Designed to be used with any deck, Red Tarot interrogates the images, themes, and power structures that have been read into and onto the cards—and guides readers to radical and empowering reclamation.
Today, we have a wealth of tarot resources with many goals—but few address the historically marginalized.
Red Tarot speaks to anyone who is othered due to their identity, or ways of being or thinking—LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC folks in particular—and presents the tarot as a radical epistemology because of the ways that it shifts the authority of knowing into the hands of the people themselves. Author Chris Marmolejo frames literacy as key to liberation, and an understanding of tarot as radical literacy.
Marmolejo shows how the cards can be used to read into the power dynamics of white supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-patriarchy and then subvert them. They offer a brief history and overview of tarot as well as complementary, non-appropriative spirituality practices, situating tarot imagery within cosmologies outside the typical Hellenistic frame: Death is interpreted through the lens of Hindu goddess Chhinnamasta; the High Priestess through Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui.
They follow with an interpretation of each card, bolstered by the teachings of Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, José Esteban Muñoz, and others—nodding to authors who have paved the way to liberation in their respective fields.
The book offers a tarot system that integrates the intersections of the work of these leaders, as well as the author’s astrology practice, and reveals tarot as a language for liberation.
For readers of Postcolonial Astrology and Tarot for Change, Red Tarot is a radical praxis and decolonized tarot that moves beyond self-help and divination to reclaim tarot for liberation, self-determination, and collective healing.
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After a pandemic’s collective deadness, I’m looking for resources that help us all claim collective aliveness. You’re holding one of the finest contributions to help find a portal to Eros; the rapture of aliveness, and the transcendent support of red reading. Christopher Marmolejo’s Red Tarot is an invaluable, extensively researched tool that helps you remember the language, symbols, and fields of somatic and intuitive knowledge acquisition. It’s a highly integrative work; successfully, accessibly merging the best of Christopher’s teachers in the decolonial and divinatory fields. Red Tarot achieves the work’s goal of Indigenous reclamation, reimagining, and regeneration in this pivotal time.
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Colin Bedell, astrologer and founder of QueerCosmos