This book is a great "Cliff's Notes" on Spanish history. Easily accessible, but does get bogged down a bit in the middle. I enjoyed Tremlett's light-hearted style and it was a great jumping-off point for some wikipedia rabbit holes. I feel I have a much better understanding of the overall arc of Spanish history.
This book is a great "Cliff's Notes" on Spanish history. Easily accessible, but does get bogged down a bit in the middle. I enjoyed Tremlett's light-hearted style and it was a great jumping-off point for some wikipedia rabbit holes. I feel I have a much better understanding of the overall arc of Spanish history.
I was wandering around Leicester Square in London back in September browsing through various antique book stores. I came upon Watkins Books and looked in the window. I saw the shelves filled with occult and mystical books!
I walked inside and immediately felt an "energy." It was frantic yet alluring. While I looked around, a man was sitting behind a curtain at a small table chanting something in Hindi. I went to the Tarot section and this book with its cute hermit on the cover immediately caught my attention.
It turns out Alejandro Jodorowsky, the famed director of The Holy Mountain and of an aborted attempt to film Dune (later taken over by David Lynch), is also somehow an expert on tarot and an author? And he published a restored Tarot de Marseille deck?
Jodorowsky's central thesis that the tarot has a structure revolving around a double …
I was wandering around Leicester Square in London back in September browsing through various antique book stores. I came upon Watkins Books and looked in the window. I saw the shelves filled with occult and mystical books!
I walked inside and immediately felt an "energy." It was frantic yet alluring. While I looked around, a man was sitting behind a curtain at a small table chanting something in Hindi. I went to the Tarot section and this book with its cute hermit on the cover immediately caught my attention.
It turns out Alejandro Jodorowsky, the famed director of The Holy Mountain and of an aborted attempt to film Dune (later taken over by David Lynch), is also somehow an expert on tarot and an author? And he published a restored Tarot de Marseille deck?
Jodorowsky's central thesis that the tarot has a structure revolving around a double cycle of 1-10 as represented by the major arcana (bookended by The Fool and The World) is really intriguing and really gives a solid foundation for being able to read any card on the spot. This, and his understanding of the numerology of the Tarot make this book worth getting.
I understand his fascination with the Tarot de Marseille over the Rider-Waite Tarot as it is much more conducive to a "scrying" type of reading and is less "pushy" about the meanings of each card. However, 80% of the book is his notes on how he interprets every nook, cranny, color, word, and number represented on the cards. It gets tiring and repetitive.
On top of that, Jodorowski is one of those dudes who lives off of "shock value" and waving his dick in people's faces. He has a very heteronormative/gender-normative and chauvinist reading of the cards, so it needs a healthy dose of salt to accompany.
The end of the book has some cool ways to do tarot spreads.
I learned a lot, and I have to admit, it did change my perspective on the Rider-Waite deck and I now have my own copy of a recreation of an 1890 deck that I'm enjoying.
There is a long tradition of Great Detectives and Dirk Gently does not belong to …
Really funny book! You really get the sense that Douglas Adams was a huge computer / electronic music / quantum physics / drugs nerd. I think he would have been really fun to hang out with.
