CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Christopher Marmolejo is a Brown, queer, and trans writer, diviner, and educator who uses divination to promote a literacy of liberation. In their latest book, Red Tarot, each card’s interpretation is further bolstered by the teachings of Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, José Esteban Muñoz, and others in an offering that integrates intersectional wisdom with the author’s divination practice—revealing tarot as an essential language for liberation.

In this episode, Christopher is joined by arts-based, psychedelic-assisted ancestral psychotherapist Camara Meri Rajabari for a conversation that moves beyond self-help and the Hellenistic frame of tarot to reclaim it for liberation, self-determination, and collective healing. 

This episode was recorded during an in-person and live streamed event at California Institute of Integral Studies on March 23, 2024. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Camara Meri Rajabari: Hello, Chris.


Christopher Marmolejo: Hi, Camara. Hi, everyone.


Camara Meri Rajabari: Hello, everyone. It's great to see folks here.


Christopher Marmolejo: It's amazing to be here. Thank you all for being here. I see some people have copies of Red Tarot as well. So cool to see.

Camara Meri Rajabari: So are you ready?

Christopher Marmolejo: Yes.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yes. Okay. So I want to hop in, especially around red and its power. You said in the beginning chapter, its power to seduce the soul back into the body. And so can you speak a little bit more about red and how it's impacting liberatory prophecy?

Christopher Marmolejo: Thank you. Yes. Red Tarot, right? Why Red Tarot? I mean, typically, you know, when you get your tarot deck, it comes with a little white book, right? And it would be a little book. And so red is about getting to the soul of the reading, getting to the person, right, in a lived experience where this is not just a disembodied logical exercise for self reflexivity. It's about shining a red light so that your readings become socialized or contextualized within the social atmosphere within which you're reading. You know, it's about connecting it towards indigeneity and unveiling our Black communities, our brown communities, our red communities, and how the tarot might be, as I say, a type of prosthetic, a spiritual prosthetic to mend some of the rupturing and fractures that have occurred within our right towards a divinatory consciousness, right? And so if you're reading red, as it were, you're doing so in a way that affects the viscerality of the person before you or yourself. If you're touching the soul, you're enlivening it in a rubedo of sorts, but you're also politicizing your readings so that they are not neutral, so that they're having real world application for you or your clients. 

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah, and I really like that about the book. And maybe you can even speak more to how reading the tarot could be an act of resistance.

Christopher Marmolejo: Absolutely. Patricia L. Collins comes first to mind in terms of how women, especially people of color, their way of knowing, their way of validating knowledge is often dismissed and decredited within legitimized quote unquote, Western institutions. And so the tarot is an alternative way of knowing, right? It tests truths via alternative means. And so by doing so, we're radically expanding who gets to be literate, right? What does it mean when you're reading tarot at the kitchen table, when you're reading so at a marketplace, at a friend's house? You're turning and making meaning in dialogue and conversation as we are here with you, with cards, with a non-human object, right? And making meaning with the more than human to inform the human experience, but also doing so in a way that puts the power of authority within your hands, within the reader's hands.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: And that is liberatory because there are all these gates and barriers in terms of access to literacy, in terms of who is validated, how many PhDs and degrees you have to have in order to be heard, to be respected, right? And so you can pull out your deck of cards and your connection to spirit and your lived experience and the person's body and their being before you and make your own meaning.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: Which for yourselves.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah, I love that because it actually brings us back in our body and learn how to be comfortable with our intuition. And I think that's something our intuition, our imagination, even our creativity, that was something that our early ancestors, Brown, Black, maybe even other peoples, that was suppressed in folks so that they would just buy into what was being presented. So there's this idea of like the tarot allowing you to form your own meaning and make your own meaning. It brings me to a thought. I was in a training recently and one thing that came up was this whole idea of fate and destiny. And fate is something that is considered to be given to us. We were born into our fate. We're born into our families, our culture, our lineage, even our nationality. And destiny is more about what we do with that fate, right? Can you talk a little bit more about just how tarot can assist us in moving beyond our fate and maybe actualizing our destiny a little bit more?

Christopher Marmolejo: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think at the same time, there's a tension and reading tarot, as I teach it, as I'm championing it, is to resist like this binaristic, it's either wholly fatalistic, you know, and I think that's why people have fear around getting readings. I don't want to know, right? Like, I'd rather be ignorant, right? As if there's just like the power of the oracle or the one giving the reading has a wholesale like authority on the fate and the response and what the cards may mean or what they may be pointing to or what your response may be, you know. And I will say, you know, all occurrences in a reading are part of the omen, right? They're all the signs, the siren going by, the cup breaking, the siren, you know, all the things are part of it. And so that is and at the same time on the other end, making meaning, which is what we are doing when we are enabling our agency and our authority to be literate, right? And to be literate and more than just like a logical zone of a disembodied head that is like decontextualized from the history, like somewhere where we're like championing for our souls, for our hope, for our most vital means of living and thriving, is also not to disregard and make the cards mean anything you want them to mean just because, you know, it's there's a there's a spectrum. Right. And so there's a balance there. It's, there's a tension there. It's not either or. Right. We're rejecting that, like from one end to the other end. And so I think that the cards are meaningful because you can see what they point to within a reading. And you're like. In the same way, I give readings at markets or for clients multiple times, and it's so interesting, I'm also an astrologer, but sometimes you'll see the same card popping up for this for multiple clients that day, you know, from different decks. And you're like, wow, this card is like really up for everyone today. It's almost like I always say we're under the same weather of sorts. Right? And the cards can help us become aware of like the weather or the fate or whatnot or what circumstances we're all sharing and being dealt with, whereas our individual responses, our positions and our ability to respond to those circumstances will, of course, vary upon our own individuality, our own subjectivity.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: And so the cards can be a means of raising consciousness so that you're not so self encompassed in your own interior world as if you have complete authority over your life. Because clearly we do not. Clearly, we are informed and constituted by forces outside of us. So how do we see those clearly while also determining what our resources are, what our responses are, how we feel about them, what options for for taking action might be? Right. And so I think that the cards and reading tarot generates all of this, all this awareness and hopefully praxis.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right. Right. And there's a certain idea of I don't know the way that I read and I don't know exactly how you you read all of it. But sometimes the images are speaking to me about something around the inquiry. Right. And then there's other ways in which it begins to form a story, you know, like, oh, that there's the question. But sometimes the deck brings forward the entire story. And I think we were talking about I go, do you have any decks that just you use for particular questions? You know, because I have a hoodoo deck and I said, oh, if you want to know the truth, you use that deck like it's going to be like, OK, this is person. I mean, yeah, this is the common question. This person loved me. And it's like, no child. It does. You know, I move on. But, you know, what about you? Do you have decks for particular purposes?

Christopher Marmolejo: I definitely I mean, I love what you're bringing forward with with the visual, you know, aspect of reading tarot is that's also a catalyst towards literacy. Right? When you start with the image. Right. My background is that is as an English teacher. And so I've extended that a bit. And when you have people who are learning the language, you start with the image to generate their own response and their own stories from the power of that image, the viscerality of that image. Right? And so I have you know, I like to give myself license to collect my deck and curate my deck collection. It's a way that I, I love art, you know, and I love that the cards and some of them are from brilliant artists. And even the I mean, often like an indie deck because you're getting to support like an artist and their actual work and make it tangible and in your hands and not just hanging on your wall, but using to me using it to mediate the lived experience, right. The emotions, the soulful experience. And so I have sets, you know what I mean? Depending on the audience, like I have some for children, I have some for shadow work. I have some for like my queer friends and whatnot. I have some for like X rated decks. 

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: I love the terrible forbidden dreams.

Camara Meri Rajabari: I have those.

Christopher Marmolejo: Those are those are for people who are ready to go there. You know what I mean? Who are to get red like they are. Those are for the brave souls. And we really go in deep there. That's an amazing deck.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. Yeah. You write about magic being malleable and there's like just a little snippet of a sentence that I really liked that you said. You said the cards are like they're being flashlights to the dark tunnels of our interior. And can you speak a little bit more to the power of self-discovery through the relationship with the deck, like forming that relationship, Right? Like we were just talking about like using it for certain queries. But yeah. Can you speak more to that?

Christopher Marmolejo: Yeah. Absolutely. There is then the experience of being wholly constituted by our external circumstances, where you feel alienated from your own desires, your own motivations or your own tone, who you really are in that sense. And I really dove deep into the cards. I was at a pre-pandemic in 2019. My life was like falling apart. And I had the stability and the externally imposed methods of like, this is what's going to keep you safe and this is the route and the trajectory that you should be following. Fall away. It was my relationships with the cards that helped me become like, more interiorly constituted and go inward outward, you know, for making decisions that are felt more with an integrity, with what my body was wanting, with my own history, with it was a whole reordering. Right? And it was a very personal relationship. And so I think that the tarot with the deck that you have or decks that you have in your own daily readings, they become a medium truly for you to connect with your guides, your sense of spirit, with the more than human again, with your people in your life, but most deeply with yourself that is connected to those things.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: You know, in an authentic and numinous and uncanny manner often.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. And do you have like daily practices? Because I know that I have certain decks that I just use to pull a card. You know, I'll just pull a card in the morning. I'd be like, OK, this sets the vibe of the day or something I need to pay attention to. Do you feel like there's practices that you want to kind of let people know in case they're new to this territory of tarot reading?

Christopher Marmolejo: Absolutely. Absolutely. I definitely champion the daily practice. You got to cut the deck like hundreds of times, honestly. You know, you really do. And it becomes a growing archive. The tarot already is an archive because of the history of their images, right? And our cultural epics in which we and how we engage those images. But then they become further specialized to your lived experience when you're like, oh, this nine of wands from this deck on this day, I have this memory of the last time I pulled it and what it signified, you know, and that's going to add a valence. It's going to add a nuance for you that's going to attune. There's an attunement process. Right? And so that daily practice, which I'd recommend having an altar, you know, and making using the cards as a way to incorporate a ritualized space, not just interiorly, but also within your physical space. Right? Having a libation, having a candle, having some some burning, you know, having music playing. And I do this every morning after my my morning mantras, after my prayers. It's very extended. And I just go in and it's just like it's replaced my previous journaling practice. You know, I would call those like my my grief journals before, you know, and this is more of like a prayer and aspiration, a hopeful inscribing every day. You know, and I'm and I'm dedicated. I am very dedicated. I have a lot of fixed energy in my chart. And so even if I'm traveling, I pull cards because I find them to be a bit of a buffer for the day as well.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. Yeah. And I really like that you said that it replaced journaling. And for me, it did kind of just transition into keeping that archive of cards and starting to understand, oh, when this card comes up for me, it has a certain kind of meaning for my day. And yeah, I love that so much as a practice. And and really after a while, especially, you know, in the beginning, maybe I know that when I first started reading Tarot, I was so reliant on the book, like for the meaning making. But then after a while, I just started to form my own meaning. And I thought that that I like the practice to just keep pushing that edge a little bit more. So it's more intuitive.

Christopher Marmolejo: Absolutely. That's comes in. Yeah, I'd recommend having a set time of day, whether it's in the morning or the evening. And that tells me all I need to know. You know, I mean, I don't necessarily do spreads like. Randomly, in a sense like that is my main kind of GPS like North Star type of a thing. Right? And then I have clients and whatnot. It's going to come through whatever I'm going through is going to come through in that morning reading. And I do a combination of decks and I and I record it.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Oh, yeah, I do that, too. Like I use my phone recorder and then I go back. I'm like, oh, what was I thinking about last year around this time? And I do my own entertainment that way.

Christopher Marmolejo: I mean, it’s important, an archive, maintaining your own archive.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right. Right. Well, I want to shift a little bit because I recently participated in an international training. And personally, I had been sitting with that whole idea because at the training, they said, what's your intention? And it just popped in my head, not in an instant way, but I had been thinking about the idea of being a global citizen. And to understand how to contribute to the world beyond colonial borders. And just to understand that this world's been divided for profit and power. Right. And it really didn't say much about the stories of the people that are on these lands, except they were dividable. And I often think about how to navigate living beyond these borders and planning my roots in global soil. And as an act of love, as an act of liberation, not as a tourist, but more of being in community. And so I used your book for bibliomancy. I mean, I think it is definitely a great read from front to back, but it's even if people don't know what bibliomancy is, it's like you're taking this book and you're really just focusing on an idea or the question. And when I opened it up, it came to Six of Swords. And there was something so fascinating about how you dived into the meaning of Six of Swords. If people don't remember that particular card in the writer, wait, it would have been the person in a boat who's covered with a shroud. Right. And they might be holding a younger child. Could have been their inner child, by the way. Who knows? But they're being led out by a ferryman. And so I don't know, can you speak more to that or that chapter? And I don't know what came up for you when you're writing that or.

Christopher Marmolejo: It's sitting with the cards with their their immense application, not just like on the image, but thinking about histories of migrancy, of refugees, especially. Right? And that card living through it and talking with clients who are living through it. It's a sense of relief when you like make it to the lifeboat.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yes.

Christopher Marmolejo: Like the ship is going down and there's only space. There's not there's not space for everyone. And so that's such a different level of regard with how you talk about that question, how you live through that gate, if you will, to that experience, how you're relating to it. I wanted to read a little bit from the Six of Swords section.

Camara Meri Rajabari: I would love that.

Christopher Marmolejo: If that's all right.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: All right. And I think that's so cool that you did the bibliomancy. See, I love hearing people do that. That's amazing. Thank you. Like I wrote a book about divination, but it's being used in and itself for divination. Like, that's amazing. Yeah. “The Six of Swords is about the avenues of escape amid omnipresent landscapes of settler colonialism, laden with carceral compulsion. In the boat, you aren't located anywhere in particular, but rather marked by a state of migrancy. Migrancy is characterized by its need to move back and forth, to bridge, temper, contrast, compare, exchange, compound. Migrant souls occupy at least two spaces at once and are always in transit. The Six of Swords images the migrant soul, the status that is non-static. The Six of Swords' drive is to make language that dispels the illusion of privatized separation with our hybrid being that wears down borders. The Six of Swords unveils borders as incoherent. The card is a construction from these contradictions. Those in the boat don't seek assimilation into the mainstream matrix, but work to restructure it from within. These are the beings who show the way across seemingly uncrossable thresholds. It is the subjectivity of traversing identity vectors that occupy adjacent, distinct spaces, for it is uncomfortable within any singular discourse of minor minority subjectivity. The Six of Swords negotiates a fragmentary existence by fusing the impossibly disparate into constant construction of new identities that transcend the either or thinking rooted in white dominant culture, knowing they can have a both and. World travel of this sort requires surrendering an arrogant perception of otherness.”

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: Yeah, you know, and so especially as you're talking and aspiring to be a world citizen as opposed to a tourist, right, which does have that arrogant perception, which is often an American perception, where the the engagement and the opinion of the cultures that you're traveling to are done through stereotypical, typically racist media, right, and notions. And instead, I talk about elsewhere in the book as well. Again, the three of wands, Maria Lugones and her concept of world traveling with loving perception. Right? She's thinking about her own mother engaging her mother's world, but she's thinking about students who cross the border daily. Right? And how to engage their cultures in a way that is regarding their brilliance, their intelligence, their their cultural flexibility and interruption, you know, and being forced into like one static box like you are this culture, you are this thing. We exist and we exist in the fault lines.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yes.

Christopher Marmolejo: You know, and so I think about from the five of swords as well, which is a card of being dead  named. It's a card of being stripped of title and status. It's being marked as an exile and other. So then turning within and restructuring the awareness to have self-regard. And so I was thinking also of Jose Esteban Munoz and Glenn Sean Coulter and Red Skin, White Masks and others to inform, of course, the whole book, but especially like, you know, these particular cards.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. Fascinating. Thank you so much for that. That vision on six of swords and just, you know, oftentimes I think like the literal meaning is, oh, you're getting ready to take a trip, but it may be under duress. You know, you have a deck here.

Christopher Marmolejo: Yes.

Camara Meri Rajabari: And we talked about maybe doing a collective pull.

Christopher Marmolejo: Would y'all like a card?

Camara Meri Rajabari: And, you know, a lot is happening for the collective right now. I mean, we are in the middle of several wars and things are coming up and we want to see what's your question.

Christopher Marmolejo: Yeah. I mean, a card for us, but let's say a bridge to cross inspired by the six of swords, perhaps.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. Yeah. That would be great.

Christopher Marmolejo: A bridge to cross.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. We'll see.

Christopher Marmolejo: So I know we both crossed a bridge to get here.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yes, we did. The Bay Bridge.

Christopher Marmolejo: We've got the knight of wands. All right. The knight of wands. I love the knights. The court cards can be hard for some people. I will talk about it as well. And I would love to hear what you say. What do you think about the knight of wands? And I would also maybe read a little bit from it from the section. You know, knights. Gosh. And it's, you know, it was this process was writing the book of thinking about maybe the dominant conception. Of course, you have the language of king and queen and knights and these things. Right? The knights expanding the empire. Right. The ones on the front line, the militant force. Right? But then on the other end, what is it to inspire like a decolonial vision and engagement with these cards? Right. And so knights are practitioners. They are on the ground floor. They're doing the work. Yeah. Right. The knight of wands is fiery, is very

Camara Meri Rajabari: Fast.

Christopher Marmolejo: Fast, very sexy as well.

Camara Meri Rajabari: That's that sexy person you should stay away from. Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: Unless you want it. That's what you want. You know what you're looking for.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. Free will.

Christopher Marmolejo: And so, you know, the knight of wands and the wands, especially not only concerning power, especially within the the pips, if you will, the knights are about the eros, you know, getting more more red, if you will. So I will read again a little bit here. So “the knight of wands agitates, arouses and inspires humanization. This entails the ability to foster hope in seemingly hopeless circumstances. The knight of wands instructs inspiration as a part as part of an ongoing process central to organizing in channels, the longing and suffering of their community, which often goes unacknowledged. They come to personify communal pathos. They rouse the conscious, startling the people's sense of propriety, exposing its hypocrisy. Their argument is scorching, rallying not with light, but fire in the pursuit of freedom. They transform conformity, brazenly indicting the state and its agents of dehumanization. The red knight cultivates an infectious inspiration that sets eyes upon collective freedom, with the power to ignite intimate understandings of personal burden and suffering into political dissent. Theirs is a humanizing pedagogy, awakening both critical consciousness and compassion. Their fire revives revolutionary fire as they capture the imagination to recover, reframe and redirect ambition. The anger and grief of communities under colonial attack burns right along with their aspirations for freedom. The fire burns against hatred that dehumanizes. We are companions of the blazing flame.” And so the knight of wands is this guy, yes, he's maybe very sexually active, but he is sort of the one who's going around and lighting everyone's candle, everyone's flame, who's sharing a message, who is telling us to fight for our hope. It is the point of the state is to depoliticize us by making us apathetic.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: Right? And so the knight of wands is one who vivifies us and gives us energy and inspires us and gets us going and gets us excited and gets us angry and has a fire burning. And they keep the fire burning and they're running a marathon from place to place, from here to there. They know what it is to cross borders. They are vividified by struggles that are all connected from here to Gaza, to the Congo, to your backyard, to you know, they're there and they're making that connection and they're using it all to fuel them into action, into movement, not into a passive passivity, into an apathy.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah, I mean, I think of real life examples of students creating, you know, protests within universities, people who will go to talks by different corporations who are invested in particular wars and genocide and standing up in the middle of the crowd and going, no, this is wrong. They're like the knights that are coming in when everybody's perfectly comfortable with sitting down and listening. They're like, oh, in the middle of it, you know, and people are like, oh, my gosh, you know, who is this? That's the Knight of Wands.

Christopher Marmolejo: Right.

Camara Meri Rajabari: And these knights, they do ignite the sometimes hidden, suppressed passion that you were talking about. That's within all of us. Sometimes we just realize this doesn't feel right. But there's also this feeling of sometimes powerlessness that keeps us silent or not. Listen, so much silent, but just talking amongst each other and not to the community, to the world. So I love that vision of the knights. Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: Yeah.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: Yeah. Thank you, Knight of Wands. You know, be a Knight of Wands, you know, and it's also following your passion.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: And overcoming any taboo that you have around your own sexual, erotic expression and agency. You know, so that might be a bridge to cross as well.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: Yeah.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Any other cards to go on there?

Christopher Marmolejo: Let's see. Yes. And let me see. We'll get another card. Okay. Of overall guidance, just a card of overall guidance for us here.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah, for the collective.

Christopher Marmolejo: Oh, the star. Bam.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yes.

Christopher Marmolejo: Do you want to talk about it first?

Camara Meri Rajabari: What I know about the star and what I feel about the star, I like that the star has one foot on land and one foot in the water. And there's something elemental that we haven't really talked about in the tarot in terms of the elements, too, of how water is your emotions. Right. And then the earth is where you're grounded. And I like how the star is visible up in the sky, but very much rooted, in my opinion, in their emotion and in their groundedness. So. I think when you get this card, it's more I've used it in just tarot readings as this is your glow up. This is your like this is your like where you can really be your authentic self and you benefit from that authenticity because then you become the star. You know, like you don't have to change for anyone. You don't need to shape yourself around anything because that's that groundedness. That's that one foot on the soil. And the other one is like being with the emotions of just what does that mean to be completely visible, seen as your true authentic self? And allowing that to be your rise. But I'm excited to hear about how you think about that.

Christopher Marmolejo: I love all that. I think that makes all sense. The glow up. You know what I mean? Totally literally after so much destruction. Right. In the image, in most images of the star, you will see the naked woman typically. Right. And and she's full grown. So that that marks a return to authenticity. Right. There's a washing away of pain. There's a cleansing. This is a card that for me would indicate Olympia being needed or having been performed and there being a restoration. This card is a is a bright star of hope. I went with my mother earlier today to the BAMFA in Berkeley. Right. And I thought it was amazing because we saw many installations about internalized or internal migrancy within the states. Black Americans, Jamea Richmond Edwards depicted legacies of her family on a boat down the Mississippi River with Leviathan protecting and blessing their crossing. And then we seen another image of Carrie Mae Williams depicting her ancestor. Walking miles and miles and hundreds of miles being forced out, but being guided by a North Star and the star. I mean, I'll often draw a North Star card for clients regardless of the reading. You know, it's that thing that orients you. Right. And we see this massive star shining above her and it's often as well coming after the tower. And with the tower, I would say let's go towering in terms of like destroying like that card is about the actual the the degree and the extent to which we must envision the destruction and the downfall of the empire. You know, it's not just like a talking point. It's like there's like a real bodily. It's that point in the color purple when Celia is like when when he's like, I know I can put this blade in your hand and you will shave me and not kill me. And the tower is if she would have slit his throat. You know what I mean? And like cut the binds that oppress her.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: And so then the star when that tower is no longer obscuring the night sky, polluting the earth, we are returned to wholeness for return to the state of Socrality. And she's refilling the pool. She's nourishing her garden. She's nourishing what's manifesting with her love. But we all know as givers, as activists, as people in the struggle, how much emotional care and just how much it takes out of us. And she's refilling herself as well. So I often think about this card as well as like deepening our capacity to love.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: Right. And so I think that this is a there's a fiery component with the Night of Wands in terms of letting things politicize and enliven and embolden you in your action, following your passion. And at the same time, the star, the sense of stillness that we are also not being we're not alone here. Like we have a divine witness. We have a starry witness. We have an ancient witness here that can orient us in our struggles as we are walking hundreds and hundreds of miles still to get free.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. I love how the Knight of Wands is signaling burning it, burning it down, you know, and then this star is like the restoration that of all that it took. Right. Because sometimes in in really having to go up against oppression, you have to like tap into certain energies and then we have to negate some other ones. And this one is talking about that restoration.

Christopher Marmolejo: Absolutely.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: Such a bomb.

Camara Meri Rajabari: So what else? Because I think that this is so expansive, like where the tarot could go and how you've introduced even just deeper terrain of our exploration.

Christopher Marmolejo: That was the goal. You know, I really I wanted to I think of the tarot often. I mean, like I said, as an archive for sure. But also somewhat of a Trojan horse. You know, people come in and they're like thinking they're going to get a cute little card reading or whatnot and they're going to like, oh, does the boy like me or am I going to get the job or whatnot? And the veil gets open and we're like talking about some real shit here. Meaning we're just like going there. 

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: And and I think that I wanted to text to sort of match that. And to have, you know, bell hooks is a big inspiration of mine. And I attempted to have that balance between the academic tone, but still being accessible, pushing it further beyond. Like there's so many beginner introductory tarot texts out there, you know, and there's even a new cohort of texts that are towards a liberatory mode of engagement. But again, this is red. This is coming from a perspective of Indigeneity, of repairing Indigeneity, of using those terms. Because you often get a white liberal perspective that gets put on for using those terms and they're engaging in an animus worldview and all these things, but they're disregarding the origin of where these things come from. Right. And so it's important that like, again, the red was central for me and that it's making a distinction again that this is coming from a detribalized trans native person who has also written this text as a type of memoir and a reclamation, a healing, a restoration of my own Indigenous native relationships. Right.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: So thank you for reading it.

Camara Meri Rajabari: I still have more to read. And I'm just like highlighting, you know, like you get certain books and you're just highlighting, underlining. You're like, OK, well, this is just the whole book. It's like I really have found so much richness here. And, you know, we talked a little bit about your inspiration for the book. Where do you find that you want to and I know this is a new question, but just like, how do you even want to expand on this? Or what are you thinking about in terms of how the community can utilize this book a little bit more and how are you working with the community?

Christopher Marmolejo: Absolutely. I wanted it like, again, with the Trojan horse piece, with the heavy citational use that I put in, you know, it's weaving, it's a coral type of being being lifted up, being put in, putting into conversation prophets who are not seen as prophets because they were Black and women and native and women. And maybe like Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, like these women are our prophets. These are oracles. You know what I mean? I wanted them to be regarded as such. And so hoping that people would read and read the section, maybe read the quote and go and read their work as well. And like have when they're pulling the six of swords, pulling out disidentifications by Jose Esteban Munoz or something, right. Or finding the reading within other like engaging further. Right. And at the same time, using it to add to their own lived experience and to like deepen, like expand the range of where a reading can go. Because even from this, I mean, what I love about the cards is and I'm thinking I think of the two of pentacles is coming to mind. But as you shuffle them, they renew. And as you get a new deck, there's a through line with like that two of pentacles in that deck versus a different deck. But the lived experience and the image changing makes it an endlessly generative resource for creativity and for guidance. Right. And so like I was like the images I was struck by today at the BAMFA was like, wow, this is so like particular cards in the wand suit. And I was like, I want to write about this and give an expression to this and use the cards as like a hook into this.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: And so I do do that on my sub stack, you know, which will be ongoing. You know, I teach classes there. I hope that people give readings with just a greater regard in terms of their potential to to heal and to help people navigate. And that's like it's like we foreclose in terms of like what we think that can be read about or can be divined about.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: And I've had clients come to me about some serious stuff, like from abusive relationships to abortions, to jobs, to health, to death, like to the whole spectrum. And I'm like, OK, I got to be ready. You know what I mean? I got to know how this card can like really relate to that and not just like some disembodied connection that I'm striving to make, because whatever else I ground it in the image, you know, and then I find that image in theory and text and my own lived experience. So I just hope that people will do the same and bring their voice and bring their bodies and their decks and their friends and and realize that, yes, it's fun. And it's it is a good time for sure. We should keep that, you know, but it is again, it's an alternative literacy. And so not to just like disregard the tarot because of its popular engagement, like how it exists in the popular imagination. Right?

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right. Yeah, I am. I do a little tarot reading sometimes on TikTok because that was my COVID thing. And then I also joined a group of therapists that it's it's on Facebook, therapists who use tarot. And I was like, I use tarot. And and with some of my clients and some of my clients, really what I found, even with some Oracle decks that aren't necessarily tarot, but they're just images. It really does allow for people to connect their current issue with the cards. And so, yeah, I've like even pushed the edges of therapy to include this imagery, to include these stories, because I think would you say these are this? There's a universal story running kind of in the background of the tarot from the full to from major to minor. And do you want to speak to that?

Christopher Marmolejo: Definitely. There's and what you're saying to as well and in the way that therapists as well, because I have therapists who are students as well, you know, at which I love because they're like doing the work with the clients, which having a client practice, like reading cards for someone, having training as a therapist or training as an educator, like like that is valid and necessary and that's going to support you in your process. And then at the same time, what I do love about tarot is that it's it is divination. You know, it's not just a self it's not just like a tool to think creatively about. It is like prophecy, like you will open, you know, an oracular capacity that has been lost and like numbed and you will be struck, you know, by the uncanny and whatnot. And it's like I don't want to lose that either. And so. The story, I think it's important in knowing your decks and like some how the archetypes are present for sure.

Camara Meri Rajabari: OK.

Christopher Marmolejo: You know what I mean? In the same way that we share a similar structural predicament by being informed and constituted by white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy. Now, our own unique positions and like trajectories, of course, have distinction as your own particular deck. It's going to like add some nuance there, but you know, like a base note for sure. You know what I mean? And you know where that music is going and you've seen some of those outcomes. And so at the same time, the cards are chaotic. There's an there's an order, you know, there is, of course, the guess from the full to the world, from ace to ten, from the page to the king, you know, and that helps. Like that helps the reader, I think, orient like relationships and whatnot. But then there's also a presence in terms of what is being what's showing up on the table in that moment. You know, that is done through a shuffle, done through randomized. You're not selecting the cards. You're making meaning out of chance. And that already is a subverting of the logical mode of knowing.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: You know, you're already humbling yourself when you come to the tarot.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah. And it's interesting how it during that time that you're doing the reading, it's tapping into a particular timeline. But that timeline is always moving. Right. So it may not. Some readings are not always going to be in that moment. It might feel like that's the answer, but the answer can shift even as the timelines shift of our lives. Right. So.

Christopher Marmolejo: Absolutely. Absolutely. That also, you know, I think that the oracle is also opaque. You know, this does help us see what like look back, you know, our right to look is Nicholas Merzoff writes about where, of course, it was an offense if you were to look a white man and I mean, it's this challenge to power. It's like who has the right to look or the cops telling you there's nothing to see here. Keep going.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: And when we use a tarot, we're like, no, we have a right to look. We can ask about this. We can see for ourselves. And yet at the same time, again, maintaining a tension of humility and that the oracle will will become more and more more opaque, the more anxious and the more disrespectful, quote unquote, that we have an entitled right to like knowing some things are going to play out in a sense. You know, there's some larger constituting forces. And so, you know, sometimes like that's a raven. You know what I mean? Like you had a glimpse and you're like, you see it. And then but you don't necessarily know the whole shebang, especially for yourself. I would say there's a difference of like, you know, I asked to be used as a vessel for when I'm helping a client and not like I'll be blown away by what comes through. But for my own self, they show me like just enough, like just the next step in a sense. And then at the same time, a global thing of like the star, like this big soulful purpose and potential that we can aspire towards. But it's still like, you know, they want to give away. They don't want to spoil everything necessarily.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Also, right. I tend to get those kind of answers like all the time. Like, who's who's my next soulmate? You know, it's like you don't need to know. You know, you know, like what do they look like? What are they coming? It's like, no, you don't get those answers. It's like there's a person and it's all in spiritual time. Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: Right. It'll be on God's time.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Right. Right.

Christopher Marmolejo: Right. It’ll be at the right time. Yes. I was, you know, I think I could read from the conclusion.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Oh, yes, I would love that, too, because I started reading a little bit about that conclusion. I was like, this is very powerful. So I would love if you think you share that.

Christopher Marmolejo: I just think of so many things in terms of my relationship with my editor and just all the the feedback on the conclusion. I was like, I actually was really happy with this. And so, again, you know, this is this is my first book, baby, I will say.

Right.

Camara Meri Rajabari: And it's a process, isn't it?

Christopher Marmolejo: It is such a process. You know, it's an elephant pregnancy. It takes a long time and a lot of understanding of process. Right.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: But but I am here at the last event of my book tour for this work. And it's been lovely. And so I figured it would be good to read from the conclusion therein. Right.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Thank you.

Christopher Marmolejo: And so “if the tarot is a mirror to understand lived experience, it is far from self explanatory. The function of a prophet is inspired utterance. The Oracle risks a different relationship to uncertainty, possessing a radical spontaneity. They gamble with meaning, meaning that divination is less about fixed outcomes and more about liberation. The augury is always arriving, always shifting and profoundly unstable. Sometimes the spread subverts your intended imposed order. The cards keep changing as you keep shuffling. This is fantastic because it means no one masters tarot. This is not the point of the reading. This is not to say that the reading has no barometer of success, no meaningful consequence, nor any practical application. Rather, this helps the reader work against the fixed fatalism being appropriated by the Western imagination. Instead, be a devotee, be willing to experiment with the most prescient and pressing work of your healing. Imbibe with divination, dance with it like a lover. It'll keep you on your toes, flexible and with full range. And what a wonderful romance it is to always arrive reverential before the beloved. The cards are one tool of prophecy, but each card is a key to an archive of archives. The living archive of the prophets body meets the shattering network of catacombs contained within each card, opening a dynamic emergent space for miraculous modes of knowing to rise. For it to be a tool of transcendent knowing, it must transgress. The red reader must work against the deep structures of Western thought. They must read the cards to nourish emancipatory knowledge that undergirds all revolutionary praxis. For any meaningful prognostication, the cards must unpack and undo the West's naturalized land claims, the internalized acquiescence to the colonial order. It'll take cutting the deck thousands of times before the psycho-effective attachments to the colonial condition are ruptured. My aim in offering this work as a detribalized trans native is to expand the borders of Indigenous intellectualism by supplying a divinatory text with a language that acknowledges the broader relations of power, historical domination, the ongoing struggle against colonialism, the ruptured spiritual lineages, knowledges and practices. Reddening the divination tool that is tarot is to work against the West. The Western imagination focuses on a future centered hope toward an ever expanding empire that is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity. They don't stop trying to steal your shit. This fictional future of the West is always made from ongoing practices of Indigenous dispossession. Red reading, writing and thinking can reclaim a precolonial sacred relationality. So embodied inquiries necessary to read red. Any reader, diviner or writer who wishes to seriously heal and imagine a future that is not predicated upon colonial divisions must actually lift the veil. They must address in every reading behind every card the symbolic violence that renders the crushing materiality of systemic violence invisible, appear natural, acceptable. This means attuning with the cards to the subtle responses to any tableau or small gallery of prophetic images arranged before the reader. In a social world that is constantly overriding our felt sense, tarot reading becomes a practice of learning to trust the intuition, the instincts, the sensorium. Beyond unveiling the red reader uproots colonial consciousness within all the relations that is so destructively saturated. This project seeks to model a citation practice that is multifarious and polyvocal. I hope I have woven a tapestry well enough that the intellects engaged in anti imperialist and anti capitalist commitments to decolonization, emancipation, emancipation and revelatory renewal may be further engaged and explored with each syncretized card. Through each card I aim to underscore the need for continual engagement between and across scholars and advocates for Indigenous intellectualism and critical pedagogy. This work, this works upon the foundation of red pedagogy that emerges from a collectivity of critique and solidarity between and among Indigenous peoples, other marginalized groups and peoples of conscience. A red reader is a revolutionary agent. They reinvent themselves. They are in a symbiotic relationship with the more than human nature of the cosmos as a sovereign entity. They interrogate the overlapping historical stratum of cultural identifications, the luminality within which people of any diaspora must navigate claims of authenticity in the crossroads of the postmodern social reality and the postcolonial imagination and future we push for. The augury here is related to the materiality of social life and its incumbent power relations. Red Tarot is but an admittedly humble step toward that insurgent poetic prophecy of our sovereignty, our emancipatory transformation. Thank you.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Yes. Immediately, I think this is why the revolution will not be televised. It's all this internal journey and working with these elements and symbols and really embody that which is our purpose. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for that's this contribution. It's, it's powerful. Um, how can people stay connected with you and learn from you and you may have mentioned some things but just to kind of, you know, spark that again. Yeah.

Christopher Marmolejo: First off my sub stack you know I'm trying to build my email list there because they could delete your Instagram or whatever other accounts right but like, if you want, and it's not just like an email newsletter it's where I write and share in my updates. And so, I will be adding you all. Thank you for sharing the emails but you can do so online. And I teach classes online, which I love because while I do of course miss having a physical classroom and being with like, like physical bodies in space. I have students all over the world and that just blows my mind you know what I mean I'm just like stunned every time, and there's, I have such a great cohort I teach a catalog of classes I'll be opening one for enrollment soon on and we'll get into the devil very centrally monstrous intimacies, thinking about Christina sharp right. And so you can say that you can book a consultation with me I do astrology readings tarot readings revolutions readings is like all the mature. The whole, I mean all work is about the revolution but that is about your, your, like a solar return your birthday, your for verdadda period reclaiming some medieval Islamic timing techniques, and then I Instagram at the red read just pretty much the red read, you know what I mean you Google that. And I'll be there.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Good, Good. Thank you so much. And yeah, thanks to the audience in person and away and I guess this is going to be us bringing it to a close. Okay. 

Christopher Marmolejo: Thank you to you all.

Camara Meri Rajabari: Thank you everyone.

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, Nikki Roda, and Pele Shalev. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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