Jodorowsky and the Tarot That Doesn't Predict the Future

When people asked Alejandro Jodorowsky to read the future in the cards, his answer was disarming: "I don't see the future, only the present."

For the Chilean filmmaker, poet and tarot reader, that single sentence holds the whole misunderstanding of modern tarot. The card announces nothing. It is not a window onto what is coming — it is a mirror held up to what is already here, now, in the life of the person sitting across from you.

The stance is radical. It unplugs tarot from fortune-telling and plugs it back into self-knowledge. On this idea Jodorowsky built an entire method, which he calls Tarology.

Jodorowsky draws a sharp line between two uses of the same cards.

Cartomancy tries to predict the future: it treats the tarot as an oracle answering "yes," "no," "soon," "never." It places the person in passive waiting before a destiny already written.

Tarology, by contrast, seeks to understand the present and the potential — what is expressed and what stays unexpressed in a situation. It doesn't say what will happen; it illuminates what is at play, so the person can choose, and act.

The shift is enormous. In cartomancy, the reader knows. In Tarology, it is the querent who finds — and the reader is only the mirror that helps them see.

Before theorising his method, Jodorowsky spent over forty years studying the Tarot de Marseille. In 1997 he published, with Philippe Camoin — heir to the last lineage of Marseille printers — a restored version of the deck.

The two men don't really speak of "restoring" an old deck, but of the rebirth of a spirit: recovering and reassembling symbols scattered across centuries and across Europe, to give the tarot back a lost visual and structural coherence.

The choice of the Tarot de Marseille is no accident. Unlike modern illustrated decks, its minor arcana are geometric, almost abstract. That sobriety forces the reader to actually look — at the colours, the lines, the directions — rather than read a ready-made scene.

Jodorowsky's reading method rests on a few simple but demanding principles.

No fixed meanings. A card does not "mean" one thing once and for all. Its meaning is born from what the querent projects onto it, and from its dialogue with the other cards laid beside it.

The optical language. Jodorowsky reads the direction of gazes (where is the figure looking?), the colours, the gestures, the hands. A figure looking left looks at its past; right, its future; down, its matter; up, its spirit.

Number as a path. From Ace to Ten, each minor arcana is a stage in a process of maturation. The Five is a crisis, the Ten a completion that already calls for a new beginning.

The dialogue of cards. Two cards side by side do not add up: they speak to each other. The meaning of a reading lives in the relationship between the images, not in any card alone.

Seeing clearly, for Jodorowsky, is not enough. One must also act. This is where psychomagic comes in — the concept he popularised.

The idea: the unconscious does not speak the language of reason, but that of symbols, images and gestures. To loosen an inner knot, rational advice has little grip — but a symbolic, theatrical, poetic act can reach the deep self directly.

A reading done in Jodorowsky's spirit therefore often ends with a proposed act: a small, concrete gesture to perform, anchored in what the cards revealed.

Keep in mind: psychomagic is a symbolic, creative practice — not a scientifically validated therapy nor a substitute for medical or psychological care. It is a personal ritual of integration — nothing more, but nothing less.

To practise in this spirit, first change the question. Don't ask "What is going to happen to me?" but "What is at play in me, right here, right now?"

Then lay a few cards and read them as a mirror: what does the present moment reflect? What root feeds it deep down? What does your gaze avoid seeing? What can you grow toward — without predicting, simply by orienting yourself?

And close with an act: a simple, symbolic gesture to perform today.

This is exactly the spirit of Mystic Manga's "Jodorowsky style" reader: on any spread, pick this reader before invoking the Oracle, and your cards will be read his way — no prediction, and the invitation to act.