The Muertos Reading
New November Consultations, Classes, & Events
Dear reader,
Dia de los Muertos is upon us once again. All over the world altars are being assembled so that the ancestors may be honored.
Once you lose someone you love, you wail and wail and wail without end. In the anti-space of where they aren’t, grief eclipses the bereaved. All year long you keep on living and anniversary after anniversary their absence is all the more cold to touch, an all absorbing afterwards. The bereaved are left to fare for themselves, and it’s so often so tedious. But during this ritual season widows are welcomed into the social order once more, none are left behind because we, the ones left alive, walk the world in the way of death. We know we will die, so might as well tear away the flesh to crown the skull of our mortality. Its reverence rather than revulsion. In our collective mourning we leave a cup for the dead to drink from. We enjoy a reprieve from the worry about the death that comes in threes, because our altars are tri-level. We say their name, we share their memories, they light our way.
I’ve been in search of my own mode of mediumship. A way to relate to the dead more deeply, but in such a manner so as not to disturb their peaceful rest. I’ve just finished a study with Sterling Moon and another with Laetitia Barbier. But I’ve been also been around death my whole life. One navigates the cemetery cautiously once you’ve seen your grandmother claw at the earth crying over who she’d be forced to bury there. For all the loss we endure, social media mourning will always be insufficient. I can’t or I won’t perform mourning for you there. I need a dark room to break down in. I need candle-light as I cry. I need silence, even in my song. I need to never forget. I need time to translate the grief they have left me with for love.
Because Mercury is a psychopomp escorting the newly deceased back to source, I make my altar a text. It’s a Scorpio new moon, and with a stellium here, I am offering a new consultation, the Muertos reading to utilize tarot in a mode of mediumship for clients who are struggling with the grief of their lost loved ones, and / or for those who want support in connecting with and honoring their ancestors, and safely receiving their guidance, using tarot as a tool.
Tarot is surely strong enough to provide a symbolic language between the living and the dead, the seen and unseen. Follow the structure of the Major Arcana and you will know death is not the end.
In this reading we will work with varied strata of ancestors. And because this is a new reading, I will be offering it a lower price than my standard hour rate for the time-being, as this experimental, psychic shrine gets more fortified.
So yes, my November consultations are open! There are still limited sessions (about 9 in total) available but a bit more than in October :).
Tarot Untamed
Wild Cards is a course dedicated to living in harmony. To see into the dark, which is not literally dark, but the reality that can change and challenge the colonial status quo, is to see as a decolonial diviner. It is to open the imaginary and subjectivity to be beyond the anthropocentric with an animal ethic that disrupts the settler-colonial logic.
Look into the eye of the raven, the eye of the stallion, the eye of the dingoe, and on we will see a “submerged perspective” looking back. We will then engage a disobedient reading of animal images, representations and stagings for oppositional purposes to their colonial context of creation. Thus, this course disrupts anthropocentrism, which is the fourth logic of white supremacy.
Sign up to study animals’ characteristic, medicines, messages & energies, including how our energies are affected by their presence. Explore what it means to be human or indeed animal at a given point in space and time. We begin Nov. 22 and payment plans are available!
FADO DEUX
Hang Time: The Hanged Man & the Aesthetics of Suspension
Nov. 14, 4pm pst
Join me as a lamenting prophet for these monthly-ish class pearls as we pray to redeem a fate we lament. Once you sign up, you’ll have access to the previous Tower class as well a live-invitation for the future classes in this container. Alternatively join me for just this class on Nov. 14th, 4pm pst.
read more here:
The Cartier Club
next meeting: Nov. 15, 2pm pst
We went full on 3 of cups, cheers-ing to each member in our first meeting last month. This time we will be Maiden, Mother, Crone as we meet under the Taurus full moon to discuss this lunation cycle relative to our charts & lives.
Join the club for only $10 a month, and join a global community of feminist cartomancers who gather monthly from round the world to cut the cards, talk transits and support each other in only the ways a psychic soror can.
Members connect between monthly meetings on a private discord. As the Cartier Club continues to grow, we will maintain a growing archive of unique tarot spreads, and exclusive articles on a wide variety of subjects.
Don’t Call the Devil Your Lover
This is an up-coming in-person event in LA, at the Philosophical Research Society, and while it is in December, I wanted to give you notice right away so you could attend if you’ll be in the area:
Spend an evening with hungry, hairy, horny beasts as we unpack the historical trajectory and application of the Tarot’s Devil arcanum. The Devil is a who and a where but he isn’t your lover. In this workshop we will examine the characteristic visual iconography of the demons and devils that develop at the same moment and place as the tarot was created to see how the ravisher makes sense of slavery, and its lingering remnants in the collective consciousness of our post-slavery subjectivities. We will supplement our tarot reading with Christina Sharpe’s text : Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects :
“My intent is to examine and account for a series of repetitions of master narratives of violence and forced submission that are read or reinscribed as consent and affection: intimacies that involve shame and trauma and their transgenerational transmission.” - Sharpe
This workshop will enrich your historical appreciation for the Devil arcanum and benefit anyone with a client practice in supporting their clients at the crossroads where the Devil appears with liberatory care. Bring your decks and journals, No prior experience with tarot required but always welcome.
Ok darling reader, clearly theres a lot going on! I’ve spent much of this monthly feeling extremely grateful to be passionate and in love with all the facets of my work. I get to use tarot to teach people, talk with them about their lives, commune with spirit and maintain a rich relationship with a muse that keeps me creatively virile. I hope you’ll join in me in the consultation room, the classroom, or in the Cartier Club. As always, I’m here if you have any questions about any of these offerings.
x,
Christopher