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):

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) included one card of each rank. (Follow this link to see how that looked.)

The 2025 Version (MBTI-Centered Mapping of the Tarot Court Cards):

I align 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 personality type is assigned one Tarot court card, matching both suit and rank constraints. Here's how they line 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, Intuitive
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
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

The earlier system was an ambitious attempt to align the tarot court with both MBTI and Kiersey’s modifications. The results were 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 espouse radical political ideas. (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.

The Scapegoat Lives!

When we say “scapegoat” in English, we are referring to someone who is punished for our misdeeds. But that isn’t how the Torah describes the sa'ir l'Azazel.

In Leviticus 16, the High Priest places the sins of the people onto a goat chosen “for Azazel,” ties a crimson thread onto its horn, and sends it alive into the wilderness. It is not sacrificed. It is not punished instead of us. The goat simply carries our sins away from us, back toward Sinai, into the desert, back to the place where we spent 40 years in the presence of God.

Our modern figure of speech misses the point: the biblical goat is not destroyed but released. Our sins are not wiped away; God graces us with a moment in which we are released from our sins.

The Talmud relates that when God forgave the people each Yom Kippur, the crimson thread turned white, fulfilling Isaiah’s promise: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isa. 1:18).

Even without the Temple, Yom Kippur still gives us this gift. For part of this day, we are freed of our sins long enough to recognize them. On this day, we feel the pull toward holiness. Just as each passing hour strengthens our resolve to continue the fast, this day loosens the habits that bind us to our sins.

But we are human and we will sin again, perhaps the very moment the fast ends. (If I am any indication, we may even struggle to keep our thoughts pure during the day itself.)

Yom Kippur gives us a moment when God sees us as pure, and we feel the weight of sin lifted from us. It is a moment to taste what it feels like to live without guilt. We can see more clearly what our sins are and resolve to live differently in the year ahead. Unlike the scapegoat, we can't return to the Wilderness of Sinai, but we can strive to live well where we are, and seek, once more, to draw close to God.