AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve placed “virtue” first in my title because, when we receive a tarot reading, we will ideally discover evidence of worthiness in ourselves and our affairs and, unless we’re entirely dishonest or avoidant, we will also acknowledge any incursion of vice with an eye toward subduing it, whether it is our own or that of other people who are in a position to harm us.

I recently came across a quote from Carl Gustav Jung that – while it came as no surprise to me as a rather cynical student of human nature – put the subject into perspective:

“We quite forget that we can be as deplorably overcome by a virtue as by a vice. There is a frenzied, orgiastic virtuousness which is just as infamous as vice and leads to just as much injustice and violence.”

I think Jung’s sentiment can be summed up in two words: rabid and self-righteous. We see it all the time in radical “anti-whatever” protests, in which the operative principle seems to be “The ends justify the means.” We could say that truly committed activists “put their money where their mouth is;” for the rest, who are mainly sympathetic pretenders, there is a concept in modern sociological and psychological usage called virtue signaling in which the key feature is a sanctimonious display of idle “posing” rather than a purposeful act of representative behavior. Here is a composite definition:

“The public expression of opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or social conscience or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue. It is the expression of a conspicuous, self-righteous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character. Virtue signaling doesn’t mean doing virtuous things that signal in ways people might notice. Rather, it’s acting like you’re being virtuous when you’re not, seeming instead of being virtuous.”

When it comes to tarot, I won’t presume to try binning all of the cards according to their virtue-or-vice quotient since experienced readers will already have their own take on what’s “naughty or nice.” While there are many cards that can be considered less-wholesome, a few really stand out in the “vice squad:” the Devil is the obvious one, while the cunning, amoral Magician is also a likely candidate, as is the treacherous Moon, and in the Minor Arcana we could look to the 7 of Cups, the 7 of Swords, the Knight of Cups and the Page of Swords for more disreputable qualities (at least according to Waite and Crowley) since they all manifest potentially “corruptible” weaknesses. Obviously, context and position within a spread will dictate whether these cards have the motivation and the opportunity to execute any nefarious intent.

For the most part, however, the cards don’t embody intrinsic moral properties, even the court cards although they may have latent propensities for such if one believes Aleister Crowley. Any honorable or dishonorable traits are projected upon them according to their role in a reading. As Jung notes, excessive virtue may be detrimental in a given situation, although vice that is more than a “white lie” transgression is impossible to condone as being beneficial in an “equal-and-opposite” way (unless we’re in need of a headsman). On the other hand, “virtue as its own reward” may be scant compensation when the burden of decency is greater than one’s ability to sustain it. Eventually, the “other cheek” runs out of unblemished skin and it’s time to either duck or defend oneself instead of offering it. As I’ve written in the past, patience is not necessarily a virtue.