DrTodd said:
Gracias Enrique
His insights are indeed liberating and appealing. The mandala is really nice as well.
The 'degrees' make sense and also offer a new opening for personal reflection as well as readings.
Saludos
Dr T
Hi Todd,
Jodorowsky has an irreverent way of speaking about the tarot, and about mysticism in general, that makes him very appealing to an up-to-date audience, and specially, to those who entertain a healthy skepticism about this kind of things. The mystical world is kind of tacky, and Jodorowsky has a great way of making it cool. I have always felt that there is a lot to learn from him. It is a shame that he had to put so much ego in his restoration of the Marseille tarot he released along with Philippe Camoin. That is, I believe, the biggest point in favor of Jean-Claude and Roxanne’s work: without making too much noise about their findings, they are working steadily at making available to us some very important, even foundational, tarots. I think the Flornoys are the closest thing we have to true card-makers, working to preserve a very precise visual tradition. They are giving us tools. What we do with these tools, where do we take what they have restored, is of course up to us.
I for one found very dramatic their decision of reversing the Dodal’s back. They tend to be so respectful of what is originally there that this took me by surprise. But when you think about it, thee is no arrogance in such decision. There is no “I found an egg that no one had seen before”, but a merely practical understanding of the use we give today to such decks. The work of a good card-maker is to preserve the imagery while adapting it to its market, and the new Dodal is a great working deck for those who are into readings. It doesn’t have some of the unique details we find in the Noblet, but it shows lots of these details that are part of the Marseille folklore -and the Noblet doesn’t have- like the blind kid in The Sun, Death and The Fool facing the same direction -so the nameless card and the numberless card feel like two layers of the same image- or the black bird behind The Star (which, very intriguingly, we also see at the bottom of the Ace of Cups). Those details form part of the narratives that people within the Marseille tradition use in their readings. I refer to them as folklore because they aren’t historically sound, but they are part of the Marseille tradition in that they have been transmitted orally along a few generations. I think it is great to have those details there.
Now, the Dodal has always fascinated me in that it looks as a modern deck. Most of its images are almost Cubist. This makes some cards, like The Wheel of fortune, or the four Knights, extraordinarily dynamic in an almost chaotic way. The superimposition of planes in some of the images make us feel as if they are about to fall apart, yet they perfectly convey the iconographic message intended. While looking at them I often wonder, what was going in that engraver’s head while he was carving those plates? Was he being lousy or courageous? What would he have thought if he would have known that a couple of centuries later, people like Cezanne, and then Braque or Picasso, will achieve fame and glory by doing in canvases what he was doing in his little cards?
All my Best,
EE
