Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy by Christopher Marmolejo is a text that I am grateful for, and one that I am so happy to see out in the world. This is the kind of tarot book that I am so excited to find and that I’ll absolutely keep on my bookshelf. I was thrilled to receive an e-book ARC but bought the paperback copy on the strength of the introduction and first chapter alone and continued my reading from there. 

The text is structured numerologically, with chapter zero as an introduction. From there, ‘One’ includes the Magician, the Wheel, and the pages and aces, ‘Two’ includes the High Priestess, Justice, The Hanged One, Judgment, and all the twos, and so on. The Fool appears in the ‘Ten’ chapter with the World. 

Far from a standard card-by-card beginner tarot book laying out how to interpret each card in a spread, Red Tarot positions each card as a leaping off point and tarot itself as a text. The author’s reflections on each card are simultaneously personal and theoretical – the text’s analysis is rooted in lived experiential knowledge, intersectional and decolonial theoretical frameworks, and tarot imagery and symbolism. Here, tarot is a tool that readers can engage to “nourish emancipatory knowledge that undergirds all revolutionary praxis” [407-8] and daily draws have the capacity to “[transform] awareness” [411]. This book is unlike any other I’ve read, and I see myself revisiting it often; it has left me with much to ponder on everything from tarot’s epistemological implications to the tarot reading as a site of dialogue and new angles to consider on each and every card. 

 Of their wide-ranging bibliography, Marmolejo writes that their citation practice is “multifarious and polyvocal,” bringing Indigenous intellectualism and critical pedagogy into conversation with reference to each card [408]. Authors that appear cited in the text include bell hooks, Paolo Friere, José Esteban Muñoz, Toni Morrison, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many more. I suspect some will critique this book as challenging to read or as ‘overly academic,’ but such criticisms miss the ways that language itself is central to the book’s very purpose and thesis on tarot as critical literacy. Marmolejo describes their book as offering “a visual framework for interpreting the tarot in a manner that perceives, disrupts, and rejects conditioned colonial consciousness” [2] – recognizing language as a site of contestation, the text invites thinking/reading/writing critically and necessitates thoughtful, deliberate, self-reflexive engagement. 

 Citation in the book is via endnotes; I would suggest putting a bookmark or post-it in the back of the book while reading so that turning back to learn the sources of quotations while reading is easier, particularly for readers unfamiliar with much of the source material.