The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards Paperback – November 17, 2009

(Review by RNT's wife, C. A. Taylor)I firstly purchased the Jodorowsky tarot deck which quickly made it plain to me that I needed to brush up on my numerology, symbols and so forth in order to understand this particular deck, so I was compelled to buy the corresponding book for the price of two cheesecakes. A month into my study of the book, I can say that it has impacted my perceptions beyond what words can describe. This inability to describe "that which is beyond us" is precisely why we are given symbols, colors, all elements in their respective places (etc.) on the cards - and I feel that I moved quickly from "novice" to "humble minor expert" without straining my brain one iota. This book would be sufficient for understanding and employing all decks of cards.Jodorowsky approaches the wisdom-seeker as a patient teacher who does not strive to sound omniscient but, rather, presents his insights and information logically and with a respectful eye-to-eye style of delivery.Upon reading The Way of Tarot, the mind opens, receptive as the beak of a birdling, to numbers, orientation, suits, degrees, order, color; the infinite possibilities of card combinations; mind exercises and layouts devoid of that "hocus-pocus" feel. Contrary to the singular negative review, I find this book to be abounding with logic and coherence even in its esoteric obscurities. It seems to make perfect sense once the various pieces are put together. Jodorowsky seems well aware that the more angles from which we study a subject, the greater our understanding:He addresses the Major Arcana and how the cards correspond to one another in various ways. He works the reader up the suits of the Minor Arcana and across by level, which thoroughly ingrains the essence, value and placement of each card. As if that were not enough, he (firstly) divides the individual card into sections: receptive versus active; earth/matter versus air/spirit; and the interplay and perpetual cycle of the suits.He trains the reader to apply common-sense in scrutinizing details such as the direction of leaves and the openness of flowers, and to expand the impressions through the understanding of colors, the direction of gazing eyes, etc.. Everything within the Jodorowsky tarot, right down to the dots, is deliberate and worth study for as broad an interpretation as possible and, in turn, for an invitation to the subconscious mind to awaken and unleash its divining potential.But one of the most valuable pleasant surprises within this book, in my opinion, is its lesson of the practical application of the Tarot in determining one's placement in life for guidance on one's personal path, and it even hints toward how one can analyze the dynamics of relations with others according to where The Fool lands in their lives and their development within their representative suit (actually, one can analyze anything by way of the Tarot).The possibilities are boundless, and now, as each and every card presents its universal wisdom, my mind opens, confidently, expansive as a rainbow, to define a plethora of possibilities within each moment, and to divine that vital truth to resonate deeply within me.I can only assume that, except by plagiarism, there will not, for a long time, be a more worthy, resourceful and helpful book on understanding the Tarot in general than that which was simply yet eloquently presented as Jodorowsky's The Way of Tarot.(I am very grateful to the team of individuals who put this book together. If I were to not yet own this book while knowing what I do of it, I would buy it - right now. It's worth a cheesecake's weight in gold!)

I might have given this book four stars to acknowledge a few significant faults, but the authors are so generous in their conception of the tarot’s use—and are trying so clearly to overcome those faults, or at least let us see that these are faults to overcome—that I can’t help but feel fondly about the result. So five stars.I’ll start with the faults. The authors recognize the potential for sexism in the tarot’s reliance on male-female pairs in the major arcana and the potential harm in assumed norms of gender and sexual orientation. In response, they occasionally show how an interpretation of the cards can work with these “norms” as imagery while avoiding them as constraints on the imagination; and they show in this way how readers of the tarot who don’t fit those “norms” can make the deck useful nonetheless. But these overcoming of the deck’s imaginative limitations is far from thorough. It’s as if the book had already been written when the problem was noticed and the edit that followed was quick and incomplete. Then, too, their thinking did not go far enough in this regard: there are also assumed norms of family in the text, and—most annoyingly—race. Since color imagery is a big part of the authors’ thinking about the cards it’s a real problem that they rely on “flesh-colored” so insistently, not seeing how many readers this excludes and what a homogenous universe it proposes us to be living in.Another fault, noted in many reviews, is inconsistency. Learning how to read two or several cards in relation to each other is the very essence of “tarotology,” and one naturally looks for rules to guide that labor, since not every possible conjunction can be covered in the book’s examples; and one also looks for implicit rules in the examples we do have. So the lack of rules and lack of consistency in the examples (for instance, in what it means for face cards to look in a certain direction, or for numerical sequences to be inverted) is frustrating. But there aren’t any rules set forth, or very few, because the authors believe strongly that interpretation is personal, must involve a reader’s recognition of associations others wouldn’t make, and that the question or issue at stake in a reading will alter the cards’ meanings. Given this conception I can accept the inconsistency, though I do wish there had been greater acknowledgment of it and of its basis from the authors, with more clarity about their overall approach to reading the cards.Interpretation for these authors is more art than science, and, in fact, more like dreaming than art making: it bends to the needs of the reader, like a dream to the dreamer; doesn’t impose its discipline, as art does, bending the artist to their material. If tarotology is an art, then the material isn't the cards but the person.And this is what I love about the book. It transforms the tarot from occult tool for fortune-telling to instrument of self-study (or, for those who read cards for others, counseling—or, as the authors prefer to say, therapy).The book is all about paying attention: to the cards first of all, as images and system and imagination of the universe; and then oneself—one’s feelings, needs, hopes, plans, memories, anxieties, obsessions, blockages, and so on. Doing so transforms the tarot into a mirror; it shows us what is most intimate to us and yet otherwise unseeable, the face we show to everyone and cannot see ourselves without some aid.

This book is a work of genius. I know, such superlatives get thrown around casually like a cheap confetti these days, delivering little, if any, meaningingful significance, but I reiterate quite sincerely: this book is a work of genius.Jodorowsky details his decades long back-engineering of the structure of the Tarot, yielding many thoughtful observations regarding the multi-layered self-referentiality built into the system of the cards by its original designers.Even if one were uninterested in the Tarot, per se, the example of Jodorowsky's methodology as employed in his quest to deeply comprehend its design would prove useful to anyone seeking to decipher the structure and purpose of an unfamiliar or arcane object.If, however, one is interested in the Tarot, and specifically the Tarot de Marseille, they will most assuredly find themselves happy to have purchased this book. And if they can manage to do so, I would suggest that they also purchase the author's painstaking restoration of the Marseille deck which is also available here on amazon. It is a very useful adjunct to the study of this book.