This author is arguably the most influential in the new wave of interpretative tarologists.
With a global pictorial and pattern-driven interpretation of the cards and spreads featuring ample feedback between tarologist and consultant, Tarot sessions get closer to psychoanalytical appointments. Many of Jodorowsky's pupils and followers have already expanded on this view on the cards' use as an expanded-glorified Roscharch (ink blot) test. This was the way fortune-telling was used long ago: pattern recognizing in order to get insight into problem resolving. Future is only a possibility and can often be changed by the consultant following his needs and aspirations.
From the author’s (and Phillipe Camoin's) own interpretation of the so-called "Tarot de Marseille" (building mainly on Lequart / Conver packs from the 18th century and some "arcane knowledge" of uncertain origin) comes this highly elaborate intellectual construct organising the cards and some of their iconographic (some original and some probably not) details and colours in order to confer them a logic and homogeneity following philosophical cosmic ideals. Not unprecedentedly the tarot deck is convincingly presented as a allegoric monument for the progression of the human initiate, such as a cathedral.
It seems Jodorowsky has his own version of this cathedral. However one has to agree with him in that the tarot must be interpreted in the context on the pattern of ALL cards of the spread and not each card separately in order to access the full potential of this "psychic mirror" as Jung used to call it.
Most of the author's views and ideas expand on the original 1949 Paul Marteau analysis (Marteau and Jodorowsky each building on his own "reconstructed" Marseilles deck). Overall a very fresh and imaginative review of the symbolism which may enrich some of the (sometimes very rigid, particulate and unimaginative) accepted explanations of the cards and pack organisation.
This work is "light-years" more advanced than most essays or manuals "on the Tarot" which only repeat the same post-Waite "Golden-Dawn" pseudo-arcane holistic simplistic views restricted to the heavily modified and obvious modern decks (RWS & similar).
Unfortunately some of Jodorowsky's impressive intellectual "house of cards" don't resist an impartial analysis of the original Conver decks and of the several existing old Tarot decks pre-dating them in which many of the "fundamental" details and colours are different or absent.
However, the formal systematization of an open and dynamic method of Tarot consulting (already intuitively tried by many but never published before) will be the most enduring legacy of this author who initiated a whole new trend of effective and (most important) helpful Tarot reading.
Highly recommended. ( )