The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards

The Tarot as Mandala Recasts the Symbolic Tradition from Divination to Depth-Psychological Integration

Jodorowsky’s central thesis — that the seventy-eight cards of the Tarot of Marseille constitute a single mandala, not a collection of discrete oracles — transforms the Tarot from an occult curiosity into a structural analog of the individuation process. He invokes Jung directly: “According to Carl Gustav Jung, the mandala is a representation of the psyche, whose essence is unknown to us.” But where Jung treated mandala production as spontaneous psychic compensation, Jodorowsky treats the Tarot mandala as a preexisting architectural blueprint — a temple whose fragments must be reassembled through initiatory labor. The metaphor he deploys is Osirian: “The Arcana of the Tarot are a chest in which a spiritual treasure has been deposited. The opening of this chest is equivalent to a revelation. The initiatory work consists of gathering together the fragments until the original unit has been restored.” This is not metaphorical hand-waving. Jodorowsky describes decades of physical experimentation — sleeping with individual cards, rubbing them on his body, imagining their figures naked, extending their images beyond the card’s frame — to achieve what amounts to active imagination practiced on external symbolic objects rather than internal psychic images. The parallel with Edward Edinger’s account of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype is striking: both authors describe a process in which scattered symbolic fragments must be consciously reassembled to restore a wholeness that was always latent. But where Edinger works through mythological amplification, Jodorowsky works through somatic and ritual identification with symbolic form.

“Fluid Symbols” Constitute a Radical Hermeneutics That Challenges Both Esoteric Dogmatism and Reductive Psychoanalysis

The book’s most philosophically potent distinction is between “arrested symbols” and “fluid symbols.” Arrested symbols demand a single fixed interpretation — “An Arcanum is this and only this!” Fluid symbols operate like dream images: “The objects of the unconscious have infinite aspects.” Jodorowsky is explicit about the clinical consequences: “The patients of Freudian therapists do not dream the same dreams as patients of Jungian or Lacanian therapists. The first see phalluses and vaginas, the second see cosmic signs, and the third see plays on words.” This observation positions him closer to James Hillman’s critique in Re-Visioning Psychology than to any orthodox Jungian stance. Like Hillman, Jodorowsky insists that the image is primary and that any single theoretical framework distorts it. But Jodorowsky parts company with Hillman at a decisive point: he does not privilege the image’s autonomy as an end in itself. Instead, he subordinates imaginal multiplicity to a therapeutic imperative — “An art that does not heal is not an art.” The Tarot reader must “charge” the symbols with “the most sublime definition possible,” actively choosing interpretations that move the consultant toward what Jodorowsky calls divine consciousness and away from the repetition compulsion of childhood trauma. This is neither Hillman’s polytheistic imagism nor Freud’s hermeneutics of suspicion. It is something closer to what Stanislav Grof describes in his work on holotropic states: a directed engagement with symbolic material that respects its multiplicity while orienting it toward integration.

The Minor Arcana as Nonfigurative Sacred Art Inverts the Western Esoteric Hierarchy

One of the book’s most overlooked contributions is its rehabilitation of the Minor Arcana — the forty numbered pip cards — as the authentic foundation of Tarot study. Jodorowsky is scathing about the Rider-Waite deck, calling its Minor Arcana “the very portrait of their creators’ limits and characteristics and — why not say so? — their illnesses.” The Waite deck’s figurative illustrations impose narrative onto what the Tarot of Marseille preserves as pure geometric form. Jodorowsky connects this geometric abstraction directly to Islamic sacred art and the Pythagorean tradition: “The art of expressing the spiritual process through geometrical shapes was primarily developed by the nonfigurative artists of Islam.” This is not a casual comparison. By placing the Minor Arcana first in the sequence of study, Jodorowsky argues that one must learn to read abstract pattern before interpreting figurative imagery — a pedagogy that mirrors the apophatic theological tradition in which what cannot be represented teaches more than what can. The two exceptions to geometric abstraction in the Minor Arcana — the Two of Cups and the Four of Pentacles, both depicting the phoenix — function as alchemical signatures confirming that the deck’s creators understood the pip cards as concealment devices for initiatory knowledge, not as decorative filler.

Trauma, Projection, and the Reader as Mirror: Tarology as Depth-Psychological Practice

Jodorowsky’s autobiographical disclosures function as clinical demonstrations, not confessions. His account of projecting his unwanted gestation onto Justice, The Hanged Man, and Arcanum XIII — “I realized that Justice was my pregnant mother, that The Hanged Man was me in the fetal state, and that Arcanum XIII was the desire to eliminate me” — illustrates the mechanism by which unprocessed trauma colonizes symbolic perception. The therapeutic method he derives from this insight is precise: identify the age and developmental arrest from which the consultant views reality, then use the Tarot reading to expand that viewpoint toward what he calls “an infinite, eternal, and cosmic regard.” This diagnostic approach — “How old is he? What is the point of view from which he looks at things?” — parallels the developmental assessment embedded in Gabor Maté’s trauma framework and anticipates the somatic-relational emphasis of Bessel van der Kolk’s work. But Jodorowsky’s method is distinguished by its insistence that the reader must undergo the same process: “A Tarot reading by an adult with the mind of a perverse child is dangerous for the life of the person for whom the reading was given.” The reader is not a neutral screen but an active participant whose own level of psychic integration determines the quality of the reading. This reciprocity — reader and consultant as mutual mirrors — elevates the Tarot session from fortune-telling to a dyadic therapeutic encounter that shares structural features with the analytic relationship as described by Jung in “The Psychology of the Transference.”

For readers approaching depth psychology today, The Way of Tarot offers something no other book in the tradition provides: a complete symbolic system that is simultaneously a diagnostic tool, a meditation practice, and a theory of therapeutic relationship — all grounded not in abstract doctrine but in four decades of embodied, ritual engagement with images. It demonstrates that the boundary between “esoteric” and “psychological” is itself an arrested symbol, one that Jodorowsky’s fluid hermeneutics dissolves with precision and without apology.