Revisiting MBTI & the Tarot Court Cards: A Reflection and Revision (2019 & 2025)

Six years ago, I attempted to map the 16 Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) to the 16 Tarot court cards using a symbolic wheel and a mixture of structure, intuition, and trial-and-error. At the time, I included David Kiersey’s temperament groupings in my calculations and tried to distribute the four pairs of traits evenly among the Tarot ranks (Page, Knight, Queen, King) and suits (Pentacles, Swords, Cups, Wands).

I’ve returned to this project with a simpler approach. While I still believe that Tarot and MBTI are not systems meant for one-to-one correspondence, I’ve found surprising results in aligning them through trait-to-symbol associations.

This post compares the Kiersey-MBTI version from 2019 with an MBTI-centered version, both of which explore how these two systems may echo each other.

The 2019 Version: Kiersey Modification of MBTI Mapped with the Tarot Court Cards

I assigned the suits to the MBTI cognitive functions:

Sensing (S) → Pentacles
iNtuiting (N) → Wands
Thinking (T) → Swords
Feeling (F) → Cups

The Attitudes (E/I) and Lifestyles (J/P) could fall into any rank, but I made sure each MBTI temperament group (SJ, NJ, SP, NP) and each Kiersey group (NF and NT) got one card of each rank. Here’s how that looked.

The 2025 Version: MBTI-Centered Mapping

This time, I aligned the four MBTI pairs with all the characteristics of the court cards:

Extraversion (E) → Knight / Introversion (I) → Queen
Judging (J) → King / Perceiving (P) → Page
Sensing (S) → Pentacles / iNtuiting (N) → Wands
Thinking (T) → Swords / Feeling (F) → Cups

Each type was assigned one Tarot court card, matching both suit and rank constraints. Here's how they lined up:

SJs – Grounded, Loyal, Responsible
ESFJ King of Cups - Nurturing, emotionally steady leader
ISFJ Queen of Pentacles - Devoted, grounded caretaker <-- me
ESTJ King of Pentacles - Practical and authoritative
ISTJ Queen of Swords - Cool-headed, dutiful, principled

NJs – Visionary, Structured Intuitives
ENFJ King of Wands - Bold, motivational, future-focused
INFJ Queen of Cups - Gentle, empathic, inwardly deep
ENTJ King of Swords - Commanding strategist with clear logic
INTJ Queen of Wands - Confident, inwardly fiery, visionary

SPs – Observant, Action-Oriented
ESFP Knight of Cups - Emotionally expressive, spontaneous
ISFP Page of Cups - Gentle, artistic, emotionally sensitive
ESTP Page of Pentacles - Practical, curious, hands-on learner
ISTP Page of Swords - Cool, alert, quick-thinking

NPs – Inventive, Idealistic Explorers
ENFP Knight of Wands - Energetic, expressive, visionary
INFP Page of Wands - Dreamy, imaginative, hopeful
ENTP Knight of Swords - Fast, sharp, idea-driven
INTP Knight of Pentacles - Steady, cerebral, dedicated

Final Thoughts

The earlier system was an ambitious attempt to align the tarot court with both MBTI and Kiersey’s modifications. It was inconsistent. Many court cards felt misaligned with the emotional tone or functional energy of their paired type.

In contrast, the current system is cleaner, more internally consistent, and symbolically richer. It’s based directly on MBTI’s four dichotomies and maps onto the Tarot suits and ranks surprisingly well. Neither version is “correct,” of course. But this newer approach feels more like a conversation between systems, rather than a forced equivalency.

If you’ve worked with Tarot or MBTI, or both, I’d love to hear what resonated for you. What court card do you see in yourself?

I Know It When I See It

Jonathan Tobin's recent article in JNS, Biased media fuels American Jewish opposition to Israel, argues that many American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide because they’ve been shaped by a relentlessly biased media and have little connection to Jewish identity or Israel itself.

This article blames a biased media. That misses something deeper, something I’ve noticed for decades in parts of the American Jewish Left. I’ve never quite been able to define it, but like that famous judge, I know it when I see it.

Every American Jew has met them: the “Berkeley Jews.” The ones manning the PLO booth on University Avenue. It’s a kind of sickness, perhaps a lingering infection from the 1920s and ’30s, when it was fashionable to be an avowed communist. (It still is in some circles.)

I saw it again just months ago at Congregation Beth Israel in Austin. Men in Torah study speaking as if parroting propaganda made them intellectually brilliant and morally superior, when in fact they were repeating a blood libel.

And then there was the woman straight out of Orwell: blindly devoted to the party line. She knows the slogans better than she knows the history of Israel. When she says, “I believe the State of Israel has a right to exist,” she hopes you won’t notice that everything after “but” cancels out the first half of her sentence, and by extension, the right of any Jew, even herself, to breathe free air anywhere.

What drives this? A desire to set themselves apart from those “other Jews,” the supposedly evil or unenlightened ones? Some sociological phenomenon of the diaspora? A psychological one? I don’t know.

Some call them self-hating Jews. I think that gives them too much credit. They’re not self-hating. They’re self-absorbed! They love their own image so much that they’ve lost the ability to see reality, or to care for other human beings, Jewish or otherwise.