Hire me to—

Speak:

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.

Sample subjects:

• Queer and feminist epistemologies 

  • By using the select major and minor arcanum, this talk weaves the image with the literary, the personal with the political to undergird a liberatory praxis. Connection will be made with cards like the Two of Wands to World Traveling with Loving Perception (Maria Lugones), the Seven of Swords to Disidentifcation, the Ten of Pentacles to the Brown Commons (Jose Esteban Muñoz), the Four of Wands to Coalition Building (Chela Sandoval), the King of Cups to Feminist Masculinity (bell hooks). This talk will be constructed alongside a divination that elicits the cards wishing to show up as teacher for queer, feminist epistemologies. Audiences will learn about these theories and praxes with the tarot iconography serving as a shorthand.

• Decolonial perspectives on divination, developing a decolonial praxis

  • In this talk, I frame literacy as key to liberation and explores an understanding of tarot as critical literacy. I show how the cards can be read to subvert the dynamics of white supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-patriarchy, weaving historical context and spiritual practice into a comprehensive overview of tarot. I’ll be presenting the tarot as a radical epistemology that shifts the authority of knowing into the hands of the people themselves. Participants will leave with an understanding of Tarot as radical literacy with solid foundations in ethical tarot reading.

• Reading Tarot To Write

  • In this talk, I discuss tarot as tool that can sustain a writing practice. I will share strategies for strong visual analysis of the cards, and the manner in which they pose provocative questions that can dispel the fog of writers block. I will share on my how tarot can become a muse and how to court this literary, divinatory muse with a daily practice that fortifies the discipline for sustained writing. Audiences will leave affirmed in their ability to read tarot and to write in wide array of genre in response, and with an understanding of what it takes to publish in the modern literary landscape.

  I also teach on the aforementioned topics and teach specialized tarot and astrology courses as well.

  I am also available for Guest appearances on podcasts and love to be in conversation with great hosts. Thank you for your consideration.

Click through event name for more details.

Future:

Lunar Tarot & the Cards of Psychic Defense, Philosophical Research Society, Zoom

All courses are Sundays in September from 11:30am - 1:30pm, via Zoom, register here

More than a mirror, the Moon is a prism and as it gathers and transmits the rays of the other planets, it protects and tempers what unfettered, would overwhelm. This protective prism shines itself distinctly into the tarot’s minor arcana, syncretized to the zodiac’s lunar decans.

Held in our human hands, these cards become gateways into the psyche’s archetypal structures of defense. In this series, learn about the astrological nature of the luminous Moon, the decans that are a 36-part zodiacal subdivision, and then dive deeper to see how the inner-child has attempted to protect itself as shown through the tarot’s prism.

We will discuss how traumatic early childhood experiences leads to dissociation, hypervigilance, splitting, we will speak of witch mothers and self-sabotage, rationalization, but more so we will prime tarot towards a therapeutic intervention for self and client, as we reach to take care of the inner-child with these cards in our hands.

The Horror of Her & Her Uncanny Arcana, hosted by Laetitia Barbier Cartomany

Wednesday’s October 1, 8, 15, 22, Register Here

The card reader crosses borders. Bodily and symbolic. They reach out and radically include what is fascinating and seductively abject. They know that rationality cannot simply ignore the uncanny. These card readers conspire and conjure the siren, the witch, vampires, the red mother. Tender is the flesh that collapses meaning. Male meaning that is. Always the first found to be shocking, horrific, terrifying and monstrous is the feminine. 

Those card readers curious about Her monstrous manifestations and her provocative, defiant powers are invited into her arcana. In this four-part class uncover the various minor arcana that particular summon the monstrous feminine. We will inevitably draw upon the Major arcana to amplify the abject resonances that She transmits to the tarot. 

This class invites you to swim with the siren, queer your sense of self and engage in musical self-questioning. Be with bird women and let your curiosity unravel with cards like the Eight of Swords.

Then come to know the Nine of Pentalces as an auspex. Isolated in the midst of a dense green, on an island off the coast, we will connect with the cult of Circe and learn how this Witch supreme humbles heroes.

Peer into gorgeous grotesquerie of the Vampires and fill your cups cards with a forbidden substance. She’ll search with you as hunt to satiate that primal hunger.

Lastly, if have you haven’t already let your hair come loose, Lilith will leave your locks ever so languid. Or was it Eve? With the swords and words that cast you out, we will become a body fantastic that foresees the future. 

The Occult Humanities Conference, 2025: Contemporary Art and Scholarship on the Esoteric Traditions, October 17-19, 2025, NYU
-Presenting Hang Time: The Hanged Man & The Aesthetics of Suspension, Saturday October 18, tickets here

How long can you stay still? How long can you stay with that which you can’t resolve? Tarot reading requires a willingness to peer the window, to look long into the frame of the card so as to critically discern the visible from the visual. 

Red reading requires the emphasis of certain aesthetic modes be appropriate to ethical conditions. For in a such a reading, the querent comes to the red reader to create some kind of buffer zone around them and their vulnerable person. In the porosity of the divination, a solemn, rigid, rational solidity gives way, becoming a liquidity that manifests an opening between the self and the world. The cards create a wedge in our experiential temporality, and strategically so. A red reader can diagram the architectures of white supremacy in their lives and the lives of their clients, internally and externally, so as to suspend that anti-black logic. The red reading is a caring container for queer, marginalized bodies that holds them without suffocating or compressing their integral movements. Rather, this space becomes one that inspire acts of defiance, refusal, and charts potential space, place and times for alternative moves. Thus, to the traitors the Hanged Man turns. The Hanged Man is one that reminds you how hard it is to stomach public executions. The Tower sends all the capitalists crashing to the ground but someone is suspended in space by the Hanged One. Their fall upward is an initiation, a peaceful abandon within a durational drag. A consciousness is clarified from a corporeality bound by white rope.

In Hang Time we will survey a bit of the historic iconography of arcanum 12, discuss the body as a site of consumption, spectacle, the hangman’s noose and then some of the Black artists who strive toward suspension. These artists pursue aesthetic modes to delay, unmoor, halt the dominant gaze, the trajectories, and the technologies of surveillance, domination and captivity. We will question the automatic association of agency with motility.

Past:

LA Festival of Tarot

• Friday, May 30th , Venue: Philosophical Research Society, Los Feliz

  7:00p - 9:30p - Tarot Quaternaries:An Exploration of the Magical Fours of Tarot An Evening with Mary K. Greer, Laetitia Barbier, Naha Armády and Christopher Marmolejo

  9:30p - 11:00p - After Party in the Courtyard (Readings by Christopher Marmolejo)

• The Star as Griot: Surviving by Way of Enigmatic Water- Bearers with Christopher Marmolejo

  Sunday 6/1/25, 1 - 3 PM

  "Historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, musician. Who will preserve our stories from one generation to the next? And how? And what when our existence is actively denied, our memory repressed, our histories undermined, our knowledge ignored? I’m sure you’ve heard, Pluto is at long last in Aquarius; for good. As such, I am looking to Lorna Simpson’s Waterbearer, who looks away from the viewer, pouring her water with abandon. What does it mean for her to turn her back on those who cannot hear her? If she is a griot then why does she not command universal admiration? The Griot will be a meditation on the oral histories that survive hundreds of years by way of the enigmatic water-bearers. In the examination of Simpson’s striking art, we will look again, see what has never been seen, bear witness. The Griot realizes tarot as a technology of the sacred. In many different languages, we dial up the Divine. We hear ourselves in the echo of a myth. Certainly, there is a slippage, in the long distance between our histories, between the celestial guidance we seek, and the rough dirt road we walk evermore on, there is the space between what one says on the phone and what’s actually going on. But there is an efficacy of word-power behind the water-bearer’s storytelling. And it’s subversive.

  Those who remember are of an ambivalent characterization. Their testimonials question our perceptual limitations. Their words have occult power, and by their speech, their sacred pouring, what had been far-distant in the night sky, impossible to transcend, becomes critically intimate, immanent”

The History of Tarot, Wednesday, May 7 / 4-6pm CT, workshop available for purchase here

“Tarot’s history reaches back to medieval Europe, when wealthy Italian families began commissioning artists to create unique and fanciful playing card decks that would evolve over the decades and centuries to become tools for oracular visioning and divination. Join one of the most preeminent Tarot practitioners, writers, and teachers of our time, Christopher Marmolejo, for an exploration of Tarot’s history, including images and stories from archives housed around the globe. Christopher is the author of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy. Their work and writings draws on decolonial, queer, crip, and feminist theory to help us see the Tarot in a new light and help us use Tarot as a portal to imagine new worlds of liberation. Christopher draws on academic wisdom, multiple esoteric and healing traditions, and pop culture to build radical connections within our Tarot practice”

“Love is Coming for Us All”, EP 264 Missing Witches Reparation Fun Part 2 w Christopher Marmolejo and Edgar Fabian Frias - Love Is Coming To Us All

 Christopher Marmolejo and Edgar Fabian Friasto talk about Art as Magic and as a healing practice, boundaries, divination, opening portals of possibility, bravery, and inner fortitude. This conversation is a nervous system reset - take a deep breath, slow down, rediscover your sense of self, commune with the Divine, and bear witness as unjust systems decay. Listen Now

Cultivating Decolonial Perspectives on Divination With Tarot, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Two Day Workshop, April 12-13, 10am-1pm PDT.

Join Christopher for an illuminating workshop on decolonial perspectives on divination with Tarot and how to develop a decolonial praxis. On the first day, participants examine how tarot cards can be read to subvert the dynamics of white supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-patriarchy, weaving historical context and spiritual practice into a comprehensive overview of tarot. Participants also explore tarot as a radical epistemology that shifts the authority of knowing into the hands of the people themselves.  
 
The second day is centered on application with a focus on how to use the cards in a reading for yourself or others. Christopher shares insights on the consultation space of a tarot reading, opening conversation and consideration for the similarities and distinctions between a formal therapeutic session; navigating the spread with confidence and a kaleidoscopic perspective.  

In this workshop participants leave with an understanding of Tarot as radical literacy with solid foundations in ethical tarot reading. Please bring your questions, your experience, your tarot decks and your intentions as diviner. 

This workshop is open to all levels of tarot enthusiasts, but some basic understanding of tarot will be helpful in deepening your experience.  

"Divination for Decolonization," March 20 @ 4:30 PM, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online

This talk with engage the Tarot as cypher for decolonizing consciousness. Within divination one can find a dignity that is denied in dominator culture. The cards are neurological pivots, subverting the logical dominance of society and self. They will be discussed as tools to reengage alternative epistemologies assaulted by colonial imperialism. The tarot is an affective archive that, when supplanted with a liberatory language and framework, may challenge and delegitimize colonial structures within and without. Every reading then pushes forward the long-multi-pronged project of decolonization.

"Gender & Sexuality in Tarot" March 19, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Confessions of A Diviner: Christopher Marmolejo, hosted by Laetitia Barbier, Saturday, January 18, 2025, 7-8pm, pst, recording here.

Don’t Call the Devil Your Lover , The Philosophical Research Society, Wednesday, December 11 · 7 - 9pm PST,  

Social Justice Poetry Event, Thursday, Women’s National Book Association - San Francisco Chapter, (November 14, 2024, 12:00 to 1:00pm /PT

Tarot to Connect with Revolutionary Realities, Firestorm Co-op, Monday, watch Here (Aug 19 2024, 4pm)

Belief, Being & Beyond with Granddaughter Crow guest appearance. (June 9 2024)

On Tarot and Divinatory Literacy for Liberation (in-person and Live-streamed with California Institute of Integral Studies, (May 23, 2024, 6pm PDT) Watch conversation here

In-Person Reading and Conversation w/ Nico Chen, World Tarot Day, (Monday, May 20, 2024 - 6:00 pm PST)

Indigenous Futures 2024 Part 2 - The Future Requires Radical Hope - Missing Witches Pod Guest Appearance, (May 16, 2024)

University of Denver Guest Session with doctoral students in Divinatory Poetics (May 6, 2024)

Witch Wave Pod Guest Appearance (May 1, 2024)

In-Person Reading @ Octavia’s Bookshelf, Pasadena. (April 17th, 2024, 6-7:30 PST)

Strength & Decolonial Tarot Magic of the Spheres Pod Guest Appearance (April 10, 2024)

Games for Decolonization, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, (Friday March 22, 2024 10am PST)

In Conversation with Alice Sparkly Kat with Charis Books & More and Charis Circle, Virtual, (Monday March 11th, 2024, 4:30 pm PST)

Red Tarot Book Launch @ Libélula Books & Co., Barrio Logan (March 6th, 2024, 6:30 PST) (low quality recording here)

Missing Witches Pod Guest Appearance - A Tarot Reading Queers Time (March 14 2024)

“Reading For Community : Talking Tarot, Literacy & Tools for Liberation” with Jesi of Libélula Books & Co., Barrio Logan (Dec 9, 2022, 6:30 pm PST)

Witch Aid Panel, (May 7th, 2023 2 pm PST)

Occulted Pod Guest Appearance with Jove Spucchi, (July 2023)

Pisces & the 8, 9, 10 of Cups Magic of the Spheres Pod Guest Appearance (Jan 2023)

Healing the Spirit, Episode 38: “Reading the World” Nov 17 2022.

Magic of the Spheres "Love as Multi-pronged approach" guest appearance (Aug. 2022)