Mike lives in Portland, Oregon, USA. He enjoys traveling in North America and occasionally Europe. The photo at left was taken in October 2011 in Granada, Spain.

Mike's professional background is in academic philosophy and clinical psychology. After  a B.A. degree in philosophy from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he studied at the University of Birmingham, England, on a Fulbright grant. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1975, with a dissertation on Wittgenstein. He taught philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany, Western Oregon State University, Portland State University, and other institutions. In 1989 he began studying Jungian-based psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, California, where he earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1996. He has published in the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal and Religion. He worked as a mental health counselor for many years until retiring at the end of 2010.

Mike's psychology dissertation used the Corpus Hermeticum, Ficino’s writings on the planetary gods, and alchemical imagery to analyze Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a process of spiritual initiation. Mike later added Renaissance art to the interpretive mix. (For a visual essay version, see http://hermetichamletslideshow.blogspot.com/). Inspired by this  exploration and that of other Shakespeare plays, he started examining the tarot as another Renaissance journey of the spirit using traditional themes in new ways.

Mike began contributing to tarot forums in 2008, with the name "MikeH" on Aeclectic Tarot Forum and "mikeh" on Tarot History Forum.  He can be contacted by way of Personal Messages at either site. Besides forum posts, he has essays on tarot and other subjects; links are at http://michaelshoward.blogspot.com/. 

He is a close cooperator of trionfi.com. A statement of his general perspective and links to some of his tarot forum postings is at http://autorbis.net/michael-s-howard.