Dear reader,

It has been five years since going fully independent as teacher, prophetess, authoress. Its all been a one-women show—writing, making and conducting courses, offering consultations. The work is demanding, but so damn rewarding.

A consistent struggle is making due where the work demands expertise beyond my ability. Suffice it to say I’m no site developer, so its been all the more inspiring to finally work with a true professional that could take my site to the next level. I’m on my Ciara sh*t yet again.

The Red Read (.com) is something between an altar and art-installation. It now visual reflects the radical spirit and decolonial mission that the red read strives toward. May your experience at my digital home-base evoke the transformative clarity that will mirror what you will encounter in a consultation or class.

And if you are looking for assistance with your web design, I cannot recommend HR highly enough. She is truly the gold star standard (and certified Squarespace Gold Member) for innovative design. Looking at her portfolio, inspired by a recent Four Queens Divination revamp, I knew my work would not just be safe but aesthetically elevated in HR’s hands.

We’ve been working hard on this new site and I hope you take some time to explore it, and let us know what you think!

Here & there you will be easily able to sign up for a consultation, my new classes, join the Cartier Club, and learn about upcoming events, to which I am excited to announce my participation in this years Occult Humanities Conference:

I’ll be living my Carrie Bradshaw dreams writing and wondering in New York, presenting “HANG TIME: THE HANGED MAN & THE AESTHETICS OF SUSPENSION” at New York University.

This is the sixth Occult Humanities, co-organized by Jesse Bransford and Pam Grossman. The conference will present a wide array of voices active in the cultural landscape who are specifically addressing the occult tradition through research, scholarship and artistic practice.

The arts and humanities at present are acutely interested in subjects related to the occult tradition. The tradition represents a rich and varied visual culture that displays a complex set of relations at once culturally specific and global in their transmission. Roughly defined, the occult tradition represents a series of culturally syncretic belief systems with related and overlapping visual histories. Though there are as many ways into this material as there are cultural - and personal - perspectives, universal occult concerns often include a belief in some sort of magic; a longing to connect with an immaterial or trans-personal realm; and a striving for inner-knowledge, refinement of the self, and transformation of one's consciousness - if not one's physical circumstances.

Intensely marginalized throughout most historical periods, these traditions persist and represent an 'underground' perspective that periodically exerts a strong influence on structures of dissent, utopianism and social change. Though history is marked with several so-called "Occult Revivals," the contemporary digital age is a perfect confluence of several factors which make this moment prime for a reexamination of all of the esoteric traditions. While the information age has allowed for easier access to previously obscure writings, imagery, and social contexts, it alternately elicits a deep desire for sensorial experiences and meaning-making once one steps away from the screen.

The presenters at the OHC represent a rich and expanding community of international artists and academics from multiple disciplines across the humanities who share an exuberance and excitement for how the occult traditions interface with their fields of study as well as the culture at large. The small scale of this conference (approximately 100 attendees) will give ticket holders an intimate look at the presenters and their views.

I’ll be closing out the first day of the conference and I’m thrilled to present a red reading of the Hanged Man. As a prophet of lamentations I’ve enumerated the aesthetics of suspension in the second installment of my ongoing Fado course, so it’s an honor to present this work, updated and revised, to a larger audience.

Red reading requires the emphasis of certain aesthetic modes be appropriate to ethical conditions. For in a such a reading, the querent comes to the red reader to create some kind of buffer zone around them and their vulnerable person. In the porosity of the divination, a solemn, rigid, rational solidity gives way, becoming a liquidity that manifests an opening between the self and the world. The cards create a wedge in our experiential temporality, and strategically so. A red reader can diagram the architectures of white supremacy in their lives and the lives of their clients, internally and externally, so as to suspend that anti-black logic. The red reading is a caring container for queer, marginalized bodies that holds them without suffocating or compressing their integral movements. Rather, this space becomes one that inspire acts of defiance, refusal, and charts potential space, place and times for alternative moves. Thus, to the traitors the Hanged Man turns. The Hanged Man is one that reminds you how hard it is to stomach public executions. The Tower sends all the capitalists crashing to the ground but someone is suspended in space by the Hanged One. Their fall upward is an initiation, a peaceful abandon within a durational drag. A consciousness is clarified from a corporeality bound by white rope.

In Hang Time we will survey a bit of the historic iconography of arcanum 12, discuss the body as a site of consumption, spectacle, the hangman’s noose and then some of the Black artists who strive toward suspension. These artists pursue aesthetic modes to delay, unmoor, halt the dominant gaze, the trajectories, and the technologies of surveillance, domination and captivity. We will question the automatic association of agency with motility.

If you can’t make it in person, then I’ve still got some online options to learn together! :

We started last Sunday, but there’s still time to sign up! Join and learn about the cards of psychic defense! This series is a boon if you are looking to begin learning about the connections between tarot and astrology, and your own moon placement. And if you have a client practice then this class will be essential to see how the inner-child has attempted to protect itself as shown through the tarot’s prism, particularized in the lunar cards that are our focus.

We will continue to discuss how traumatic early childhood experiences leads to dissociation, hypervigilance, splitting, we will speak of witch-mothers and self-sabotage, rationalization, but more so we will prime tarot towards a therapeutic intervention for self and client, as we reach to take care of the inner-child with these cards in our hands.

Come explore the Tarot’s gorgeously grotesques—where abjection becomes beauty, and monstrosity becomes magic.

This October, I’m honored to be a hosting this four-part journey into the cards that summon sirens, witches, vampires, and Lilith herself. Being able to work in any capacity is always a dream, but this class will be dripping with the stuff of nightmares!

We’ll swim with bird-women, drink from forbidden cups, and meet the Witch supreme Circe in the Nine of Pentacles’ green sanctuary. It’ll be all femme body whorror 😉, a provocative class in the tarot leaving you primed for a bloody Scorpio season.

⁠Queer your sense of self, unravel your fears, and step into the arcana where the feminine is always powerful, provocative, and defiantly alive.⁠

⁠Anyhow, now find a streamlined, and haptic inspired site where you can find all my upcoming and ongoing class offerings, events, and schedule a consultation at the new and revamped Red Read.

Cheers to rebirth!

x,

Christopher