Among my guides and mentors, one of my tarot decks is placed in plain view, very close to the book The way of the tarot by Alexandro Jodorowsky. This multifaceted Chilean artist, filmmaker and who was also assistant to the mime Marcel Marceau, is also a tarologist/psychotherapist. He studied the 78 mysteries of the Tarot de Marseille for decades to teach the subtleties thereafter. The devil of a man even pulled me over the phone during an interview on another subject. Jodo has “played” and thwarted codes and symbols all his life.
My tarot cards have accompanied me on the journey for a long time. I coaxed them at the age of 15 and I consult them occasionally. They are companions on the road and in doubt. I note that they have regained their luster over the past few years with young aficionados in love with esotericism and the art of divination. They can’t be blamed: the future has never seemed so uncertain, and the present is ready to prove it right. The tarot makes it possible to raise a lantern in the fog to let rise the answers buried in the unconscious, like a waking dream. He does enlightened introspection.
Divination is an art, like cooking and medicine. These arts are all based on a part of instinct, an assembly of signs, of “seasons” in the broad sense, of elements, of a particular reading specific to intuition. I handle the three, like a healer who would sometimes use her fine herbs, sometimes her nettles and mushrooms, and who, finally, would take out her cup of tea to read in the leaves.
A useless art is no art
My tarot is rarely wrong, because it invites you to dig; that’s why I use it sparingly and for real questions, never in a dissipated context. Its study is infinite and makes you humble since the symbolic load is immense. We are so small and ignorant before the vast baggage from which he draws.
“In many initiations, it is said that man can only approach the truth without ever knowing it through language and that, on the other hand, it is possible to know Beauty, a reflection of the True. Tarot study can therefore be undertaken as a study of beauty,” writes Jodo, who owns more than a thousand different tarot cards.
We can dare drag the Devil by the tail in this perspective.
Explore the invisible
The tarot makes poet and philosopher, and sometimes wise if we guess the subtext. Anyway, “the value of a reading depends on the level of consciousness of the tarologist”, recalls Jodo. The tarot often appeals to writers because it allows a story to be told in a playful, even psychoanalytical way. We do not know where its name comes from or what “tarot” means, but the term arcane (it has 22 major and 56 minor) means “secret” in Latin. This is why it is also used as a therapeutic tool. “It refers to a hidden meaning, a mystery defying the rational”, explains Jodo.
“The great interest of the tarot for me is to manipulate works of art to get to know each other better, to finally have themes for meditation”, writes the historian Evelyne Ferron, well known for her sparkling interventions. on the show Draw me a sunday and in his podcasts. She too has been using it for nine years as a psychological tool rather than as a divinatory art.
Evelyne explains to me that the symbolic figures of the High Priestess, the Pope, the Emperor or the Empress are a reflection of court life (the oldest preserved tarots were developed for the court of Milan, between 1440 and 1450 ). But the tarot dates back to the XIVand century and recalls the cardinal virtues of Strength, Temperance or Justice. “Christian allegories are not left out, if we think of the Devil or the famous Tower, originally the House of God,” adds the historian.
It also decodes Hebrew letters, Muslim symbols, cabalistic signs in an optical language that transcends cultures and eras. This mysterious murmur has always challenged me, as if I saw something appear in it behind a veil. The cards evoke; just listen to them. Or listen to us.
The Clairvoyants
Recently, I found myself at the poet Louise Dupré for a tarot reading in front of a steaming teapot. The writer participated, along with fourteen other authors, in writing the literary oracle Clairvoyantsreleased this spring.
This singular object makes it possible to approach the divinatory art from a feminine, introspective and symbolic point of view. Forty-five cards are divided into three fields: figures, places and objects. The book that accompanies the cards offers a pretty crazy reading, which is not the only one possible.
Louise learned to draw cards thanks to her maternal line and got caught up in the game of tarot while writing her doctoral thesis on Quebec poetry in the feminine. “There is a relationship to poetry; take figures and associate them with each other. And then there is intuition. For a creator, it is necessary. »
People would do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid staring their own souls in the face. It is not by imagining figures of light that one attains enlightenment, but by making darkness conscious.
According to her, reading the cards is convivial and allows us to be together in a different way. “We like to be talked about. We are not at the shrink, but there is a quality of introspection which resembles meditation… in pairs. We try to understand the strengths and weaknesses in ourselves. These are food for thought. I don’t organize my life according to what the tarot says. »
Clairvoyants offers a completely different mythology, baroque characters like the Cat Woman, the Temptress or the Witch. The Libraries are secret there, the Forests whisper opera and the Lace resembles relations, fragile and easy to tear with a clumsy gesture.
We travel in a parallel world through these 45 blades. The cards often teach me that I have no control and teach me to trust unsuspected forces. The tarot teaches me to dance with Death.
I can only change the angle: chaos begins and ends within me.
Instagram: josee.blanchette
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