AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m not a huge fan of this book but it does have its moments of lucidity. (Some may recall that Jodorowsky was a fiercely iconoclastic and surrealistic film-maker in the ’70s [El Topo, The Holy Mountain, etc], which may explain his singular and often peculiar notions about the tarot.)

As I begin re-reading Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Way of Tarot, I’m once again struck by the perception that his introductory remarks on the history of the tarot from the arrival of the Tarot de Marseille (his area of specialization) onward is where much of the value in this work lies. (I can take or leave his often quirky card-by-card interpretations, although some of his tarot-reading principles and practices – which, judging from the beneficial change in writing style, may have been influenced by his co-author, Marianne Costa – are generally worthwhile). He skewers almost all of the Continental European and British occultists (other than Joseph Maxwell and Paul Marteau) beginning with Antoine Court de Gebelin for their esoteric tinkering with the TdM, calling their contributions “Three centuries of dreams and mystification.” He also mentions that, at least for him (some might disagree but he gets no argument from me), the tarot doesn’t excel at probing the deep, dark corridors of the psyche, it mainly stimulates the intellect.

As an avid student of the Tarot de Marseille (after four decades with the Thoth and another with the Waite-Smith deck), I can see where he’s coming from. The TdM has a spare elegance that the accretions of occultism have shrouded in often-extraneous symbolic detail. As Caitlin Matthews noted in her book Untold Tarot, the most practical and reliable way to interpret the numbered “pip” cards is via a combination of suit and number theory. Although it’s tempting to go beyond that into astrological and elemental correspondences, they can be left aside and replaced with a personal lexicon of meanings derived from the visual hints in the images and a great deal of contemplation. This appears to have been the way of Yoav Ben-Dov and Enrique Enriquez, on whose approach I based my own assumptions without becoming nearly as bogged down in the minutiae. I should mention that Jodorowsky does make considerable use of color theory, as did his chief inspiration, Paul Marteau (whose 1949 TdM volume I’ve discussed in previous essays), but he complains that the limited color palette of 18th Century printing technology did a disservice to the earlier hand-painted decks. Personally, because decks vary in color scheme from one to the next, I don’t dwell much on color-based abstractions so I probably won’t avail myself of the “rectified” deck that Jodorowsky and Philippe Camoin created to restore an assumed historical integrity in that department.

The “dreams and mystification” apparently began with Jean-Baptiste Alliette (“Etteilla”) in the late 18th Century, who was strongly persuaded by the theories of Court de Gebelin regarding a since-discredited origin for the tarot in ancient Egyptian mysticism. However, although I have now read two translations of his work, I have yet to discover Alliette’s seminal astrological assignments, which I’m aware differ from the Golden Dawn version of “MacGregor” Mathers that is in widespread use today. It’s a gap in my knowledge that I want to fill, but I don’t plan on letting it taint my methods for divining with the Tarot de Marseille. I agree with Jodorowsky that Joseph Maxwell had one of the purer outlooks on the TdM (even though there are some unusual elemental associations in his 1938 book The Tarot), and Paul Marteau borrowed heavily from Maxwell (while getting really anal about color symbolism in a way similar to Maxwell’s fixation on numerical “isomorphs”). Although I’ve read several books that address the occult meaning of numbers (including Heinrich – or “Henry” – Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy), I have yet to find anything to rival the “goldmine” I discovered in Maxwell’s book. Admittedly, its network of mind-boggling numerological detail isn’t approachable for everyone, just as Marteau’s forays into color aren’t easy to absorb due to their frequently tedious complexity, but my own thinking thrives on such patterns.

To wrap this up, I want to clarify that I do get valuable insights from the Golden Dawn’s system of esoteric correspondences with decks that are designed around it (although I certainly don’t swallow its idiosyncrasies whole), but only when the use of such embellishment is driven by my inability to come up with a more literal “action-and-event-oriented” interpretation. Core knowledge and a trace of free-association from the images serve me well enough in most cases, and my personal vocabulary for both the TdM and more recent “occult” decks (captured in this blog and the e-books listed in the “My Publications” sidebar) makes that abundantly clear. For the most part I’ve steered well away from the “mystification” of the current reliance on a psychic, largely intuitive reading style in favor of a more meditative approach that still retains a sense of the visionary and poetic befitting a storyteller who favors inspiration, imagination and ingenuity over entirely subjective guesswork.