Exploring Tarot, decolonization, and community with Christopher Marmolejo. Draw cards, mythologize, and imagine a reindigenized world with us.
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[00:00:57] Risa: Welcome back to The Missing Witches Podcast listeners, sunlight, big winds, birds singing in the morning, your 10,000 ancestors reminding you that we've defeated fascists before. Welcome, you know whoever shows up today and welcome especially to label mate and dear friend of the pod and sunshiny, gorgeous human, Christopher Marjo.
Author of Red Tarot and wonderful teacher in the arts of liberatory tarot, and just like nice person to get to hang out with. Hi.
[00:01:32] Christopher: Hi. Thank you so much.
[00:01:35] Risa: Oh, it's so
[00:01:35] Christopher: good to be here. I'm so happy to be on the label with y'all.
[00:01:38] Risa: Yeah, I'm happy to get to hang out again. How has it been since your book came out?
How do you feel about your book and your work and your classes?
[00:01:50] Christopher: I feel. You know, I feel so good about having a craft. We covered eights in class, and we were talking about the eight of Pinnacles,
and we were just talking about craft, and I just love what I do, honestly. It's like I have one pinnacle. Like whether I'm researching for something that I'm writing, I'm developing a class and that I'm teaching a class or I'm giving a talk or I'm able to sit in space with y'all. And it's this sense of the manifold expression from the same root is been, I dunno, it's just so sustainable and enduring for me.
And time flies with the book. I'm loving the feedback that I'm getting, but also. Paying attention to certain critiques that I've just always gotten as being a intelligent, vocal brown person. And so, yeah. Anyways, I just, love having a craft.
[00:02:44] Amy: Can we backtrack a second for our listeners who maybe haven't heard you on the podcast before, have somehow never heard of Red Tarot or the Red Read? Like, who are you, what do you do? What do you do? Oh my God, yes,
[00:03:02] Christopher: yes, yes, yes. The author of Red Tarot, I mean, I am. Who am I? Oh my gosh. An existential big question.
Now, I am my mother's child, my grandmother's child. I am a Christopher Marjo. I am in community with the Serrano people, the people, the pines. I teach tarot. I have a background in education. My master's in education taught seventh and eighth grade English, and then the pandemic happened. I always say I had a pre pandemic in 2019 where I was like.
Where am I going with my life? You know, tarot and astrology emerged. I wrote Red Tarot, a Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, which was released last March, 2024, um, and teach a variety of classes, just kind of under that aim. Thankfully, decolonization is a lifelong project, a generational, lifelong project, and spacious enough to to, to continue working.
Like under, or have that as a, as an aim or a goal, a, a methodology and using the cards as a prism for archiving so much knowledge and catharsis, but also bringing the notion of divination, of sacred spirituality into the mix. I teach students, I give readings, I write, uh, I'm on substack.
[00:04:25] Amy: Your Substack is fantastic, the Tina Turner.
[00:04:28] Christopher: Well, thank you. Oh,
[00:04:29] Amy: essay was so wonderful.
[00:04:31] Christopher: I appreciate that. That one was like, certain things get cute. I'm sure y'all know being creatives yourself, so I was like, that one was in me for so long. When I finally had that expression, I was like.
[00:04:41] Amy: Yes. Yeah. And the visual element of seeing Tina drawn as the strength card battling the lion.
I was like, oh, this is just for me. Christopher made this just for me. Did I know you didn, but it felt like it.
[00:04:56] Christopher: Oh, I did. I'm glad. Yes. I'm like, what's your favorite Tina Turner song?
[00:05:00] Amy: For me, it really depends. I think Tina's prayer, I'm talking to the priest, the high priest, and all of y'all out there in the universe, but lately it's been, you better be good to me.
Hmm. Hmm. It so like, you better be good to me. Right? Oh, please be good to me, but like, you better be good to
[00:05:22] Risa: me. Come on. Yes, yes,
[00:05:25] Christopher: yes. She is my, she is the icon diva of strength. Like she, anytime I pull, I'm just, she is, she is. Tina, I was so proud to write that in of only, I'm always trying to like, like, let's not for, not that anyone's forgetting about her, but just newer generations or younger people who I'm like, she is.
Mythological. Like she is so archetypal. It's she's stunning. Thank you for that.
[00:05:48] Risa: Oh, a friend of mine recently asked on social media, what was the song that changed your reality as a child, and mine was a hundred percent, we don't need another hero. Mm-hmm. I was like, what is this?
I didn't know there was a movie, but the children singing and she just shook me.
[00:06:04] Christopher: Yeah. She would just be blasting outta my grandmother's jukebox, you know, like, what's love got to do with it? Of course. Um, acid queen, the video for acid queen is just mm-hmm. Like this needs to be shown continuously. Like we need to study this.
Yes. You know what I mean? Like it needs to be studied. Oh, I praise Tina. Thank you, Tina.
[00:06:26] Amy: If you didn't have your mind blown by Tina Turner at some point in your life, today is the day. Yes.
[00:06:34] Risa: Okay. I have a question about divination. You're teaching divination practice and such a wonderful writer on divination.
[00:06:41] Christopher: Thank you.
[00:06:43] Risa: I was talking with Zoe Flowers, who has a wonderful podcast Come to the Brink about. Divination, especially astrology after the US election, watching some people sort of implode, like, you know, like some astrologers going so hard on whatever their predictions were and then getting called out for being wrong and then blowing up their communities and going to hide behind paywalls.
Or you know, like there's just like a lot of really adamant predictions. Not a lot of accountability after. I wonder how you feel about divination these days. Like when everything changes every two minutes. We're drawn more to divination in these chaos times out of control times, but then.
Yeah, what do we actually use it for? That is useful, that it's grounding. That's community building instead of just a way to sell more to people who are afraid. You know,
[00:07:43] Christopher: that is a whole word right there. Like you just said, so much that is so characteristic of how people engage and how it gets commodified, right?
Yeah. It's like it is to sell this. Sense of peace or whatnot. And I think that's where I've had, I mean, diviners are like, nothing is a hundred percent right. Even the best studied like discipline diviner, you know, has margin of error of course, right? We, everything has a margin of error. So there's that.
And I think that may be, sometimes people put, but, but that sense of ego where someone's like. This is, you know, word of God, like, here is what's gonna happen, you know, is one that is always like, okay. I approach it with so much humility because it's like we may just be getting sometimes like a a, a people.
Through what may happen. Right. Or I think of on a funny sense like that, from that so Raven, where she'd get like a glimpse into the future, but then it's like chaotic and totally decontextualized and like, you know what I mean? It ends up causing it inevitably, but it's this crazy scenario that gets there.
I've definitely had ups and downs with divination and especially with prediction, like in terms of that sense of prediction as well, like being disappointed by. Astrologers and their predictions, you know, feeling locked into fate and studying my own birth chart, being like buck, you know, like, god damn. I think that there is a real reckoning with scale and a real sense of.
That that also humbles us against our notion that that man or human is the creator in the center of the universe, that they're all powerful and that we can just shape our will to be whatever we want. If we just pull our bootstraps up high enough. That's not. How I approach it. I have a certain container, and I would say the red read as a whole is like in that mode, but this sense of like, what do we do with a fate that we limit?
And bringing that to the notion of Fado fa, which is this Portuguese folk music in the intersection between all of the colonial history and this musical catharsis where they were like, man, we're gonna be washed away in this tidal wave or whatnot, but we're not. Faltering in a faith either necessarily, there is some surrender, some sense of spiritual maturity that develops at the end of empire, at the end of decline as empires collapsing as language is pluralizing.
You know? And so like I think of so much of of fate and stories of divination myths are tragic. What do you do with that? No one wants to hear that. How do you handle that? In the eights class? One of the eights cards, of course, eight of sorts. Right. And I'm telling my students, I'm preparing them, and it's complex because we're not licensed therapists or practitioners.
But at the same time, this type of therapeutic work and working with people, it's like that card comes up and absolutely, like justifiably shows a history of abuse in particular sexual abuse. If that's coming up for, for a client. I tell them, I have to broach this with a client. I'm not gonna not touch that and or talk about that or, or.
Venture into that space, and of course, me too, right? Like we all know someone or know who knows someone. It's not many degrees of separation. To find that kind of history of abuse, then where do you approach that? How do you talk about that? And inviting my students to share the student that drew that card in particular.
Hadn't been as disclosing in the class space as much. So I let that, of course I wasn't gonna trigger them, but like, I'm like, you know, I broach this with clients and so obviously in this class space we're talking about it. Like anything that this brings up for you is welcome. Like we can hear it, you can bring it in that that card is about shame.
That card is about silencing. So just even the shared witness of being able to express it, I think is sometimes it's also the divination is great for processing things that have happened and that, uh, that. Confound our mind, like why did this have to happen? And that's really complex. But yeah, it's a lot.
That's a big question. Yeah,
[00:11:49] Risa: You reminded me that once in my twenties I saw a tarot reader who told me that my mom had abused me and she hadn't. And so that was sort of strange. Yeah. And it sort of became, uh. Avenue for them to talk about their own experience and they felt like I was a safe person as a 22-year-old to share that with, which I think speaks to where both of us were at that time in our lives.
But it reminded me, yeah, like of the. It's the sort of tricky relationship we can have with divination. You know, like I, I was also, I, I was playing cards for myself after I was diagnosed with cancer and they were so dark. It was all tower and death and devil, and I was like, well, I'm done with this for a while, right?
Not gonna play this game for a little bit. It's too hard and I understood what it was. Objectively. I was only at the beginning of going on an underworld walk, and that's what was showing me, but I really wasn't up for the symbols of it. What do you think about how, for example, astrology is one that's troubling me more these days?
How do we use astrology in empowering and not. Not ways that, as you say, it can make us feel kind of trapped in our destinies.
[00:13:13] Christopher: Yeah, I mean, I will say that the language that a Diviner tar reader or what have you, like use, it's, there's so much power in that. I will never tell a person like you've been assaulted.
I would never say that to a person. I would reflect what the card. What we're seeing clearly in the card and like, does that bring up anything? You know, like where do you see that? Maybe it's about the restriction of voice, you know, maybe it's more like, and there's like other things happening, but, but other, but it's that, that boldness to be like, so like this is, I don't tell people about themselves like that, you know?
Right. I'll bring things up and ask questions and make it a conversation, and then we thread it together. But with a struggle, that's such a,
[00:13:53] Risa: an empowering way to do it. I feel like we could have had a really interesting conversation if that reader had said that to me. 'cause there are a lot of ways I could have engaged with.
That story. Like you say, we all do have histories of abuse in our families, but yeah. Sorry for interrupting.
[00:14:09] Christopher: No, absolutely. There are big shifts in language in terms of like how that's going to, that's gonna go with approaching that same, perhaps like subject matter. Right? And so, you know, so much of that.
How do use astrology, I mean. I think that if folks are having anxiety around what's going to come, there's like, like check, like don't, don't engage it. Like paying, paying attention to your own response and your capacity for handling the prophecy prediction or whether that you see coming, you know, and it's always contextualize.
I think sometimes people also would try and take it as like waiting for the. The savior, the saving grace are like this. I'm, and I am for miracles. Don't get me wrong. They're certainly miracles. I'm pro miracle too. I'm pro miracle. Absolutely. Um, but in terms of being ungrounded or like, I don't, it's, it's a fine line.
It really is. It really does take experience. It takes falling flat on your ass and being disappointed. It takes being so surprised where you're like, wow. Similar to the card or the manifestation of a transit. You see the energies, but there's still the surprise of all these different ways they can take expression.
So being so sure that it's gonna happen in this like one particular avenue or this specific expression is egoic, or you know it's hubristic, you still don't know. The sun went into Taurus. My first house squaring Mars. This is a heavy week astrologically. I had an allergic reaction and inflammation. I was anticipating some family tension and some family, like potential arguments or things like that.
I wasn't like stressed about it. I was just like, oh, okay. I was readying myself for that and then my whole body's inflamed, and that makes so much sense. I see that in the astrology, like, you know what I, you know what I mean? Um, so I think one, having a good relationship with an astrologer like that you trust knowing that.
Astrology. It's knowing again, that astrologers are human and that they have margins of error, and that you should know the tradition from which they're coming from, that you should have an ongoing relationship with them, that sometimes the timing may be off and that at the same time, I, I personally love working with my Joe Ti astrologer because they give remediation.
You know, and so there's a lot of, Joe ti as a whole is oriented towards remediation. I question how efficacious some of these remediations are because I'm like, what? I've been doing this and you've been telling me, you know? Um, but that giving someone something like, and that's what I teach my students with cards as well, like one card for prognostication what's going on on one card for remediation.
For discerning where the sphere of our agency and our control to change as much as we can, change for the better, while also learning how to surrender circumstances that are far beyond our control. And I think divination helps us to cope and process with what is. Traumatic.
[00:17:06] Amy: Can you continue that thread into how divination can be useful for people who don't like quote unquote believe in magic?
[00:17:15] Christopher: I would say from client experience, client work and client testimonials, it is somewhat of a heightened therapeutic container. Distinct from therapy for sure. I give. Suggestions, advice or I make certain predictions about things for clients that they're asking me for, and I have ongoing relationships with clients, but not in the the frequency that one would meet with a therapist.
Right. But there's ways that we can unearth certain dynamics via the cards or via the chart that family trauma that. Separation from mother, that thing with a partner or the potential for the career, we can get there so much faster. That would take a lot of time that you can then take to your therapist, right?
So I think in a therapeutic dialogic, um, kind of like psychic x-ray way that the divination can help. And I do think, again, that's where you wanna make sure that you're, you're seeing who you're working with in their background because a lot of people try and manipulate power and. Fuck you up with saying certain predictions or how you are and doing this kind of character.
You know, again, rather than looking at them as circumstantial, like how this person's circumstances are embedded in like a manifold expression that can be brought forth, and also having like a stance of like. And it's hard, don't get me wrong, but there's not a Pollyanna stance at all, but just this sense of like a real deep spiritual rooting for the history of suffering and trauma that we've all endured like that there is.
An arc of spiritual evolution. There is an arc of soul development that we've all agreed to on some fundamental level to incarnate here. People come at crossroads to divination. People come when their doctors are not seeing their humanity, when their church has failed them, when they're all alone. And so in that vulnerable space, when you're cracked open, I think is also when you open a bit more.
[00:19:09] Amy: And in terms of, you used the phrase unearthing dynamics, and I think that really relates to this question I wanna ask you about how does divination relate to decolonization? How are those two things enmeshed beyond or as part of the unearthing of dynamics?
[00:19:28] Christopher: Oh my gosh. So it's, that's, that's, you know, the, the thrust of my work, it's like ongoing, you know what I mean?
I'm just like, it's always. Each card has so much, um, as well being able to locate. And so, you know, with what I teach my students, there's, knowing this how to visually read the symbolism of a card or of the chart, right? There's just like that simple like strong visual reading skills that we have to have first, right?
And then. Um, adding significances and for what the red read does, like shining the red light onto it, which is, um, reading. Like we can apply any interpretive lens to any text. And so I think thinking as well for people aren't magical. This is an art exercise. This is reading art critically. Right. You can apply a feminist lens, you can apply a queer lens, you can apply all different lenses, and so applying that lens of colonization or decolonization to the text that is tarot or the chart unearths, all these possibilities where when you're reading for a client, you can have this social critique where you're.
Seeing like that is misogyny, that is misogynoir, that is classism, that's internalized ableism. Where are these things rooted from? Where's the history of these things? Of course goes to colonization. They become regionally contextualized with like my clients. I think about the two of wands or the three of wands is always one where I think of as cultural embassy and how.
It's important for clients to understand their own cultural background so as to not be ethnocentric. I have students and clients all over the world, so of course that expression of colonization, the histories of white supremacy are going to differently shape their experience, but we can still understand a larger grouping under that fucked up umbrella of white supremacy and colonization, and so the cards can help.
Show that we all have the same transits. It's like the weather, not we all have, but you know what I mean. The transit are happening to us all, and I'm like, in the way, I can see, oh, there's that white man in you and it's showing up in this part of your life. And that's what I work on a part of decolonization is also decolonizing our spiritual tools, reconnecting to our relationship to the earth, reconnecting to our ability to conjure, to commune.
To fortify a faith that is revolutionary. So
[00:21:51] Amy: I'd say that. And what advice do you have for those of us who feel like we're constantly contending with our own internalized classism, sexism? How do you contend with your own internalized isms and how can we contend with our internalized isms?
[00:22:11] Christopher: That's another point for the cards.
A major aspect, of course, is self reflexivity. You gotta know what your shit is. You gotta know what your isms are and how those are related and be vigilant about it. I think it's a constant process of learning. It's a constant process of taking that as a, a meaningful aim and commitment and discipline.
You just have to be committed to keeping that in check and, and I think being willing to make. Sacrifices and and changes. It's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable and it requires a lot. I think people are hard to sacrifice some sense of selfish comfort around whatever way they benefit from those systems differentially, and don't benefit from those working against a larger self-interest.
I would say having a strong community. A practice of self reflexivity, having a therapist or a reader, or a diviner that you are in relationship with me, having my friends that I'm intentionally cultivating, that I feel so inspired to be friends with is a big part of that. When you connect to your roots and our complicated inheritances, that's not something that we can just escape.
Either way, you're gonna be pulled back into it. So I think that there is that sense of not being in denial or avoidance about what the work needs to do and not trying to solve it all. Like Tina Turner, we don't need another hero. We just need you to be a person among persons. We need you to reclaim some sense of humanity, and we need you to at least grieve.
I think so much of the work is grieving, processing and grieving and releasing so that you can open yourself to some new perspective. Some new relationship
[00:24:01] Amy: You, you mentioned strong community, you mentioned grief, and this is the year of the hermit. I've been asking a lot of tarot readers about their interpretation of the hermit.
Almost every single one of them. For them, the hermit has been about building strong community, which is kind of the opposite of what you would think of the hermit year. Do you have Red Tarot in front of you? I do because I was going to read a couple paragraphs and I'm so glad that you got to do your own narration for your audio book.
It's so wonderful to hear your voice reading these words. So instead of me doing it, if you could please flip to page 3 35 and start with the last paragraph, the Path of Redemption, and just read as much as you want to get this sort of. Ironic hermit.
[00:24:59] Christopher: Thank you so much. I'm honored and glad I have the copy here.
Yes. Chapter nine on page 3 35, the hermit. So this is what I've written, the path of redemption, the hermit walks is one in which the suffering we have endured is not for nothing. The deep struggles we inherit are a burden the hermit makes into a well of compassion, patience, wisdom, and understanding. A healing tonic they extend to others that wouldn't have been possible without persevering through such painful adversity.
The Herman is when our history is no longer an open festering wound, but a scar. A scar I can touch and tell stories about from the gifts of the Herman, I use the tarot. I write this book to explore the interchange of possibilities offered by compatible spirits across different knowledges, traditions, and histories.
[00:25:49] Amy: Now, talk to me about that in relation to the year of the hermit. How does that echo throughout 2025?
[00:25:57] Christopher: I think the walk, you know, we all have to walk our walk. We all have to walk our path. And there are thorns in the path, and we may twist our ankle and break our leg and get to this point, but I think the hermit keeps going and keeps walking.
It's often an elder that's pictured in the card and you're like, grandma, what are you doing out there? Like, grandpa, come back. It is cold out there. What do you mean you're taking this long walk? You know, it's this real sense of maturity. I think that is cultivated from still standing, from still going, from still breathing, from surviving.
From having an ability to commune when you've been in the room when someone has died, you know, there is a real faith that permeates or a real sense of more than the mundane material, hard world. There is a real spiritual connection. I think that, that Herman is guided by ancestors by the Starlight. They have, they're, they're led by their own light in that lantern, by their own sense of faith.
Trying to show the way for others that distinction of having a scar is something you can tell stories about, maybe that you're proud of in the sense that it is a scar now and not an open festering wound. That it's evidence of your healing, it's evidence of your resiliency of what's happened to you. I don't have tattoos.
I only have scars personally. My family all has to, I love tattoos, but I just have scars, you know, myself. I think the hermit is a real interesting one to be this year to shift from the strength year to hermit year. I think the hermit is really having me slow and walk a slow, steady, fortified kind of pace with trying to be as prudent.
As I can be, you know?
[00:27:42] Amy: Yeah. A lot of people get hung up on that word hermit, but they're missing the lantern. Mm-hmm. And to me, it's the lantern that's really the hermit. It's not hermitage. It's definitely not solitude. It's that lantern. It's that light.
[00:27:59] Christopher: Mm. It's being enveloped, I think like hermit would that?
Yes. People have, I don't know, like the common connotation of that word is like this envelopment into. God or the divine or the goddess or the mystery or what have you, and I think it makes so much sense. Again, it's like just circling back, like in total darkness when there's no sense. Of a way forward or no clarity and there's just confusion and you feel alone or you feel disconnected that the Herman emerges and is, it's like the, the darkness being evidence of being so intimately close to the divine.
And I do quote cross the book like Father Ian Matthew, who I love, they're writing about not shoving light into your face in this spiritual bypassing way. Like if you just book with me, we're gonna be fantastic and you'll be rich and find love. You know what I mean? It'll all be, well, you don't have to think about that.
You know what I mean? I'm the one who's like L, like we are in the dark, like, you know what I mean? We already are in the dark, but there's a lantern there. There's starlight there that Herman is like, if I fix my eyes on this lantern, if I learned how to carry this lantern, if I learn how to respect the wisdom that my ancestors have given me, that the divine is giving me.
And walk that path slowly and humbly. And I tell others, it's like, you can follow me if you want. I'm just following this light. Like you, Herman is not interested in mass followers. He is not interested in audience. He's not necessarily trying to tell other people what to do or where to go or how to be.
He's simply trying to hear for himself or themselves or herself where the next step is for them. What the right next step for them to take is to be in alignment, to feel that they can respect themselves, to feel that they're walking somewhere that offers sanctuary and respite, but fulfillment. They're also not going to take the easy path because everyone else is parting it up under fluorescent lights.
You know what I mean? He is like, I'm trying to go where I am meant to be going. And so I think the Hermit offers does definitely offer as much wisdom at this point, for sure.
[00:30:09] Risa: Do you wanna pull a card for us and I'll pull a card for you?
[00:30:13] Christopher: Yes.
[00:30:16] Risa: Amy, do you have a third deck there or do you wanna just watch this unfold?
[00:30:19] Amy: I'm gonna watch it unfold. Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm so excited. Okay. Hmm.
Turned right over. Let me know when you're ready.
[00:30:59] Risa: I'm ready. I filled this card for you and showed it to Amy while your eyes were closed. We both laughed at how perfect it is. You got Audrey Lord? Yes. Mytho. Mythologize. Mythologize make myth of your life. Lovely one. We wrote, AUD Lorde black lesbian warrior poet, feminist essayist and civil rights activist radically opens pathways to intersectionality just like you.
She created the genre of biography. She invites us to craft our mythic lives in her 1980 SA age race. Class and sex. Audrey writes, as a 49-year-old black lesbian feminist, socialist mother of two, including one boy and a member of interracial couple. I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong.
In her poem Equinox, she writes, we must be very strong and love each other in order to go on living. A Lord summons you to the fertile meeting places of our otherness. Be very strong. Love each other. Make your life mythic.
[00:32:02] Christopher: Thank you, Audrey. Thank you. I love y'all's deck and your work and the podcast. It's a blessing and an honor, and I think that, again, for me, focusing on bringing that hermit, there's so much wisdom there for us.
There's so much wisdom in the moment and the things we are all pouring from our soul to create and receive. I have to be disciplined and fortified about centering that in my life rather than the darkness and dismay. And that is a daily effort in a daily practice. And so, and I know Audrey Lorde knows about that.
The card I drew for y'all that popped right out is the Ace of Wands. Oh. Oh. It's very big Ace of Wands. It's like literally on fire. This Ace of Wands, which you don't always see, this is from the Theodore Pavlov Tarot, and so I'll read a bit from Red Tarot as well.
[00:32:48] Risa: Always read from Red Tarot. That's my go-to.
[00:32:51] Amy: I really appreciate that. Thank you for, thank you for that.
[00:32:54] Risa: I mean, I have to tell you, I read from it all the time in missing witches coven circles. I think it just, it's like the. The book, the interpretations that like gives me the most like grounding and clarity and like, uh, sends me excitedly looking at authors.
Real, real deep medicine, not, not not blowing Smoke Deeply. Love that book.
[00:33:14] Christopher: No, I, I, I appreciate that. 'cause I get, like I said, complex about how certain readers have, like, try and police. Mm-hmm. I've, like, I've always been policed for my intellect and my expression writing and my syntax and my diction. I also recognize my own faults in terms of reading it very critically.
I'm happy to have readers like you and for anyone that it's helped. It's a gift and honor. But anyhow, the ace of Wands for you.
[00:33:36] Risa: Okay, we'll send that back. And there's a,
[00:33:38] Christopher: there's a, let's circle back
[00:33:39] Risa: to how annoyed I am at this,
[00:33:41] Christopher: but from the opening, so the epigraph, thus. Because of the way in which domestic myths are transmitted, people often never learn that they are myths.
People become submerged in their viewpoints, prisoners of their own traditions. They readily confuse attitudes towards reality, proclamations of value with reality itself. Statements of fact, failing to see their own myths. They consider all other myths false. They do not understand that the truth of all myth.
Is existential and not necessarily theoretical. That is, they forget that myths are true to the extent that they are effective. In a sense. Myths are self-fulfilling prophecies. They create facts out of the values. They propound thinking We are superior to other creatures, for instance. We set ourselves up as such and use them ruthlessly.
People that think of themselves as brothers to the beast live with them in a harmony and respect. So I just gotta say that like from this connection to mythologizing our lives to this being the opening of a graph, like here we are, label meats, like, come on. Um, I'll read a little bit more. That was just the epigraph, but I'll say.
White culture has an uncanny ability to mystify reality among people of color. Without a clear sense of our own histories, we are vulnerable to the delusional and destructive myths of white supremacy. As you realize, an ideology has been imposed upon you. Anger mixes with confusion. White worldview maintain worldviews, maintain dominance so long as they shape the consciousness of the masses.
We are blind until the fire touches us. The ace of wand arrives, erect and before us. And an absolute reality in it's, it's and before us is an absolute reality in it's self stimulating. With the, with the Ace of Wands, we write with a reason, a sparked interest, a cause with it, we make myth to achieve self-determination.
The penis is a PHUs, but the PHUs is not necessarily the penis. The wand is a phallus rather than the penis. The active, rather than the receptive symbol of power and fertility that can be wied by any regardless of sex or gender. The staff is a symbol of external power and authority, but it only appears as we understand how we have been complicit in our own subordination fire's.
Intimacy lends itself to sudden inspiration. Fire is all knowing possesses. Every prophecy, the ace of wands is then a atory cept burn, a white fire, and the past will be purified.
[00:35:59] Amy: It is amazing to me that both the cards you pulled were this mythology sentiment. Okay, so. To sort of close this portal, to close this circle, I have a giant question.
If you could maybe close your eyes, if that feels comfortable for you, and take a second to use your imagination or to mythologize. What a re indigenized world might look like. If you could give us a couple sentences of something that can become, for us, a hermit lantern that we can look toward as a possible reality.
[00:36:42] Christopher: Hmm. I do see. Deconstructed buildings that have so much natural overgrowth that fences aren't there broken down. There's birds in the air, a lot of birds again in the air. People perhaps are. A like somewhat migratory, like I see people moving in a reclaimed city space in particular. I get a vision of this overgrown city scape.
I feel people crying together, not simply from grief in the sense of grief, yes, but relief and a ritual offering. I see there not being a stress of being on a time table in particular. I see there being like a, a real moving at a slower pace, and that paradoxically, that's very fertile and very thickened moving at that pace.
I just see people embracing each other in communion. With each other, and that's represented by the resurgence of the ecology and the resurgence of, in particular, birds in the sky. Just watching murmuration, murmuration. Mm.
Perhaps blasting out of the speaker. Some Tina Turner. Yes,
[00:38:27] Amy: I can really dig my feet and hands into the idea of human murmuration, us all moving together as one shape that is in communication as we move. This is a vision that I can very much get into.
[00:38:47] Christopher: That murmuration, it's distinctive of movement and this ability to migrate, but also being connected and like communally psychic, you know,
[00:38:56] Amy: and the tears being tears of relief.
Hmm, hmm. Hmm. Okay. Tell our listeners how they can best support you. Thank
[00:39:07] Christopher: you. No, I appreciate it. I love y'all so much. Y'all can, any listener can find me@theredreaded.com. R-E-D-R-E-A-D, the red read.substack.com, which I really like. I'm on Instagram as well, but like. Shadow band and like get like 2% of like people seeing whatever I post there said
[00:39:29] Amy: great.
Right? You get 2%.
[00:39:32] Christopher: No, literally. Um, so y'all should support authors by subscribing to their newsletter list. I write there, I have my class announcements there. Be able see a whole host of offerings and classes. You can buy Red Tarot anywhere you get books. There's an audio version as well. In my biased opinion, there is a real fullness to having both the hard copy and the audio book version.
I get that feedback a lot from people who do have both versions. It felt like the full artistic expression for me, having the visual alongside the music, you know what I mean? When I recorded the audio, it felt. Like it needed this as well.
[00:40:09] Amy: Lyrics and music.
[00:40:10] Christopher: Yes.
[00:40:11] Amy: Yes, exactly. And your reading is fantastic.
You are such an excellent narrator. It's really beautiful to hear the words in your voice instead of the voice. That voice conjured in my head when I'm reading your words in text.
[00:40:23] Christopher: Thank you. It's always been a dream of mine since watching Mrs. Doubtfire to be a voice actor.
[00:40:28] Amy: Hello? Right. Or like he
[00:40:30] Christopher: opens up and I was like, I wanna do that one day.
So if anyone's listening, you know, wants to hire me to be. I'm down. If you want me to narrate your book, I'm down, but, uh, no. But thank you so much. Thank y'all so much. It's an honor and a gift to just spend any time in space with you and to be on a label. I'm humbled together
[00:40:50] Amy: so. Y'all. Yeah. Thank you.
[00:40:52] Risa: So fun to be together again.
I really appreciate your time and the way the universe tricked us into hanging out together. It did. I'm really into it, and I felt what you said about getting policed for that language. I can imagine how that would happen. I have seen versions of that in different spaces where a friend gets. Shot down for asking the same question that I could have asked because she's black, and so it seems like she's troublemaking for you to be able to write in that high theory incantatory prose, that is very much in the same lyrical stream as Dilu guitar in these really advanced theorists, and for you to be critiqued for that because someone doesn't see the world that you're writing in.
I, I just wanna witness that how wrong and infuriating that is 'cause. You do some real good work, my friend.
[00:41:53] Christopher: Thank you. I was always that thing of like, just make the work, the right audience will find it evidently. Mm-hmm. And knowing sometimes work takes however long to get its reception and not even like, I don't feel entitled about it being received away.
It's just the sense of like, I also write, it's a paradoxical thing, writing and sharing. I write for me against histories of policing language and also wanted to reach the humanity of my reader as I explore my own.
[00:42:18] Risa: Yeah.
[00:42:19] Amy: It's a very rare combination, extremely clever and extremely kind, and I think you, Christopher, are just emblematic of that meeting place of kindness and intelligence.
[00:42:32] Risa: So folks, go get in on these offerings.
[00:42:35] Christopher: Yeah. Be gush. I'm honored, I'm humbled. I'm hearing together again by Janet Jackson. Yeah, that's playing in my mind now.
[00:42:44] Risa: The perfect outro,
[00:42:45] Christopher: the perfect that video and everything too. It was like, so
[00:42:47] Risa: for
[00:42:48] Christopher: it. And please
[00:42:48] Amy: get
[00:42:48] Christopher: missing witches. Come on you guys. The missing witches deck, like make it a full set.
Do you see how they communicate together? Do yourself a justice and be led into our re indigenized. You chirp,
[00:43:01] Risa: join the mythologizing and blessed fucking me.
[00:43:04] Amy: Blessed fucking me.
You don't have to know if you're a witch.
You just have to be curious and ready to share in wonder. Come find us@missingwitches.com.