A reference — not a lesson

The Cards

Twelve places to begin

An ordinary deck of playing cards, handled every day by people who suspect nothing, carries a map of human typology. Four suits are the four centers. The three court cards within each suit are the three parts of that center — mechanical, emotional, intellectual. Four times three is twelve: twelve places a person can begin from.

Nobody chooses theirs. It is where the machine was already running when you first thought to look.

four centers down, three depths across — twelve places to begin

Read across a row and you have one center at three depths. Read down a column and you have one depth across four centers — which is how you discover that every King is the intellectual part of its own center, and that they have more in common with each other than with the Jacks beside them.

Open any card

♣ clubs — the instinctive center

The oldest intelligence — the body running itself, older than thought by hundreds of millions of years.

♠ spades — the moving center

Learned movement — every physical skill the body was taught, from walking to the work of the hands.

♥ hearts — the emotional center

Feeling and relationship — the center through which we meet other people, beauty, and the Divine.

♦ diamonds — the intellectual center

Thought and language — the youngest center, and the one this civilization prizes above all others.