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This chapter has a story of its own. Back in 1994, when I was close to completing this research in the area of behavioral sciences, I started thinking more and more about a naturalistic, scientific, paradigm that could explain the phenomenon of Tarot. It was obvious that mechanistic science based on linear causality was insufficient. Indeed in chapter 7 of this book I commented that our verbal language is equally inadequate to reflect the full richness of human experience as exceeding the propositions of the conscious mind but encompassing the psychic reality of the archetypes 'situated" in the collective unconscious and expressing itself in the language of images. The premise of the Jungian unus mundus, the one world enveloping body, soul and spirit, demands however that there should be naturalistic explanation of the functioning of the archetypes and, respectively, Tarot, even if this practice is usually considered esoteric hence ipso facto unscientific. The world as a whole, however, includes our very being-in-the-world thus transcending the visible physical nature as empirically given.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-6091-421-8_10

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