Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy
Christopher Marmolejo
Mar 2024 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Christopher Marmolejo
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17 hr 39 min
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About this audiobook
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.
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.
About the author
Christopher Marmolejo is a queer Indigenous teacher committed to radical community healing and building. They bring traditional teaching experience as an English teacher, intensive study as an astrologer, and their personal articulation of the tarot archetypes to their classes, workshops, and consultations as they seek to liberate through critical pedagogy and transgressive truth-telling. Marmolejo has facilitated emotional wellness programs with the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice for the Inland Empire, and has worked with the organization Artists in Solidarity to offer their services to raise money for migrant families and children.
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