Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains How Tarot Playing cards Can Give You Artistic Inspiration

The prac­tice of automobile­toman­cy, or div­ina­tion with playing cards, dates again sev­er­al hun­dred years to a minimum of 14th cen­tu­ry Europe, per­haps by means of Turkey. However the spe­cif­ic kind we all know of, the tarot, like­ly emerged within the seventeenth cen­tu­ry, and the deck we’re all most famil­iar with—the Rid­er-Waite Tarot—didn’t seem till 1909. Pop­u­lar fundamental­ly with occultists like Aleis­ter Crow­ley and Madame Blavatsky within the ear­ly twentieth cen­tu­ry, the tarot explod­ed into pop­u­lar cul­ture within the new age 70s with books like Stu­artwork Kaplan’s Tarot Playing cards for Enjoyable and For­tune Telling, and by means of cult movie­mak­ers like Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky.

Since its rel­a­tive­ly current pop­u­lar­iza­tion, “enjoyable” and “for­tune telling” have roughly outlined most individuals’s atti­tude to the tarot, whether or not they approve or dis­ap­show of both one. However for artists and poets like William However­ler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and sur­re­al­ist direc­tor Jodorowsky—whose movie nar­ra­tion is per­haps essentially the most poet­ic in mod­ern cinema—the tarot has at all times meant some­factor way more mys­te­ri­ous and inspir­ing. “The tarot,” says Jodor­owsky within the quick movie above, “will train you easy methods to cre­ate a soul.”

After examine­ing the Main and Minor Arcana and the fits, and puz­zling over the sym­bols on every card, Jodor­owsky dis­cov­ered that “all 78 playing cards could possibly be joined in a man­dala, in only one picture.” Study­ing to see the deck thus, “You could not speak in regards to the future. The longer term is a con. The tarot is a lan­guage that talks in regards to the current. If you happen to use it to see the long run, you grow to be a con­man.” Like oth­er mys­ti­cal poets, Jodorowsky’s examine of the tarot didn’t lead him to the tremendous­nat­ur­al however to the cre­ative act.

And like many a poet earlier than him, Jodor­owsky explored the jour­ney of the Idiot in his 1973 movie The Holy Moun­tain, a “daz­zling, ram­bling, usually inco­her­ent satire,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz, that “unfurls like a hal­lu­cino­genic day­dream.” Jodorowsky’s cin­e­mat­ic dream log­ic comes not solely from his work as a “shaman­ic psy­chother­a­pist.” He additionally cred­its the tarot for his psy­chomag­i­cal actual­ism. “For me,” says Jodor­owsky within the video on the high, “the tarot was some­factor extra seri­ous. It was a deep psy­cho­log­i­cal search.” The results of that search—Jodorowsky’s sin­gu­lar and complete­ly unfor­get­desk physique of labor—speaks to us of the val­ue of such an beneath­tak­ing, what­ev­er means one makes use of to get there.

Or as Jodor­owsky says in considered one of his mys­ti­cal professional­nounce­ments, “If you happen to set your spir­it to some­factor, that phe­nom­e­non will hap­pen.” If that appears like magazine­i­cal assume­ing, that’s actual­ly what it’s. Jodor­owsky exhibits us easy methods to learn the tarot as he does, for psy­cho­log­i­cal perception and cre­ative inspi­ra­tion, within the video above, addressed to a fan named John Bish­op. Span­ish communicate­ers can have no trou­ble beneath­stand­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion, as he fast­ly slides virtually ful­ly into his native lan­guage via lack of con­fi­dence in his facil­i­ty with Eng­lish. The video belongs to a sequence on Jodorowsky’s YouTube chan­nel, most of them ful­ly in Span­ish with­out sub­ti­tles.

Nev­er­the­much less, for Eng­lish communicate­ers, the sub­ti­tled video on the high provides a sur­pris­ing­ly dense les­son on the Chilean mystic’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the tarot’s sup­posed wis­dom as a sym­bol­ic sys­tem, and a manner of telling the current.

Must you want to know extra, you’ll find it in Jodorowsky’s e book The Approach of Tarot: The Spir­i­tu­al Trainer within the Playing cards, and prac­tice in your very personal deck of Jodor­owsky-designed tarot playing cards.

Word: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this submit appeared on our web site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet the For­acquired­ten Feminine Artist Behind the World’s Most Pop­u­lar Tarot Deck (1909)

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Playing cards (1490)

Carl Jung on the Pow­er of Tarot Playing cards: They Professional­vide Door­methods to the Uncon­scious & Per­haps a Method to Pre­dict the Future

The Tarot Card Deck Cre­at­ed by Sal­vador Dalí

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian based mostly in Durham, NC.