Trouble Connecting with Masculine Major Arcana

grubbaj0

I've been working with the tarot for a few months now. Not long at all but there are some cards that I click with and some cards that I just don't get. I don't connect with them, I don't really get what they represent in a reading (even though I've looked up the meanings). These are particularly the masculine cards in the major arcana in particular: The magician, the emperor, and the hierophant. I am a female but I'm not sure if that's the reason. Maybe I'm a bit too anti-establishment/tradition to connect with these but I would really love help with ways to connect with the meaning of these cards. Thanks heaps!
 

JoannaCrystal

I've been working with the tarot for a few months now. Not long at all but there are some cards that I click with and some cards that I just don't get. I don't connect with them, I don't really get what they represent in a reading (even though I've looked up the meanings). These are particularly the masculine cards in the major arcana in particular: The magician, the emperor, and the hierophant. I am a female but I'm not sure if that's the reason. Maybe I'm a bit too anti-establishment/tradition to connect with these but I would really love help with ways to connect with the meaning of these cards. Thanks heaps!
Hi there grubbaj0 😊

So, there's at least 2 things you can do!
You can ask the cards why that happens, or you can try to meditate on that cards, try to forget about the meanings you have for them and try to see what YOU see in those cards!! Try to tell your own story about them!! For instance, let me show you what I did with the Emperor

"He is the Father. That strong figure, rigid, with a powerful voice that only with an eye-popping puts us in order. But he is not a heart made of stone at all. Far from it. He shows his love in the best way he knows. He teaches us to follow rules. If there were no rules, this world would be more upside down than it already is.
He is authoritarian, yes, no doubt, but if he were not, no one would take him seriously.
He is where he is, and he is the powerful influence he is today, precisely by following rules, discipline, order, and structure. He learned to be strong and use his greatest strength - rational thinking. But although he has this image of a stone man, with a simple hug of someone who loves him, he smiles for himself. He feels, he feels a lot, but he does it inward. On the outside, he has to be strong, stiff, a true leader. But his leadership comes from the love of a Father."

This is just an example 😊 see if you can see this on your Emperor as well 😊

Much light for you

Enviado do meu A0001 através de Tapatalk
 

Alta

There decks where all of the cards are female (there are also decks where all of the cards are male. too), there are also nature based decks and some themed decks (i.e. Dragons) where the gender is not so in your face. Maybe if you get used to the archetypal energies represented by those cards using a deck like that it might help you ease into the more typical visual representations.

It might help to remember that these card represent certain archetypal qualities, or energies, and not people per se.
 

Farzon

I am a female but I'm not sure if that's the reason. Maybe I'm a bit too anti-establishment/tradition to connect with these but I would really love help with ways to connect with the meaning of these cards. Thanks heaps!

Hmm... there seems to be a growing antipathy towards male energies in general, I think. So I think you're not alone with this.

And I think your own gender is a strong influence on this. I had the same issue vice-versa with some of the female archetypes. The challenge is to accept your own male characteristics. Maybe take a look at Asian philosophies: Yin and Yang are in everything and need to be balanced.

The Golden Dawn wrote something similar on Kaballah, that gender is in everything but not in the sense of our human gender. It's just a symbol that is easy to understand for us. Maybe this view will help a bit in accepting your own male energies. It definetly helped me.
 

Nemia

Our culture at the moment values "feminine" characteristics, and we understand now the difference between biological sex and socially-learned gender - just by looking at the differences between gender roles in different societies, without going so far as to say ALL gender differences are learned. Some of them certainly are, otherwise they wouldn't change or differ between societies.

In addition, we're all a bit more sceptical when we hear the traditionally "masculine" voice of authority since we've seen historically where it can lead us if we follow unquestioningly. So I guess you're not alone.

The hesitation you may feel can have biographical roots. If you were a rebellious feminist teen and are now a self confident woman, Emperor and Hierophant appear to you as opponents, not parts of yourself. But we all have ALL archetypes of the tarot within ourselves, including those who look most alien to us.

This seems to lead us towards Jung's theory, according to which women have an animus, men have an anima. But I have some grave doubts about these concepts, with all respect to Carl Gustav. Maybe Animus and Anima are not so different after all, and Jung simply accepted stereotypes we don't hold dear any more? Men can be tender and intuitive, and I don't have to call that their Anima, and women can be strong and assertive, and that's not their Animus. We all have the potential (and often the strong wish) to transcend the categories of gender and leave them behind us.

So where in your life is the voice of the Emperor, the Chariot, the Hierophant, and why do you struggle with it? Ask them, ask yourself, listen to the voices of memories, of inner judgements, of negative or positive comments in your head.

I find the struggle with my inner Emperor has brought me more substantial learning than the easy identification with Empress and Temperance. The Star is easy to love, but how can I love my inner Tower? my destructive and self destructive tendencies, my anger, my aggression?

Each archetype is a challenge, the beautiful and harmonious ones and the difficult ones.

We all have the voice of the inner father, even if our biological father left us (like mine did), even if it is only the fantasy image of a good, caring, protective father that collides painfully with the actual image of a cold, cruel and bitter father (again, my childhood story). We can learn a lot from the tarot in finding the nuances of each card.

For me, the Emperor has been maybe the most personal struggle AND acceptance. (My biological father and my husband are both Aries - this Emperor plays a bigger role in my life than I would wish sometimes ;-))

I see it like that. When we wander along the procession of trumps and it hurts somewhere, that's where we have to dig. The Emperor hurt when I saw it, I dug, and I'm still digging.

This inner dialogue with the cards is IMO the greatest gain of the tarot, not the answers in readings. The major arcana are inner archetypes that often are associated with people, but they're not these people. The Emperor is NOT my father, he represents what my inner father means to me and how I relate to him. The card represents the wishes and dreams about the ideal father, the actual father image, and the cultural voice of the father, including the patriarchat. Light AND shadow sides.

The better you know these male archetypes with all the baggage of cultural and biographical associations, the better you'll be able to relate to them in readings.
 

Lee

So where in your life is the voice of the Emperor, the Chariot, the Hierophant [...]
I think this is the best advice. I like to bring the lofty concepts of the cards down to practical, everyday matters.

Let's say you're faced with having to do something that you've never been good at before. You're skeptical that you can do it, but you try it, and surprisingly, it comes out well. Congratulations, you've just found your inner Magician!

Or a friend comes to you with an idea which involves breaking the law. You tell them that breaking the law is probably not the best way to accomplish their goal, and the risk of legal liability is too great. You've just enacted the role of the Emperor, who upholds laws and boundaries.

Or perhaps a friend comes to you and tells you they are considering having an affair with a married person, and you tell them that it doesn't seem right. Now you're fulfilling the role of the Hierophant, who upholds social mores and concepts of what's right and wrong.

Now, in those last two examples I'm making assumptions about how you would react in these situations. Perhaps you would react differently, but the point is we all depend on structure of some kind in our lives, and we all subscribe to concepts of right and wrong, even if those concepts might differ among different individuals.

One exercise you might want to try is, as you go about your day, think about what Major Arcana card you have just embodied or seen embodied by someone else. The key is to try to lower your vision from grand overarching concepts and instead focus on how those concepts play out on the stage of the real world. The Magician might be the plumber who knows how to fix your toilet. The Emperor might be the IRS to whom you owe taxes. The Hierophant might be Dr. Phil, who makes judgmental pronouncements about family dynamics.
 

MysticMoonlight

It may help if you connect those problematic connection cards to people that you know in your life, if possible. If you do not know anyone that "fits" a card, perhaps pick a celebrity that does. It may help you relate to those cards and open them up for you. This has worked for me and once I did this, the cards really began to sing for me. Best wishes :)
 

Barleywine

Hmm... there seems to be a growing antipathy towards male energies in general, I think. So I think you're not alone with this.

And I think your own gender is a strong influence on this. I had the same issue vice-versa with some of the female archetypes. The challenge is to accept your own male characteristics. Maybe take a look at Asian philosophies: Yin and Yang are in everything and need to be balanced.

The Golden Dawn wrote something similar on Kaballah, that gender is in everything but not in the sense of our human gender. It's just a symbol that is easy to understand for us. Maybe this view will help a bit in accepting your own male energies. It definetly helped me.

What really brought this home to me was, after decades of thinking of myself as the King of Cups when choosing a significator (primarily because I'm a Water-sign-dominant Cancerian male), I was putting together a tabulation of all of Aleister Crowley's court-card keywords and phrases from the Book of Thoth coupled with their decan descriptions, and I suddenly realized that Crowley's "moral characteristics" for the Queen of Cups are a far better fit for my personality profile than the King of Cups. Nothing at all to do with gender specificity, strictly psychological in nature.
 

grubbaj0

Hi there grubbaj0

So, there's at least 2 things you can do!
You can ask the cards why that happens, or you can try to meditate on that cards, try to forget about the meanings you have for them and try to see what YOU see in those cards!! Try to tell your own story about them!! For instance, let me show you what I did with the Emperor

"He is the Father. That strong figure, rigid, with a powerful voice that only with an eye-popping puts us in order. But he is not a heart made of stone at all. Far from it. He shows his love in the best way he knows. He teaches us to follow rules. If there were no rules, this world would be more upside down than it already is.
He is authoritarian, yes, no doubt, but if he were not, no one would take him seriously.
He is where he is, and he is the powerful influence he is today, precisely by following rules, discipline, order, and structure. He learned to be strong and use his greatest strength - rational thinking. But although he has this image of a stone man, with a simple hug of someone who loves him, he smiles for himself. He feels, he feels a lot, but he does it inward. On the outside, he has to be strong, stiff, a true leader. But his leadership comes from the love of a Father."

This is just an example see if you can see this on your Emperor as well

Much light for you

Enviado do meu A0001 através de Tapatalk

I will admit I have not taken time to meditate on those cards. In fact I tend to have trouble with major arcana vs minor arcana in general. As they are quite overarching