Christopher Marmolejo
Writer, diviner & educator investigating decolonization, indigeneity, queerness & consciousness through Divination.
About
The Red Read is a project of simultaneous decolonization & re-indigenization.
I frame Tarot as a political praxis of liberatory literacy.Red light makes each card a prism of poetic, political praxis. The reader unfamiliar with social horror will find their imagination engaged and activated Tarot makes us literate in the imagery offered in augury, but a red read enacts a divinatory consciousness that is critical, transformative & transgressive.
PResenting:
Now Available ! Print, DIgital and Audio Versions available
Read the full announcement here
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
“Redesigning the tarot as a rich tapestry of LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC perspectives to instruct on how divination can be used to empower these communities, there is a lot to appreciate about this book. It goes where I haven’t yet seen a tarot text go before. The words on these pages do bleed red. They move you. This is rubedo, the final stage of achieving the Great Work.”
-Benebell Wen, author of Holistic Tarot, The Tao of Craft, I Ching: The Oracle and creator of the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot. Read the full review here
“We have been anticipating this divine text for what feels like a lifetime. San Diego local author Christopher Marmolejo links crucial concepts such as literacy, liberation, and radical intersectionality to tarot in a seamless way that instantly leads the language of the tool directly back to the people. It’s a beautiful, poetic promise for the future and our collective healing.”
-San Diego Magazine, “What to Read in 2024: Top Picks from Local Bookstores”
Order a limited signed copy of Red Tarot here
Offerings
Classes
With my MA in Education and single-subject English teaching credential, and 9+ years of experience, I am trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility. My classes center tarot but very much incorporate astrology, curanderismo, and principles of critical, decolonial black queer feminist theory. I love teaching the tarot because I get to help students plant and nurture the seed of a divinatory practice, working continuously with students round the world conjuring, consulting and conducting the oracular aria. Come learn about tarot, the radical tradition of reading, freedom and prophecy.
Readings
I offer limpias, tarot and astrology readings online, and at in-person events, to help clients process, heal and grow. Whereby chart, cards or curanderismo, a reading is a summoning and articulation of soul. It subversively undercuts the logical dominance of western epistemology, and offer catharsis, clarity and divine communion.
Writings
In my tradition, literacy in all its forms, is the legacy of liberation. By giving and facilitating new ways of reading the world and the self, we are empowered to write a new world, and to revise worn out self-concepts. Follow my revisions, my proclamations, my translations below.
Speaking
Following the publication of my debut essay collection, Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, I have been sought out by institutions such as The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the Mechanics Institute, and more for readings/talks.
Learn more about sample subjects, upcoming and past events:
Please Reach Out If You Would Like To Lead A Workshop, Class Or Retreat With Your Organization & Inquire For Rates
Upcoming Events include:
On Tarot and Divinatory Literacy for Liberation (in-person and Live-streamed with California Institute of Integral Studies, May 23, 2024, 6:pm PDT
Register Here
In-Person Reading and Conversation w/ Nico Chen, World Tarot Day, (Monday, May 20, 2024 - 6:00 pm PST)
“Red Medicine is the red of ceremonies and blood, the red earth and red cloth for healing; it is the red of protection and ‘the red and the black’ paint of the codices and, therefore, knowledge. It is the red of women’s blood powers and red of the woman’s direction in some expressions of Nahua thought; it is the red coral worn for protection, as in the red thread, the red of primary color and firstness and the red inside the color brown; it is the red of vitality and of the ability to live and continue. It is the red of original colors and originality. It is the ceremonial red and the red cloth of ceremonies.”
