April Card-a-Month: Jodo-Camoin Marseilles

Before this month gets too far away from us, I better post the Card-a-Month for April. This time, I am using the Marseilles restoration by artist, director, and tarot-seer Alejandro Jodorowsky and Phillipe Camoin, scion of the original Marseilles deck creators, it seems.

Early on in my card reading, I started to prefer using Marseilles decks over Rider-Waite versions, but I only discovered the Jodorowsky deck a couple of years ago. I don't think that I've ever worked with a deck and a reading system as intuitive and generous as the one Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa laid out in The Way of Tarot. This deck talks to you, and it's trusted advice.

The card to guide us for the month for April:

The 8 of Coins.

It's a weird time, April. We should be in full-spring, yet winter behavior continues to exert itself. April feels more like the old saying for March these days, in like a lion out like a lamb. Another sign of climate change. It's these liminal seasons that are the most weirding. As much as we may want to save the world and preserve it, we may have to respect the weather it feels it needs to express during the change. Spring will come, or something like it. Representing the month in the zodiac are Aries and Taurus.

The 8 of Coins in the Jodo-Camoin system is basically the fulfillment of necessity: all needs are met, and everything is in place, as each one of these coins is neatly sectioned by the flowering growth centered where the material and spiritual planes (in Jodo's view, the bottom and top halves of the card). It seems again, similar to last month with the King of Pentacles*, our lodestar is meeting and realizing the material prosperity we have that fulfills us.

*The thing about the coins/pentacles suit again: Last time I complained about the name on the card but eventually acquiesced; this time I feel fine calling April's card the 8 of Coins. The Way of Tarot English translation used pentacles, but the original text had deniers, coins in French, so I don't see a big deal there.

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Photo by Anthony Michael Morena is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.