Le Mat…
Just got my copy of Jodoworsky’s {i] La Voie du Tarot[/i]…and, knowing it won’t be a cover-to-cover read for me, but a look-up-a –particular topic book…since it is in French, I thought I’d give his section on Le Mat a quick translate for myself. So…here is a summary/paraphrase of some of what he says> I have also added a link that shows a piece on Le Mat that Rusty Neon has also translated.
Jodo says the key phrase of Le Mat could be:
All the paths/roads are my road.
He summarizes Le Mat as being a card of energy and freedom. Who is before? Who comes after?…Where is he going? Or, is it possible that he is turning endlessly in circles around his own stick? Is he perhaps a religious pilgrim who returns to a holy place or, as many have seen him, a fool walking toward his own destruction?
If we wish to see him on the higher plane, is he a being detached from all care, complexity, judgment…living outside the boundaries, having renounced all demands:
a light, a god, a powerful force in the flow of energy, a force of immeasurable freedom.
Jodo has several more pages on Le Mat…he mentions the tiny bells on his tunic
One can image, perhaps that he plays the music of the planets, of cosmic harmony.
Rusty has translated the passage I just started about the bells, in a thread on the various little balls in the Camoin-Jodo deck. I’ll add the link here, rather than translate more…
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27244&highlight=Le+Mat
At the end of his passage on Le Mat, from a lecture, Jodo summarizes Le Mat as evoking an enormous force of energy.
Depending on the placement of the card, if he faces toward a card, it changes the creative energy of that card.
If Le Mat is separated from the card which precedes it, he is leaving a situation to bring his forces to a new project, a new work, a new relationship.
He represents, then, a liberation, a flight/escape
(material, emotional, intellectual, or sexual). This card poses the question of learning how the energy of the querent should be carried…to what or to whom the querent’s
energies should be directed.
If Le Mat is identified as a person, he sometimes represents
madness or inconsistency. Well-placed, a pilgrimage, a trip, a force which directs/moves.
The question is to know where Le Mat goes….As for himself, he has no preference.
There is a great deal more on the colors and clothing and details in the Camoin deck, as well….
Just felt like translating a piece and sharing it along with Rusty’s translation from anther thread that has the piece on Le Mat.
I think I am going to like more of what I learn from Jodo's book as I go along..but this is a piece...not entirely new idea, certainly, but very much more descriptive than I might have initially expected.
terri