Hello beautiful souls,
It is another Sunday and I am here again to read to you. An eclipse has occured in Leo and we are unseeing beloved patriarchs as they experience an ego death, a social exile because their “shadow” has emerged unapologetically in broad daylight. What an audacity to be incredulous when you cannot escape accountability. Tumbling down crowns will always come.
A thinker and text that has always been clarifying for me in understanding the evasive manuevers of racists is Maria Lugones and her essay exploring ethnocentric racism: “Hablando Cara a Cara/ Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism"“. This essay appears in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras, Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color edited by Gloria Anzaldúa. Lugones was an Argentine decolonial, feminist philosopher, activist, and professor. I carry on her charge to be an engaged cultural practitioner by being a self-conscious cultural actor that is raced and has an ethnicity, explicitly tying her thinking to the Two of Wands in Red Tarot:
Hegemonic cisnormative patriarchal culture mutes culture differences as it takes itself for granted as a neutral, culturally unremarkable locus. Western perspective takes whiteness to be universal, to be the norm, the standard upon which deviance is measured. The colonizer mindset orients around supremacy, around a self they deem to be the peak. The Two of Wands shows a high-ranking elite far removed from the nameless worker we see in the Ten of Wands, for instance.
They look upon the world in their hand with an exotic gaze as if they were to stand outside culture. To declare yourself outside culture is self-deceiving, for it is actually one’s culture and one’s society that one is looking at and sees through, but this awareness is veiled because the viewer takes it as a universal lens.
Every other voice and every other culture then becomes alien. This imperial sight maintains a cultural ideology that severs the meanings and connections between ethnicity and racialization. Adopting such a disengaged stance of inquiry is either dishonest, incompetent in its lack of self-conscious depth, or committed to ethnocentric racism.
It is a radical form of passivity that privileges the dominant culture’s perception as the only “true vision.” And yet sincethe “culture” of supremacy is cannibalistic, whiteness is really devoid of culture; it is antagonistic to culture. The Two of Wands asks whether your stance is unconsciously ethnocentric and thus disengaged, or self-reflexive and self-governing.
The red read is critical of the white organizational structures of a westernized world, which absolutley entails astrological organizations. Organizations that are primarily white and male. What is an ancient spiritual lineage of star-gazing becomes a masturbatory math class, emphasizing technique.
While I teach much on technique and combing through the endless archives upon archives contained in the catacomb of a card, my work emphasizes an ethics.
My red spirituality is syncretic, reparative, intertextual and emphatic in its rebuke of white supremacy, colonization, racial capitalism, transphobia and on toward -against any mutation of oppression.
We need much less on technique if it comes at the expense of ethics, of being a skilled counselor. Lets offer into the fire any spirituality which platforms and produces a guru of any kind that uses their spirituality as a way to avoid having to deal with their own race, ethnicity and how it is structured by racism at large.
This work is soul work and just can you can analyze a chart or read a card doesn’t mean you have clarified your vows and your contracts to the work and what it will require of you.
Hear, here Maria Lugones in my mouth and may you more deeply understand why a white person claiming they aren’t racist after using semantics to call a Black man the hard-r slur, is indeed deeply racist.
Always more classes coming soon that marry the technique with the ethic. This work is for those wanting to walk a red path, a path of erotic, liberatory embodied communion.
Thank you for reading ❤️❤️🔥
