A Musical Tarot

At the beginning of The Way of Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowski tells a story of how he first encountered the Tarot. At the age of seven, his father, Jaime, took him to Crazy Abraham’s billiard parlor. Little Alejandro took no notice of the billiard games; instead, he watched Crazy Abraham build card houses: “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.’”

The Tarot is a system of 78 illustrated cards, and for those who trust it and practice with it, the whole world is contained within it, every thing, being, event, process, and person we can experience. The cards hold a mirror up to our existence. Indeed, as Crazy Abraham knew, they do more than that: the cards are what we’re made of. In this respect, Tarot is like music. Music, too, both represents and participates in our lives. We don’t just listen to music, we are music. Tarot is the music of our souls in pictorial form. A study of music and Tarot makes a study of our own lives.

For five weeks, starting on Thursday March 19, Phil Ford will be leading a course called “A Musical Tarot” on Weirdosphere. Each week he will select cards from the Tarot and choose pieces of music that align with their energies. Students will be invited to read excerpts from such classic works as Jodorowski’s The Way of Tarot and the anonymous Meditations on the Tarot and to listen to selected pieces of from classical, jazz, pop, rock, hip-hop, and other streams of music. The Tarot is a sort of cosmic escritoire into whose 78 compartments we can sort all the gestures and movements of a human soul. And these are also the gestures and movements that music traces in air. So (for example) in the desk drawer labeled “The Hierophant” we might find JS Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier sitting next to Sleep’s doom-metal opus Dopesmoker. The study of Tarot can give us a music history made strange by the subtle and hidden imaginal wavelengths that connect pieces of music from across boundaries of period, style, genre, and tradition.

Through lectures, interactive class sessions, and the shared and collective creation of tarot-inspired playlists, we will grope our way towards a weird musicology. You don’t need any specialist knowledge or music theory chops, just a love of music and a curiosity about the Tarot.