Horizontal and Vertical Orientation: A Study in Contrasts

AUTHOR'S NOTE: More inspiration from Alejandro Jodorowsky. In The Way of Tarot, Jodorowsky talks about certain trump cards that exhibit a horizontal orientation and thereby symbolize "action in the world," while others align vertically and emphasize interaction between the plane of Earth and the spiritual (or in some cases, infernal) regions. His representative examples were …

The Importance of “Focus”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: While ordering my thoughts for this essay, I toyed with the idea of talking about "landscape" and "distance" (near, middle and far) as displayed in the scenic cards of the tarot, since both imply "action in the world" (Alejandro Jodorowsky's supple phrase) that can be explored during the interpretation. But then I realized …

The Further Adventures of “Gaze and Regard”

I've written in the past on the topic of "facing, gaze or regard" between two adjacent tarot cards that include human or human-like beings in their iconography, and what their juxtaposition in a spread means for the narrative when they are either facing toward or away from one another. (Simply put, one suggests "seeing eye-to-eye" …

The Pages: “Hesitation Blues”

"How long do I have to wait?Can I get it nowOr must I hesitate?"("Hesitation Blues," early 1900s, attributed to various songwriters) I just came across a description of the tarot Pages as "hesitation between doing and not doing" according to the nature of their suit (Alejandro Jodorowsky in The Way of Tarot). The implication is …

The Tens: A “Holding Pattern”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I won't regale you with where I got the raw material for this essay; suffice it to say that it's "of a piece" with my last dozen "sourced" ideas. The Tens of the Minor Arcana have been described as representing a "cessation of effort" while awaiting new information or a fresh impulse to …

The “Active Witness” and the Minor Arcana

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here is another interesting observation from Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Way of Tarot. In it he notes that, when a "pip" card of the Tarot de Marseille exhibits a red dot or figurative "eye," the symbol represents an "active (that is, actively involved) witness" to the action signified by the card. This idea inspired …

The Sixes as “Solar Centerpiece”

I recently reconnected with an idea I had forgotten about from my previous studies: adding together the integers of certain sets of three consecutive numbers from One to Nine (and, if necessary, refining the sum through "Theosophical reduction") will always yield the number Six. The same is true of the double-digit trump cards, and actually …

Lunar Month Look-Ahead for December 2022 – January 2023: A New Wrinkle

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This reading reflects both an update to my lunar-month predictive model and a return to "first principles." In the past I decided to remove the Major Arcana and court cards from the draw because the short-term outlook changes on roughly a 3-1/2 day frequency during the month and the Minor Arcana should therefore …

“Heavenly Fourth”

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Nothing profound today, just a bit of whimsy from the Monty Python - Mel Brooks collaboration Yellowbeard that I find amusing from a tarot perspective. There has been much conjecture about the intentions of the angelic hand emerging from the cloud in the Waite-Smith 4 of Cups as it offers a fourth chalice …

The Court Cards as “Decimal Equivalents”

I've been working with the concept of "Theosophical reduction" (adding together and reducing the digits of a composite number to produce a simple, one-factor sum) for so long that I've been more than a little skeptical of Alejandro Jodorowsky's notion of "decimal equivalency" between the double-digit and single-digit cards of the Major Arcana. His premise …