Four, three, two, one.
Nothing is ever a copy.
At the start of The Way of Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky describes trying to lay the 78 cards out as a symmetrical mandala, and failing every time. That failure taught him something. He remembers a guide at an old imperial palace in Japan telling him that no wall there was built quite straight, because perfect lines and perfect symmetry were thought to be demonic. Sacred art, he says, is never symmetrical. Our own bodies aren’t either: the right lung has three lobes and the left only two.
The same goes for the Tarot. The top of a card never quite matches the bottom, and the left never quite matches the right. Somewhere on every card a tiny difference, often easy to miss, keeps the two halves from matching. In his view the deck’s makers placed these on purpose, as a training in attention.
The rule inside the three
Once he saw that the Tarot always refuses to repeat itself, he found a law in how the Minor Arcana are built: “Out of four parts, three are almost identical, and one is different.” And of the three that are alike, two resemble each other more. He writes it as ([1 + 2] + 3) + 4. That is the four, three, two, one: a pair, the third that joins it, and the fourth that stands apart.
The book’s own examples
- The four suits
- Swords, Cups and Pentacles are made things; the Wand is a piece of nature. Of the three made things, the Cup and the Pentacle are the closest pair, while the Sword is held up in the air by a hand.
- The court cards
- Three Pages wear hats and the Page of Cups is bareheaded. Three Kings sit inside a palace and the King of Pentacles sits out in nature, with a hat instead of a crown. Three Knights ride blue horses and the Knight of Wands rides a pale one.
- Kings, Queens and Pages
- Later in the book the whole court is grouped the same way: the Kings and Queens of Swords, Cups and Pentacles form the pair, their Pages the third, and the Wands family of King, Queen and Page is the fourth, the seed of something new.
- Beyond the Tarot
- He finds the same pattern in the four elements (air and fire, then water, then earth), the four Gospels, the Christian Trinity with Mary, and even the face: ears and eyes come in separate pairs, the nostrils join into one nose, and the mouth stands alone.
Where this page goes further
The book names the pair inside the three only for the suits and the full court. For the Pages, Queens, Kings and Knights, and for the corner coins of the Ten of Pentacles, the pair shown here is our own reading of the CBD deck, and the page marks it as ours. You may well see a different pair. That is rather the point.
Want to see the whole deck as one structure? The Tarot mandala lays out all 78 cards, and Four palaces sets the court cards at home.
Sources: Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa, The Way of Tarot (Destiny Books, 2009): the opening chapter, around pp. 24–25; the chapter on the numerology of the Minor Arcana, around p. 256; Justice, around p. 169. Page numbers are taken from the ebook’s image numbering and may be off by one. Card images: CBD Tarot de Marseille by Dr. Yoav Ben-Dov (www.cbdtarot.com, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), which differs from the book’s deck in places; where it does, the notes say so.