Royal Reflections

Hello dear reader,

Do you have a favorite court card in the tarot? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I particularly favor the Queens. Today I drew the Queen of Cups and prepared a baño to wash away the year. Her magnetic force draws up all that is unknown within me to emerge for a therapeutic release. She calls me back to the water. She wants me to wade deeper.

In her royal blue I find a heartfelt reflection, and I know her by many names: Yemaya, Oshun, Chalchiuhtlicue. She is Water of Water, blood from blood.

The Court cards are often especially challenging for many readers. They require more than an acquaintance, but an intimacy. And then they uniquely exemplify tarot as an obsidian mirror. The reflection is concave so it may misrepresent but it also shows a world of possibility. Mirrors, of course, are more than a means vanity, they a divinatory technology.

King Louis XIV had an obsidian mirror in his Cabinet des Curiosités, which was said to be have been plundered from Moctezuma II himself, making an imperial mirror. So again, What does it mean when we (the historically abject, the queer, the black, red and femme) find a reflection in royal portraiture?

The Imperial Mirror is made to maintain le majeste of the king, and this mirror does not obey the laws of optics but the laws of absolutist power. White sight is incarnated in the figure of the “king” and attendant kingship.

As we examine the portraits of kings and presidents through the mirror in the court cards we cross the visual bridge between past, present and future. This optically incorrect visualization will open a doorway for us to see ourselves, our clients in these royal reflections. We will see Sovereignty anew and break it apart from the white male body while we contemplate the postures of power.

For most of the modern era, only the wealthy and powerful, only royals, would maintain the possibility to see an image of oneself. The royals in the tarot court represent this compressed, reworked history by showing us ourselves through these imagined images of the powerful, of the select few who would actually be able to commission portraiture.

In Paper Crowns we will consider how the selfie resonates so strongly because it is an evolution of the self-portrait that was once the preserve of a highly skilled few. We will spend a week with each rank of the court, seeing connections and distinctions across element, gender, power.

Tarot presents a unique entry into visual culture that is the relation between what is visible and the names that we give to what is seen. And what we visualize, as with the aid of the cards, is not always visible:

❝

“Visuality is an old word for an old project. It is not a trendy theory word meaning the totality of all visual images and devices, but is in fact an early-nineteenth-century term meaning the visualization of history. This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas. This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer.” - Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right To Look

At stake for visual culture is simply how to see the world, when the world is changing so dynamically while exponentially expanding just how much there is to see and oh so many different points of view. Red tarot reading engages visual culture as an active way to create change, more than just a means to visualize what is happening.

Thus Paper Crowns will explore the court cards as an archive of the portraits of the powerful. Within these compositions we will contend with the myriad ways one can face - and be faced with - our own subjectivity. We will concern the visibility of the historically invisible, the politics of the gaze, the construction of new archives; the tarot reader as visual activist generating new ideas about community and citizenry. In looking at these images we will acknowledge and enrich our own impressions of agency and power. By expanding the regard portraiture affords, we will assert our status as significant. This reading of the court will not be not photography-as-death, of transforming subject into museum object, as Roland Barthes describes in Camera Lucida but its opposite.

Paper Crowns will make these royal portraits in the court cards come alive as a subjectification of the objectified. This course is a reclamation of the historically laden image for those who have come before.

Enroll here