Irminsul
11-03-2006, 22:48
I’ve just received Jodorowosky's The Way of the Tarot (in Spanish) and have begun reading it. It’s a long, deep, detailed and introspective book. Not an easy read, but fascinating (thus far, at least for me). It’s certainly bound to scare away the modern-day seeker of briefer and simpler, How-To-Tarot methods.
Jodorowsky seems to have distilled into the book his lifelong relationship with the Tarot, including the creation of the Camoin-Jodorowsky deck. As he explains in the introduction, along the way he was constrained to discard many cherished notions. He mentions an encounter with French poet Andre Breton in the early fifties, recounting how Breton dismissed the RWS deck (that J. had proudly displayed), extolling instead the richness of the TdM. The TdM thereupon became J's deck of choice, and it eventually led him to Camoin and the creation of the Camoin-Jodorowsky deck.
J. is concerned with understanding, not with just “learning” the Tarot. For him, the Tarot is fundamentally self-referential: it has its own complex identity and nature. It cannot be understood simply through derivative interpretation, or the comparative study of other esoteric fields (Kabbalah, numerology, Jungian archetypes, mythology, mystical symbology, different religions, etc.). It does relate to outside references, of course, because all esoteric studies must perforce share some common received knowledge. But the mysteries of the Tarot are not a mere collage of influences, harvested or derived from other fields.
It’s clear that J. does not consign the Tarot to being a tool for a join-the-dots divinatory interpretation of a series of plates. If I've understood him correctly thus far (no easy task!), he views the Tarot cards as a book or as a majestic flowing river, a continuum of consciousness, not as a series of more or less self-contained “way stations.” The role of the individual cards is always altered by their relative position in the deck. But he sees them more like notes in a musical composition - with correspondences in tone and melody among the notes. A seamless legato effect is produced. He does not view the notes as a succession of individual plates to be fit into a mosaic or expected to complete a jigsaw puzzle. There are no deterministic concepts here, such as "past influences," "hidden influences affecting the outcome," "final outcome," etc., in the reading of individual cards.
For those of you who are trying to read Jodorowsky in Spanish or French, I believe it's well worth the effort! Congratulations for your commitment and hard work, for this book is definitely not the little explanatory manual inserted in a box of Tarot cards. With Jodorowsky’s book, the reader must do a lot of the work. Which is as it should be.
Jodorowsky seems to have distilled into the book his lifelong relationship with the Tarot, including the creation of the Camoin-Jodorowsky deck. As he explains in the introduction, along the way he was constrained to discard many cherished notions. He mentions an encounter with French poet Andre Breton in the early fifties, recounting how Breton dismissed the RWS deck (that J. had proudly displayed), extolling instead the richness of the TdM. The TdM thereupon became J's deck of choice, and it eventually led him to Camoin and the creation of the Camoin-Jodorowsky deck.
J. is concerned with understanding, not with just “learning” the Tarot. For him, the Tarot is fundamentally self-referential: it has its own complex identity and nature. It cannot be understood simply through derivative interpretation, or the comparative study of other esoteric fields (Kabbalah, numerology, Jungian archetypes, mythology, mystical symbology, different religions, etc.). It does relate to outside references, of course, because all esoteric studies must perforce share some common received knowledge. But the mysteries of the Tarot are not a mere collage of influences, harvested or derived from other fields.
It’s clear that J. does not consign the Tarot to being a tool for a join-the-dots divinatory interpretation of a series of plates. If I've understood him correctly thus far (no easy task!), he views the Tarot cards as a book or as a majestic flowing river, a continuum of consciousness, not as a series of more or less self-contained “way stations.” The role of the individual cards is always altered by their relative position in the deck. But he sees them more like notes in a musical composition - with correspondences in tone and melody among the notes. A seamless legato effect is produced. He does not view the notes as a succession of individual plates to be fit into a mosaic or expected to complete a jigsaw puzzle. There are no deterministic concepts here, such as "past influences," "hidden influences affecting the outcome," "final outcome," etc., in the reading of individual cards.
For those of you who are trying to read Jodorowsky in Spanish or French, I believe it's well worth the effort! Congratulations for your commitment and hard work, for this book is definitely not the little explanatory manual inserted in a box of Tarot cards. With Jodorowsky’s book, the reader must do a lot of the work. Which is as it should be.