Red Tarot

A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy

By: Christopher Marmolejo

Narrated by: Christopher Marmolejo

Designed to be used with any deck, Red Tarot interrogates the images, themes, and power structures that have been read into and onto the cards—and guides readers to radical and empowering reclamation.

Today, we have a wealth of tarot resources with many goals—but few address the historically marginalized.

Red Tarot speaks to anyone who is othered due to their identity, or ways of being or thinking—LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC folks in particular—and presents the tarot as a radical epistemology because of the ways that it shifts the authority of knowing into the hands of the people themselves. Author Chris Marmolejo frames literacy as key to liberation, and an understanding of tarot as radical literacy.

Marmolejo shows how the cards can be used to read into the power dynamics of white supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-patriarchy and then subvert them. They offer a brief history and overview of tarot as well as complementary, non-appropriative spirituality practices, situating tarot imagery within cosmologies outside the typical Hellenistic frame: Death is interpreted through the lens of Hindu goddess Chhinnamasta; the High Priestess through Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui.

They follow with an interpretation of each card, bolstered by the teachings of Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, José Esteban Muñoz, and others—nodding to authors who have paved the way to liberation in their respective fields.

The book offers a tarot system that integrates the intersections of the work of these leaders, as well as the author’s astrology practice, and reveals tarot as a language for liberation.

For fans of Postcolonial Astrology and Tarot for Change, Red Tarot is a radical praxis and decolonized tarot that moves beyond self-help and divination to reclaim tarot for liberation, self-determination, and collective healing.

©2024 Christopher Marmolejo (P)2024 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

“Red Tarot passionately reindigenizes the symbolism of each tarot card and demonstrates the importance of this reclamation. Along with illuminating bold interpretations of the tarot, it pulls the reader into each tarot narrative in a brilliant and poetic manner. I loved this book!”—Erika Buenaflor, MA, JD, author of Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo and Veneration Rites of Curanderismo

“Red Tarot is a volume that truly, as in its own words, readies its reader to come as ‘part prophet, part poet, part political participant.’ This is a generous book. Marmolejo has done something truly wonderful here. They have made a book that makes it possible for you to engage with the future in the best way possible which is with the feeling of blowing your brain hole open. Anyone who hungers for more possibility when faced with the prospect of reading the future should keep Red Tarot with them. I know that it will be very dear to me. Red Tarot shows you how to find a sense of almost unnerving freedom in the future. This book treats reading as a medicine.”—Alice Sparkly Kat, author of Postcolonial Astrology

“After a pandemic’s collective deadness, I’m looking for resources that help us all claim collective aliveness. You’re holding one of the finest contributions to help find a portal to Eros; the rapture of aliveness, and the transcendent support of red reading. Christopher Marmolejo’s Red Tarot is an invaluable, extensively researched tool that helps you remember the language, symbols, and fields of somatic and intuitive knowledge acquisition. It’s a highly integrative work; successfully, accessibly merging the best of Christopher’s teachers in the decolonial and divinatory fields. Red Tarot achieves the work’s goal of Indigenous reclamation, reimagining, and regeneration in this pivotal time.”—Colin Bedell, astrologer and founder of QueerCosmos