The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

The town merchants would close up shop at noon until five every afternoon because of the extreme heat. My father, Jaime, would lower the metal shutter of his Casa Ukrania [Ukraine House]—which sold feminine undergarments and household items—and go play billiards at Crazy Abraham’s, a Lithuanian Jewish widower who had washed up here under mysterious circumstances. In this warehouse where women never set foot, the normally competing merchants declared a momentary truce and gathered around a green table where they showed off their virility by making cannon shots.

What did catch my eye and fascinated me was a card castle. Crazy Abraham was obsessed with building large castles out of cards. He would leave these huge and imposing constructions, no two of which were ever alike, on the bar counter far from any drafts until he got drunk and intentionally knocked them down, only to immediately begin building another. Jaime would mockingly tell me to ask the “loony” why he did this. Smiling sadly, he would give a child the answer he did not wish to give to adults: “I am imitating God, little one, the one who creates us, destroys us, and with what’s left of us, he rebuilds.”

Later in France I worked with Marcel Marceau, who bestowed on me the greatest honor ever granted in his troupe: to show, while motionless in a suggestive pose, the placards announcing the title of his pantomimes. This was how, transformed into a statue of flesh, I traveled through a number of countries for five years. Marceau put all of himself, body and soul, into each performance. Afterward, exhausted, he would lock himself away in his hotel room for many long hours. On the next day, without visiting the city, he returned to the theater to rehearse a new sketch or to correct the lighting.

I should acknowledge, though, that the Arcana can be organized into one whole in countless ways. As the Tarot is essentially a projective instrument, there is no definitive, unique, perfect form within it. This is consistent with the mandalas drawn by Tibetan monks using different-colored sand. They all resemble one another but are never alike.

I asked it: “What purpose does this study serve for me? What kind of power are you able to give me?” I imagined the Tarot answered me: “You should acquire only the power of helping others. An art that does not heal is not an art.” But what does it mean to heal? Every illness, every problem is the product of a stagnation, whether it be one that is physical, sexual, emotional, or intellectual. Healing consists of regaining fluidity in one’s energies.

In Japanese culture, the straight line and symmetry are considered to be demonic. Actually, the study of sacred art shows that it is never symmetrical.

In many kinds of initiation, it is said that through language, human beings can approach the truth but never grasp it; and that, conversely, it is possible for them to know the truth through its reflection in beauty. The study of the Tarot can therefore be undertaken as a study of beauty. It is through looking, through placing our trust in what we see, that its meanings will gradually reveal themselves to us.