Enrique Enriquez – a conversation with Yoav Ben-Dov, published in:
EX ITENT ER: ENCOUNTERS AROUND TAROT: VOLUME TWO (EyeCorner Press, 2012).
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ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: You created the CBD tarot de Marseille. I guess I could start the interview by asking: why follow the Marseille tradition instead of making your own deck?
YOAV BEN-DOV: In my first years as a Tarot reader and teacher I was using the Rider-Waite deck. But then I was lucky enough to learn Tarot from a real master, Alejandro Jodorowsky. I could see how deep and powerful his readings were, using just a few cards from the traditional Tarot de Marseille. Then I understood that the power of the Tarot is in the Images. It is a living work of art that evolves for many centuries, and undergoes transformations and natural selection through countless hands and eyes. The result is a set of images that has a very mysterious power over people – you look at them, and they bring up in your mind contents that can change your life. Now Tarot is a very flexible system. You can re-draw it in many different styles and the magic still works. This is what makes possible the new versions. But the power is diluted when you leave the original path. People using Tarot de Marseille often experience this: once you get used to them, new versions look flat and lifeless in comparison. I can understand why this is so. How can a single person, as talented as he or she could be, compete with 600 years of a living and evolving tradition, and with the hands and eyes of so many masters?
ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Indeed. People often obsess about finding a secret behind the images, when in fact, the images ARE the secret. Yesterday I saw a woman reduced to tears by noticing how the fire in La Maison Diev was flesh colored, like La Papesse’s book. (I was looking at the Jean Noblet tarot). It is very hard for someone outside the tradition to understand the magic of these images, which consists on bringing us back to the modesty of experience. Now, while talking to all these authors connected to the Marseille tradition I have noticed a pattern: they all coincide, loosely, in a general narrative: the tarot the Marseille is the repository of the knowledge of the image makers, this is, the same knowledge one would find in a cathedral, a mosque, a tanka painting… A knowledge that is based in the ability of use forms to lift us up. But the coincidences end there. No two authors agree on the details of that story. They even contradict themselves. I believe the problem resides in our need for absolutes. To me that story seems to be a myth, a “deep truth”, which works better at a poetic level than as a historical fact. What do you think?
YOAV BEN-DOV: I agree. Even if we believe that some mystical, esoteric group in the 14th century (or whatever) have put its teachings into the cards, this does not explain the magic of the tarot. There are so many mystical groups from previous periods that we don’t take as a guide for our life today. Why should we treat this one differently, just because it put its ideas in pictures form? The power of the cards for me is not in its origin, but in its evolution. For some reason, people feel the desire to preserve and develop this set of images. Why did they do so? I believe that the power of the images themselves was working on them and motivating them. And in their turn, they were modifying and adapting the images so as to have a stronger impact on people’s minds. And this went on for centuries. So, when someone feels he can see a repository of ancient knowledge in the cards, I take it as just another example of their impact. They make people project on them their ideal of ancient sublime knowledge, whatever this idea is: ancient Egypt, Cabbala, medieval or Renaissance secret societies… I can learn a lot from these projections. they tell me what intelligent and learned people can see in the cards. But I don’t take them as real history.
ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I agree with you, in the sense that, on one hand, I find rather silly the romantic notion of all “ancient wisdom” being inherently superior than our own innate wisdom. On the other hand, when I say that the secret in the images is the images themselves, I am alluding to a tradition of image-making in a literal sense: draftsmen, painters, stone-carvers (but also musicians and poets)… They all knew how to move our souls by means of the manipulation of materials and forms. That is the craft of the image-maker. Since the tarot is a set of images, it obviously inherited these qualities. To me the bottom line is this: the experience of the tarot is the experience of art. Looking at the tarot de Marseilles images and letting them speak accomplishes the same thing as the experience of art accomplishes. Now, these 22 images we see in the Marseille tarot are especially apt. We live now in an age of image-making in which anybody can snap pictures, rework them and share them with the world in a matter of seconds. But, in consequence, these images are only good for a matter of seconds. The 22 trumps of the Marseille tarot have survived for centuries. Anybody can make up a new tarot pack. But the moment you change The World card into whatever image tickles your fancy, you lose the possibility to see the mandorla (MANDORLA = ALMOND = LA MOND = LEMONDE) as an eye, or a vagina, womb, wound, or the Anima Mundi. The moment you change the images, you render their range of significance, their language, mute.
YOAV BEN-DOV: Yes, I agree — tarot is first of all a work of art. This does not mean you cannot speak about it as magic. Art and magic have an age-old relationship. But also it is a very special form of art. It is not like a painting that, once finished, is framed and put on a wall and that’s it, you can admire it but not touch or modify it. Tarot is a living and evolving work of art. It exists in the hands of people. It undergoes natural selection: somebody invents a new feature, which could be for any arbitrary reason (like a random mutation) — for example, to show the moon in profile and not full face as it was until the 17th century. Either the modification catches on and people accept and propagate it, or it gets rejected and does not appear in later decks. In this sense the evolution of tarot resembles the slow adaptation process of a living species. Or, if you want, a meme system. Like a living system, it is always on the brink of extinction: It could be enough that one generation would reject the set of images for the chain to be broken. Tarot as we know it would disappear and be replaced by a different card game. So, tarot had to prove itself continuously for each generation.
ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: How do you see the relationship between the tarot and language? In which way do you think the names in the cards affect the images, or vice versa?
YOAV BEN-DOV: Originally the texts were not part of the printed cards. But once integrated into it, they become part of the language. You can go into the text of each card and find meanings for it, but like the image, there is not a fixed interpretation. Considering the captions in general, in Conver’s version you can see that they are archaic-looking, inconsistent and with many anomalies, compared to 18th century standards (when there was already a standard orthography, for instance, a clear distinction between U and V). Some examples of these anomalies: inconsistency in the use of U and V. Sometimes an apostrophe appears where it should not be (L’A ROVE DE FORTVNE), sometime the opposite (LETOILLE) Irregularity in breaking up or joining of words, unclear use of points or periods between words and groups of small vertical lines. Three court cards are spelled BATON, one (the Queen) BASTON. Three suits have number cards with numerals written on them, but not the coins. 15 court cards have captions below, and one (Valet de Deniers) on the side. And, of course, LE MAT without a number but with a blank band, XIII without name and without blank band. What is the function of these anomalies? Perhaps one function is to give the cards an archaic feeling (Compared to the time of printing 1760). But perhaps there is a d deeper reason: the balance between order and chaos, which is also expressed in other card features like broken symmetries in many card details. In my view this is something very important. Any well-trained artist knows to balance between regularity and irregularity. Also in modern terms of complexity theory, “edge of chaos” is the permanent state of living and evolving systems. So, these irregularities are an important feature which makes the cards come alive.
ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: You have said that you retraced the Marseille tarot while aiming at making it contemporary. What do you mean by that?
YOAV BEN-DOV: Since the tarot is an evolving system, when I restored the CBD Tarot I was not looking for the oldest original deck. It is like saying that “the real Einstein” is who he was as a newborn baby. Instead, I tried to catch the magic of the tarot from the most potent deck, which has proved its power and influence over people’s minds by becoming the most influential deck in Tarot history. Clearly, this is the Conver (1760) deck. So I tried to reproduce it as faithfully as possible. A major factor in the visual impact of a Tarot deck is the quality of the lines. Today it is not practical to reproduce the woodprint technique of the original Conver cards. But I still wanted the lines to be handmade, not computer-generated. So I took an illustrator who traced the lines with ink on paper, working by the eye. I then scanned the drawing, had it cleaned, and re-shaped the lines by hand using high-quality scans of the original Conver cards. It was important for me to preserve the fine details of the original, up to a single line resolution. Still, I was not interested in making a museum restoration. Rather I want to produce a deck usable for people today. It is not possible to reproduce exactly the techniques, the coloring materials and the quality of the paper used for the original cards of 1760. And even if I could imitate them with artificial means, the visual impression on the observer would be totally different, as our present-day eyes are accustomed to a completely different world of images and graphic materials. Due to these differences I had to introduce some adaptations in various places, such as to soften an “abnormal” detail which would stand out too much with the modern means of printing. I made especially significant changes to the facial expressions, since an exact copy would have made them too gloomy and depressive to a modern observer, although I tried to preserve the general facial traits. In addition, since there is no way to reproduce the original shades of color pigments and the impression they made at the time, I had to rebuild the scale of shades of the various colors. This means that a red surface in Conver’s cards would still be a red surface in the CBD Tarot de Marseille, but I had to decide which shade of red to use.
ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Speaking of color, where –in your view– does the images’ emotional impact reside? Is it in their colors, their shapes…?
YOAV BEN-DOV: I think there are many factors which together create the magical impact of the tarot. The colors and shapes are part of it. But they are not like the deck structure, or the symbols, which represent a long established tradition. Instead, what we see here is the art of the particular deck creator. This is what made me really excited about when I was working on the CBD deck. Suddenly I could see what this person, Nicholas Conver, was doing, how he was composing the cards with the colored surfaces, so as to give each card a different structure of movement and harmony. Now these compositions were there in the original Conver cards, but you could not see them clearly because of the fading and the wear of old age, and with the imperfect quality of the original printing materials. I suppose that the last time they were really clear to see was in Conver’s original designs on paper, which he must have made before starting to cut the wood. So it was very exciting for me to see these compositions appear again on my computer screen after 250 years, once I copied the exact shapes and filled them with fresh colors. Especially that I was not looking for them in advance, because I was not thinking on this aspect of the cards and nobody else mentions it. For example, How the colored shapes are arranged so as to give a feeling of anticlockwise motion in the wheel of fortune. The dynamic tension in the temperance card aroused by a bow-and-arrow composition. How the observer’s eye is drawn by the shapes and the colored surfaces towards the focusing points in the hermit and the queen of coins cards. The integration of the staring lines of the figures’ eyes into the compositions. And then there are some crazy things, like the Picasso-style play with surfaces in the valet of clubs, so that the hands detach from the body and become one object with the stick. This is why I think that Conver was first of all an artistic genius. You can see some examples in the video on the art and composition of the cards here http://bendov.info/tarot/cbd/cbd_video.html
ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: What do you make of la langue des oiseaux and/or gay sçavoir? Do you see any relationship between these notions and the Marseille tarot?
YOAV BEN-DOV: I suppose by that you mean the ideas of Fulcanelli from about 100 years ago, that were adapted by Jean-Claude Flornoy in recent years: there is a historical connection between the cathedral builders, Templar knights, compagnions, troubadours, a secret initiate language and the tarot de Marseille. As a historical thesis, there is no solid evidence for any of these links. Also, I don’t see that the examples given for “the true meaning” of the cards based on this theory are so enlightening. Still, there are two points in Flornoy’s text that I find interesting. One is the idea that you should try to understand tarot images by direct intuition, not by rational reasoning. I agree with that. It reminds me of Chinese Taoism, for example the story of Chuang Tzu and the happy fish in the Hao river: you are not a fish, how can you know that the fish are happy? Well, you cannot know how you know, but you know that the fish are happy when you look at them. In a similar way, you “know” the meaning of the card when you see it while reading. It is not a rational process that you do by the book. The second is the idea of deconstructing words like in puns and word games. I think the same is true with surfaces in the tarot de Marseille images: you can play with deconstructing and reconstructing them into new forms and objects. You can also do it with the texts: Jodorowsky reads “Le Jugement”, the Judgment card, as “le juge ment” – the judge is lying. Also you can read “Letoille” as the star, but also as the tissue (both slightly misspelled), and understand it as an irony on her nakedness. This kind of word games is done in Cabalistic writings and also in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Now Cabala and tarot is not a new link, but I think there are interesting things to understand on the tarot from a Lacanian point of view.
New York – Israel, 2012