Tarot as Transgression
XZ open for enrollment
“It is the testimony of a journey of consciousness, a coming to know through transgression.
I came to know by transgressing the disciplinary boundaries and ossified borders of academia—between fact and fiction, teacher and activist, spirit and reason, theory and practice—highly guarded by the sentinels of the ivory tower.
Finally, I came to know by transgressing the borders between the traditional, modern, and postmodern worlds, and through rejecting the temporality of Western space and insisting upon the fluidity of traditional time
From all of this, I learned that experience is far from self-explanatory; that language and the ability to name one's experience are precursors to emancipation; that teachers, schools, and Western frames of intelligibility still desire to 'kill the Indian and save the man'; and that Native America is not only a place but also a social, political, cultural, and economic space. Ultimately, however, I learned that transgression is the root of emancipatory knowledge, and emancipatory knowledge is the basis of revolutionary pedagogy."
Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy
Decans, from the Greek deka, means ten.
In total there are thirty-six decans. Each decan has a name, a division of space-time, as well as certain associated deities. As a finer division of the zodiac, the decans tell us that time has many faces of many spirits and geniuses.
And that communing with these spirits resources the self with a celestial relation ever-important when the state, the family, the nation deadnames you.
Each decan represents a place of dignity or power for a planet to reside within. Position is a many layered dignity assessment of planetary performance, hierachalized by human countenance.
Dignity activates a planet. Dignity is about belonging.
It is what’s afforded with imperial power, citizenship, sovereignty, the being kindred.
Decanic dignity differs from every other rank. It is the dignity of the other, the stranger. It is the dignity of one who is made foreign to the land, with no family of their own, but by skill and virtue restore and realize their worth. Thus it is a reclamation, a transgressive dignity that asserts itself despite being disregarded by the state.
Tarot is a noted, new syncretization to this wheel of small gods. Tarot is a queer epistemology, it knows by cohering the chaotic while also aligning a visual calendar with over four millenia of social strata to its iconography; reading resonances through time and culture to inform the present, to infuse the self with sacrality, as an act of the uncanny.
The decan walk is noted as unique movement syncretizing the reader to the cards to the cosmos. The trans of transgression is rooted in crossing, stepping over, passing, going beyond. XZ [TENZ] is the decan walk as a mode of transgressive movement.
The divinatory window is of space, time and image through which prophetic visions emerge. But images are slippery.
Depending on how they are deployed, by whom, and from what frame they are perceived makes all the difference. The West is ahistorical, it’s a remembering of non-western materials as the empire is grafting other sovereign nations, bodies and beings onto itself.
I teach tarot to work against this perception and organizing, emphasizing decoloniality as a deordering of the Western world view.
In a lot of ways XZ is the most fundamental course for those seeking a deeply nourished divinatory praxis, and also its not you average tarot fundamentals course.
It’s not just tarot and astrology, its critical theory, its radical application that is a further cultural syncretization to the heavenly spheres.
Native peoples have a long history of sustaining their spiritual power relations through syncretization. As indigenous communities continue to be transformed by movement, access, border crossing, the sociocultural geography of Indian Country expands along with the borders of indigenous intellectualism.
My voice, my teaching is one of an urban detribalized, trans native. I know tarot as tool of transcendent, transgressive knowing.
Red pedagogy operates a rhetoric and a social movement, while XZ ties this movement to the celestial cycles. It is a study, a tracking, a following the motion of the planets in a coherent imagistic omen-ology.
This red work emerges from a collectivity of critique, tying authors in solidarity between and among oppressed peoples and peoples of conscience, to divinatory literacy.
The image above is the long walk of the lonely. It’s the lost and disregarded who must find a faith, a warmth, outside of the institution. It is an image of decay, the way we are wounded bodily and spiritually by the progression of an un-renewed time. It is the bodies bearing the burden of apocalypse. What are the relations of these two? Are they just alone, together? Is it the coldness that happens when people cease to care for each other?
XZ is my humble but earnest attempt to walk together, to re-relate with each other, and the cosmos. Ritual is this reading. Our spiritual practices are severely impoverished by capitalist, colonialist conception and so each class is a stake in time and place that supports the ritual practice that is critical, honest, deeply contemplative and highly psychic. It is away to re-inscribe the sacred, socially. It’s putting on your schedule a Star, to refill the collective pool of faith.
Each class is about nativity, as we consider the course texts in addition and against traditional sources. With tools of divination we reinvent ourselves, while still validating overlapping cultural identifications and relate them to the materiality of social life and power relations.
XZ is now open for enrollment. Come and make those cards read red.
~ C