu in the process of
Tarot edusemiotics pertain to the “women’s ways of knowing” (Belenky et al.
1986) related by educational philosopher Maxine Greene to the healing arts that
allow us to “come face to face with others” (2000: 31) in a relation. Yet, modern
liberal education tends to focus on scientific facts at the expense of intuitive,
feeling, and caring aspects of the feminine that contribute to making sense of,
and assigning a particular value to, our many experiences. Tarot edusemiotics
partakes of imaginative narrative as a methodology of “edutopias” (cf. Peters
and Freeman-Moir 2006). It is on the basis of this, historically utopian, universal

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 The edusemiotics of Tarot 111

language – the language of images – that humankind can recreate the harmo-
nious, peaceful, and prosperous Golden Age when people were united by the
same language and the same understanding of the nature of the universe. Using
the feminine language of “images [as] the balm bringing about this worldwide
healing” (Shlain 1998), we can recover the feminine values of caring and
reconciliation in education and society at large.

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114 Inna Semetsky

Bionote
Inna Semetsky

Inna Semetsky (b. 1948) is an adjunct professor at the University of Waikato and chief consultant
to the Institute for Edusemiotic Studies (IES) in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include
semiotics, philosophy of education, transpersonal psychology, and futures studies. Her
publications include Deleuze, education, and becoming (2006); “Nomadic education” (2008);
Semiotics Education Experience (2010); and “Jung and educational theory” (2012).

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