Spurred on by a devotion to my craft, I am committed to leaving a trace behind of the queer possibilities offered in divination, even if that means I face even more potential violence for leaving such a track. For if I don’t document my history, my work, then who will? There are those who would eliminate me if they could, who are actively trying to erase and evaporate my voice, my body, my work.

The Vault will be a rich body of archival material. A divination is an intimate index, so here is an archival sensorium upon archival sensorium. Within the documented card, the recorded reading is a highly personal prose that finds its way into the public, living archive that is tarot. Through this queer infusion of the private into the public, the card becomes a talismanic tool to inscribe from our stories a biomythography, a mytho-poesis that resists concrete creation narratives.

This is queer evidence, manifesting in the flickering fleeting moments and poetic performances of divination. Diviners are cultural practitioners passing on each others lives, fates, voices, through speculative, multilayered forms. So archiving my teaching, outside of any instituional arrangement, fosters a participatory dynamic where I look to reassess the relationships between the archival body and the sensorium.

Divination remixes the archive so as to listen and index absences in institutional archives, by relying on sociality. In the divination we are writing an alternative history, underground and on the margins of gender, race and ethnicity. Here a reading is a historical source. We move beyond the text when we attend memory, the art of our cards, the delivery of our voice in a reading, when we bear witness of each other in a reading, the enlightened witnessing.

With card reading we are handcrafting the archive. We read the image and look to listen to an unheard sound as Ellison and Moten¹ would say. There are stories in the cards, equally forthcoming and withholding, that are waiting for us to hear them as we contemplate their image.

By our hands we raise the dead, resurrecting the silenced bodies in the reverberating materiality present in the cards, in the queer performance of a tarot reading that here becomes an archival construction. It’s a noisy collection. The card is not just a historical document but an index of a queered ethics of affect and communal care. The reading is resourceful for it maintains this queer commemorated care by raising up an emotionally charged vernacular. These cards are colored not by pigment but by our many feelings and personal memories becoming ever-more attached to them. These queer archives that are the cards become resilient repositories of our emotional interiority.

With these cards we can trace all the multiple bodies and beings we continuosly encounter, encounters that change our respective constitutions. Divination is the art of encounter. And in the pursuit of preservation from images upon images, decks upon decks, to readings upon readings, there is no authoritative voice. There is contigency, and dynamic uncertainty that maintains an open hand primed for continous revision. So with each reading, with every student and every card is an archival polphony we join to respond to the silences, erasures, that have become scars at the hands of the institution. We, diviners, do not cede authority to the institution. With every reading we are re-authoring dominant notions of documentation. We’ve imbued all these images the right and ability to speak. We listen and remember. Then through them we speak to each other. In this archive relationships matter. We are responsible for keeping record of each other.

Yet within all the scarred silence is the conditions required for radically empathic listening. From silence, sound regenerates, returns and responds. Their soundscapes are glittering, gay, insolent fugues of silence remixed into resurrection.

These cards are of course imperfect proxies for the person but they do form an autotopography, as a “tactical act of self-representation at the level of intimate objects,” a “physical map of memory, history, and belief.”² If the cards are an archive then it is the reading that constellates the material, emotional and spatial aspects of each card collection. Remembering the reading traces an ephemeral evidence to translate all the dissident structures of feeling that resist dominant systems of aesthetic and institutional classification.

Telepathic noise accounts for the unruly documentation that refuses to be collapsed into a little singular voice or neat narrative. From the crypt of the card, the silent sepuchral vault, many voices vie for the mic. In this epistolary catalogue of my divinatory praxis is a reliquary for the word God made.

The Vault offers a guided, nurturing space for those looking for support for learning divination with clear, structured and consistent learning. It is perfect for both beginners and those who seek to deepen their studies while maintaining steady study at an accessible price point.

Becoming a member means you are signing up to keep care of this queer’s archive. To make things streamlined you can upgrade your subscription here to get access!

So in The Vault are some divinations I’ve taught only once, or likely won’t teach again or often, secured for you take a second look. Or third, fourth, fifth or sixth.

Enroll and read on and listen in on the tracks of this queer ephemera I leave behind.

x,

Christopher