Darling reader,

To be a card reader you must echo a cat’s characteristics. A nocturnal prowess requires shining all-seeing eyes. Its not just the night of uncertainty we must learn to navigate with dexterity, but as we cultivate the skill to see through and across the threads of time, we see the soul evolve, we venture toward rebirth, dying nine-times over till at last we are liberated.

From Sumer, to Crete, Greece to India, felines have been closely associated with female Divinities, for they are both cunning, self-aware, shape-shifting and free of male control. Long before male gods and kingship constructed their likeness to the lion, the Goddess has had lion’s draw forth her chariot, guard her temples or offer themselves as the very seat of her throne.

Sekhmet, the Egyptian Cat Goddess from the old Kingdom, c. 2600 BCE, establishes an animal assemblage that was worthy of reverence and veneration. She was regarded as a deity of fate, holding in her hands human destiny.

An elegant self-reliance produces a proud assertiveness that reads regal and courageous at once. Card readers are capable of cohering meaning out of the shuffle’s chaos. They are true to their own nature and instinct, and so they belong to themselves, not a father, nor a lover; though they may be known for a prodigious sexuality.

The cats who read cards learn to build rapport with impetuous spirits, while pursuing the ambitions of her own prerogatives. We disappear and re-appear at will with a mystical, spiritual grace. With a skilled stealth and speed we consult the Oracle to become a kitty curdled up against eternity without beginning or end.

The cards themselves also have a cat’s character, displaying a complex ambivalence of terrifying ferocity as well as a supportive tenderness. They remind us all life is imbued with Spirit, and as that Spirit pervades the whole of the natural world, our reverence and respect is due any time we pull out a pack. The cats, the cards and the feline femmes who read them maintain a seamless, symbiotic relationship with the more-than-human.

And so my dear reader, to inure an ecofeminist awareness of the interconnectedness of all life, I am writing to announce Wild Cards, a seven-week class in untaming the tarot, so that you can read like a beast, is open for enrollment.

This course, formerly known as Auguring the Animal, is entering a new iteration and I am so excited to teach this truly unique material and embolden the sense we make of animal omens, familiars and decolonial comrades, as animals undoubtedly continue to be the subjects of colonial domination and displacement, the objects of colonial knowledge and at times the agents of colonial conquest and settlement.

By divining a dialogue with the animals present in our tarot decks we can better relate the animals of our natural world to the cultural and supernal worlds we share. This course continues to build decolonial epistemologies through the focused of prism of revolutionizing our animal considerations and thus animal relations.

We will approach these images from perspectives beyond the lenses of alienating taxonomy. By looking 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 can then engage a disobedient reading of animal images, representations, and stagings toward oppositional purposes to their colonial context of creation. Thus, this course disrupts anthropocentrism, which is the fourth logic of white supremacy.

Considering literacy as an ecosystem enables a communion with the more-than-human, toward a liberation that is not at the expense of the animal or the natural, but alongside, within and in reverence toward the animal, the natural, the wild, the queer, the native.

Wild Cards aims to position animal knowledges as a possible means for students to understand the epistemic shifts necessary for structural decolonization, while enabling the consideration of animals as cultural mediators and agents of decolonization. This course offers a decolonial ethic that accounts for animal bodies as resurgent bodies. The tarot will be our counterpoint to create a circuit of coherence amongst the various cultural layers, significations, and vantages that coexist within the cards animal references. No prior experience with tarot required but always welcome.

I’m happy that students from the last round of this class are continuing to join me in community space in The Cartier Club (our first meeting was such a sweet synergy and our next meeting is November 15, the Taurus full moon, where we will be discussing this lunation cycle relative to our charts & lives. Definitely join us if you want ongoing psychic community).

As always, the students who study with me provide uncanny contributions in oracular explorations. I’m excited to see this class continue to deepen and expand as more students enter its wilds.

Nov 22 - Jan 3 / Fridays, 3:30pm PST / payment plans available.

An animal divination will bring you into a deeper awareness of yourself for the significance you afford them is a reflection of your passions, motivations and yearnings toward an agentive personhood. So I invite you to see with me from submerged perspectives. Transform your images of, and revel in, the strength of nature. Let us consider how to create a more egalitarian, wilder world.

x,

Christopher