Tarot. The Open Reading - review

These are only a couple of thoughts I had about "Tarot. The Open Reading".

I liked the book very much. The author draws the reader's attention to many various ways to read what the cards want to tell us - how the figures and objects in the spread correspond to each other by gestures, glances, colours and shapes that patches of colours create. I think the author reads the pips in a less detailed way than we do when we read scenic pips like RWS. He sees them more like smaller pieces showing a bigger picture. However, he also gives in his book interpretation for every card and what's interesting - he has an interpretation for a reverse card, if the card can be reversed at all (some of the pips are so symmetrical it's hard to see whether they're straight or upright).

About the suits: Dr. Yoav Ben-Dov seems to refer to classical playing cards suits where we have black and red suits - and where black suits are believed to mean struggle and complication and red suits are about love, company and money. Thus he sees Cups and Coins as "soft suits" that show more pleasant things and Wands and Swords as "hard suits" that show us our challenges and limitations.

The book was interesting for me also because the author is a disciple of Alejandro Jodorowsky and he refers to his teachings frequently. In suits he sees correspondences to the elements, directions, parts of human body etc. and he points that we can put the suits into the order according to them. For example:

Coins=body=legs, that ground us, that give us the base. Without a body there's no emotion, no desire and no intellect.

Wands=desire=pelvis, where our sexual desires dwell.

Cups=emotion=chest, where our heart is.

Swords=intellect=head.

What I didn't like and thus skipped that chapter - detailed instructions for how you should do a reading and what to avoid (like use blue bag for your deck, but not red, better use matches to light the candle, than a lighter). I believe that to be a very personal thing and nobody should give such detailed instructions about it. I'm also not into "magical ritual" kind of thing, so these parts were not interesting for me. 

I must also say that the deck that the author has restored is great, I like it very much. I have the Jodorowsky&Camoin restored deck and I love it to bits, but maybe one day I will also buy the CBD :) What is lovely about the CBD, is that Dr. Ben-Dov altered the expressions of the figures a bit - and they don't look so stern; they mostly smile gently.