The Cards and the Suits

 

SoulCollage® cards are arranged in suits to help sort out different aspects of yourself, and to understand the deeper forces at work in your life.

 

Suits include dimensions of your life such as: inner personalities, archetypal influences, community (living and deceased), animal companions/connections, transpersonal elements and more. 

 

Inner Personalities (the Committee Suit) includes all the different “selves” who appear in your every day life, and the roles you play in life: the happy-go-lucky one, the angry child, judgmental critic, wounded child, hard worker, good father, ice-skater, community organizer, etc. 

 

The next suit is your Community; those who both support and challenge you in the present and in earlier times in your life.  In addition to friends and family, these cards can also include your pets, and important social/political/literary figures (Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Jane Austen).

 

The third suit is the animal Companions.  These accompany the Chakra sites in the body as posited by Eastern philosophies.  There are seven chakras, and seven companion animals for you to find/intuit and create as cards for this suit.  One way to understand this suit is to recognize that we are very distant from the natural world in which we evolved, and bringing animal energies into our own body and experience, brings us back to our own more nature-based selves.

 

Suit four is the Council of Archetypes.  Archetypes are the symbolic figures who appear and reappear over time and in all cultures; the light-bearer, the pattern keeper, Gaia – mother earth, the wounded warrior, and many more.  Most often you don’t set out to create an archetype card, you just feel that certain images want to go together and you figure out what the card is about later.  Archetypes are a central part of Carl Jung’s psychological paradigm, and they appear over and over in art and literature in all cultures.

 

Some people create a few additional suits for dreams, or special places, while others feel comfortable with these kinds of cards being part of the Committee or Community suits.