By M. Belén Bulacio
Milonga interviewed Victoria Braojos Nieves, director, founder and teacher of the European Esoteric School The Order of Ayala.
At the beginning of this interview Victoria shows me a collection of tarot cards, and a book by Oswald Wirth [artist and esoteric author, disciple of Stanislas de Guaita] which she describes as an "incunabulum".
Victoria: "This first book that I have shown you, is the ferro, with his handwritten notes and his corrections. In fact, there are corrections that were not made in his book, as happens in all books". She looks for the Argentina section, and showing it to me, she says: "this is the Tarot del Tango, and all these other decks are also Argentine".
Belén: Your name is Braojos Nieves, does it have Portuguese ancestry?
Victoria: In principle, not as far as I know. Apparently it comes from the Jews. It is a surname, Braojos, which means the metal braonera worn by the soldiers. But I know up to that point. I know about the Jews because some friends of mine, who are Templars of a Jewish order, told us...because I thought it was Arabic. As far as I know he is not Portuguese, but hey who knows...(and with surprise he exclaims), oh I have family, come on Braojos that are Brazilian and Portuguese.
Belén: I also thought that, perhaps, it was an esoteric name.
Victoria: Do you want to believe that many people, when I became famous here in Spain, many years ago... because of something I did that was very geeky, but that reached the whole world? I mean, I was the first witch that was on the front page of all the newspapers in Spain. Do you want to believe that people thought it was my stage name?
Belén: Artistic no, being a witch it is rather esoteric.
Victoria: Well no, in fact my esoteric name, I sign as Victoria Braojos and in quotation marks Ayala. In fact I don't know if I have any of the books I wrote here [she searches through the material she has spread out on her table], I have eight books of all kinds of things. Look, this is a book I wrote by Marcia, and if you see it is signed as Ayala, Victoria Braojos - Maestra Ayala. That is my esoteric baptismal name.
Belén: Well, when did it start? What is your connection with tarot?
Victoria: I started very young. I come from a family that has an important spiritual tradition, but not linked to tarot or cards. What happened is that when I was three years old, thanks to my mother, my mother was a cook, and in one of the restaurants where she worked, there was a client who was a mazon. And he was the one who showed me the first tarot of my life, Enrique Maizón. Well, he showed me some wonderful showcases... I was a little girl, I was about to turn four years old, and I saw the first deck of cards. And soon after, Enrique gave me my first tarot, which was a facsimile of the Ombers tarot, which I also gave to a friend who has a herbalist who still has it, only with the twenty-two major arcana. And besides, it was very curious, because one of the tarot cards that I saw in her showcase, years later I had a dream, before the pandemic, with that tarot in black and white, which I always said was the tarot of the golden century. And Miguel Fernández Pacheco appears, and for those who don't know him, he is an illustrator, he is an artist, and he was the one who made the "Electroduendes de la bruja Avería", which I suppose you are also familiar with in Argentina. And he comes to me with some letters, which he did not paint himself, in fact an illustrator who has worked with him has painted them. And when I see them I say, "these are the cards of my dream". This deck was published, which was called "The Tarot of the Golden Age", and I want to show you some images [he shows me some cards with beautiful images, of an unfathomable depth]. And I dreamt it in black and white... it was something so special, what can I tell you... You should know that Javier Serrano and I had never met before, in fact, when Miguel arrived he was very worried because he said "he has only drawn eight cards, he is missing fourteen", and I told him "don't worry, this tarot will be published and it will be in the next congress". And suddenly, without connecting one with the other, the other gave him all the cards in one week. And this is true, any of the authors can tell you. It was a beautiful project, with the book, only the major arcana. And that's how I started, actually I started very young, in the most casual way...although you know that in life there are no coincidences.
Belén: When you were three years old, you had your first contact with the tarot, with a deck, and how did you learn it? How did you study it?
Victoria: Look, children, when you give them a deck of cards, what they do is play. And I used to play with him. But it is true that in my house, when we finished eating at family gatherings on Sundays, we would take out a Spanish deck of cards and we would play a game to see if you were going to be unhappy, or if you were going to... In other words, everything was very oracular. That deck of cards served me to amplify the Sunday dessert game, where I was a child and they didn't let me participate. And I would see how my mother would play the game with my sister or something like that. Because my mother was a clairvoyant, what she did was that what she dreamed, generally when she dreamed it three times it came true. My sister is a medium, she is also a dream seer, and she casts the cards but in a very intuitive way, as a child does or as any student does when he starts with the tarot. Now many begin in schools, but the initial tarot reader, what he or she does is buy a deck of cards and begins to play, to see what it transmits to him or her. You have to think about one thing: the deck is absolutely archetypal, so when we see an image, it will take us directly to a place. If we see the card of the Emperor, it reminds us of our father...the archetype is the father, but it will take us to the emotions that our father transmitted to us. If I cast the cards for you, and you get the Emperor, although there is a meaning that a group of tarot readers have arrived at and we have given that meaning to the card, traditionally that archetypal meaning has been dragged along, then I will have a particular feeling with that card. So if that image brings me pleasant sensations, I will transmit those sensations to you through that spread of cards. So we all start like that, playing. Besides, there are many games, for example, Russian or German games that were puzzles for children, and then they became oracles. For example, what Marianne Costa has done. She has turned the Mexican lottery into an oracle. Because deep down it is true that all those images of the Mexican lottery transfer us to an information. That is why Jung saw in the tarot a reflection of the collective unconscious. The lecture I am going to give at the university is based on Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and we are going to see that the myth of the hero is in the tarot. What happens is that the tarot parallels everything, which is why it has survived, has been maintained and has been amplified for so many years.
Then, logically, as you get older, you discover that there are tarot books. In my family nobody cast cards, so Enrique gave me some books when I was older. But since I was very young, when I was 7 or 8 years old, I was part of a Catholic Spiritist group and then I also received information from there. At the beginning it was all self-taught because, curiously, the first tarot books that arrived in Spain after Franco's regime were from Argentina because here with the dictatorship it was forbidden. Franco prohibited Freemasonry, he would have liked to be a Mason but he could not because Freemasonry does not admit a war criminal. Those first books could have come from France but not because we speak the same language and you were more liberated. From then on, because of our proximity to Italy and France, there has been an important surge, but the number of Argentine Tarot followers is the largest in the whole world. Neither in Italy, nor in France, nor in Spain, nor in England. I am telling you this because of the courses we do. Argentina is the tarot's mere mere. There are also people who have gotten into psychoanalysis through tarot. The publishing house that made the first Spanish tarot was Mauchi Italo-Argentina and, in fact, one of the most successful tarots in Argentina and Mexico is the Spanish tarot whose author was Tedelmiro Moreno. I discovered this 7 or 8 years ago while doing research on him. Moreno was from Seville where the polvorones, from the steppe. What happens is that he was a guy who worked translating for the Jesuits, he was a very smart and very cultured guy but as he lived in Argentina for many years many people think he was Argentinean.
Then when I arrived in Madrid, I started reading the cards on television in a way, partly self-taught from everything I was absorbing from books, and through intuition because I have an intuitive part, which we all have, but I have not been restrained when I was a child and I let myself be carried away by it. Right now there is a program I recommend by Eduardo Curcet with a fantastic scientist who claims that intuition is more accurate than reason. I am a woman with my eyes in the sky and my feet very much on the ground. In fact, this year, for the first time, tarot entered the university in Spain. After the books I was nourished by magic, in which I was very involved, and I was absorbing the mythological knowledge of each of the societies of different cultures, I have been in Haiti, I have been in some sects because I was very interested in gnosis. After all this journey and many years in the esoteric world, I decided that I wanted to know more about the human mind, I organized the congress and began to bring academics so that there would not only be an esoteric vision, but also a mythological, psychological and historical vision of the tarot. A perspective open to all views of tarot, including the oracular.
A year before the pandemic I decided to study psychology and journalism at the university in order to know how to transmit, write and communicate well and, at the same time, to have a broader knowledge of the human mind. From then on, I began to connect with the academy and I have been very lucky to have friends who have pushed me and supported me because they knew that I was interested in tarot so that it would not remain on a table on a velvet tablecloth and a candle in that obscurantist way that it has traditionally been given. Because the deck is an object that women have used as a psychologist, possibly, or as a way to see beyond what they had in their lives. And as everything about women is demonized, the tarot was not going to be less. In fact, I am going to tell you something that is very interesting: the Visconti Sforza deck, the tarot that is considered the oldest, which is at Yale University, has something that very few people have realized, and that is that this tarot, apart from all the virtues, the theological virtues, the moral virtues, etc., has a knight and an amazon, a jack man and a jack woman, that is, a male page and a female page, and has a king and a queen.
Belén: It is more integrated.
Victoria: It has many women! The same level of men as women, however, in later tarots [the figure of the woman] is disappearing and only the queen is left. But if you go into the Yale University library right now and look up the tarot, you will see those women who, curiously, have disappeared. In fact, it is said that the tarot had 96, 98 cards and 76 are preserved.
Belén: Victoria, tell us how the First Deck and Tarot Congress came about.
Victoria: Because of a tantrum, but I'm going to tell you about it at a dinner [laughs]. Look, I had been wanting to organize a congress that included magic and esotericism for a long time. In fact, in the first congress there were two parts, the tarot and deck of cards and magic and alchemy. But then I said, if the tarot itself encompasses everything and from the tarot you can talk about everything, why not leave the congress only about the deck and tarot. Above all, because for me it was important to bring tarot out of the closet, I was so tired of the fact that when you said "What are you? It seemed that my profession was like a sin, and I wanted to show or make public that tarot was much more and that very important people spoke, wrote and even fashion collections inspired by tarot have been made. I will refer to the last one, Dior a few months ago released a spectacular collection based on the Visconti tarot. Dali himself was going to be hired to make the tarot for the 007 movie, but he asked for a lot of money and didn't do it in the end. Many painters, illustrators, filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro and Tomás Hijo, psychologists like Jung, philosophers and anthropologists have debated with the tarot, but this is not known. All that is known about tarot is that there are ladies, that there are also gentlemen, but generally the ladies are demonized, that there are ladies who play the cards and take money from people. This is the constant. Of course, when you say look, it is not only the third edition of the Congress of cards and tarot, but the University, through what arcane knowledge shows us, has hosted an exhibition and a workshop with Marianne Costa, Javi Moreno, Pedro Ortega, Macarena Arnaz. All of them are either graduates or doctors in something and all of them have done work on the tarot, like Javi Moreno who uses it in the classroom, and I'm not going to tell you anything about Marianne. So, that's it. A coming out of the tarot closet even though, as I told you, I was pissed off when I said, "I've had enough, what is being done continues to increase the echo of the obscurantism of tarot. Let's talk about tarot from all angles and from all kinds of people, right? University doctors, master taromancers or tarologists, even people who from their profession as doctors or lawyers like tarot. "
Belén: What other functions does tarot have besides being a hobby?
Victoria: Tarot is therapeutic. Well, when you suffer from anxiety, which ends up being fear, having a tool that shows you that your fears are based on not having the courage to obtain what you are and what you want is wonderful. That on the one hand.
On the other hand, the tarot is like a Jiminy Cricket, like a psychologist too, isn't it? It's telling you, "Look, this is where you are right now, and this is where you're coming from. If you follow this process, you are going to end up here. But, if now that you are aware that you are in this process, you can change your future." I always say that the tarot predicts and the person says. Someone who handles the tarot intuitively can do a job for himself. To work with the tarot as a therapeutic tool for another, you have to have knowledge of many things, of tarot, of psychology, to know how to communicate the message well because the word is healing. I always say that the rightness of tarot is the 4 virtues that are maintained: strength, temperance, justice and prudence, which I see in The Hanged Man and other people see in The Hermit.