As someone who has taught middle school boys and now teaches the oracular arts to folks of all ages, I often think about this poem by Audre Lorde:

The Bees

In the street outside a schoolwhat the children learnpossesses them.

Little boys yell as they stone a flock of beestrying to swarm

between the lunchroom window and an iron grate.

The boys sling furious rockssmashing the windows.

The bees, buzzing their anger,are slow to attack.

Then one boy is stung

into quicker destructionand the school guards come

long wooden sticks held out before them

they advance upon the hive

beating the almost finished rooms of wax apartmashing the new tunnels in

while fresh honey dripsdown their broomsticksand the little boy feet becoming expert

in destruction

trample the remaining and bewildered beesinto the earth.

Curious and apart

four little girls look on in fascination

learning a secret lesson

and trying to understand their own destruction.

One girl cries out

“Hey, the bees weren’t making any trouble!”

and she steps across the feebly buzzing ruins

to peer up at the empty, grated nook

“We could have studied honey-making!”

- Audre Lorde

She establishes an ecofeminist critique through the critical observations of a young girl. Why must boys wage war with the bees? In this performance of power relations learning about the natural world is a gendered learning for both the boys and girls.

The destruction of the bees becomes the girls own destruction. Gendered socialization demand the bee-possessed-boys move to discipline (in the Foucauldian sense) the free moving bees, supported by the state’s security guard. This violence, of course, is eroticized. Boys have no patience nor any curiosity for the hive, no awe for the miracle of a collective collecting liquid gold. No, they learn to beat the bees with their broomstick till the honey bleeds all out. Someone needs to read them Bee Boy Buzz, but it would be published 30 some years too late.

The girls learn that these bees are sister animals, and that the bee’s weren’t the provacateurs, but acting desperately to defend their hive. The girls teach us that these moments, as spectators can be moments of consciousness-raising. She recognizes that for every choice succumbing to destruction, there is an option for creation. Given that four girls watch this violent, elementary destruction of nature, I’d associate this poem with the Four of Pentacles, what I’ve come to call the “honeypot decan” of Capricorn with students, in particular.

In Red Tarot you will read:

How many of us are that young girl, militantly questioning as feminist thinkers, as lovers of justice, who can’t hardly wait for another taste of honey, clamoring to break free from patriarchy?

If the boy’s could tolerate their fear of the unknown flying freely before them, they might realize how much more there is to learn. What if we sought truth like the bee seeks nectar from all kinds of flowers, tenderly devoted to the Divine and discovering how brilliantly are its polyfloral blooms?

And then the bee would teach us of our own antennae of intutive knowing. The hive would put us on the path of pollen in the realm of oracular knowing. Bee would become our title and we’d offer honey to Artemis. We would gather all the bones and set them in honey for their resurrection. We’d remember when the bees nourished the new-born Zeus. The honeycomb would be our temple and no sons would be sacrificed in war, and no daughters would be raped, no mothers murdered. We would bring forth the fruitfulness of the Earth once more.

The bee is an ancient symbol of the soul. Let them teach you the art of prophecy, of venerating the earth and inspire a vision of a feminist masculinity birthed by a decolonized divination.

Traverse this earth’s savage garden and forage for wisdom like the bee does her honey. The visceral depths of nature and her changing rhythms bypass the rational man’s mind.

If you love the bees like I do, then Wild Cards is the course for you. This seven-week class studies a bestial relation to the body. We will become bees reading the future, the past, and unravel our colonized present. To work with the wild is to risk untaming meaning and challenging the racial signifiers of the bestial.

In this class we will journey from bewilderment to chaos. We will realize wildness is not limited to the natural world. We will look at the animals in the tarot and consider them as omens, as teachers, as symbols of resistance and sufferers of colonial subjugation.

Wild Cards works through the animal associations in space and time as much through analogy and vast theoretical sources as through the touch of the cards that are shuffled and arrayed on the the table randomly. We will stage a new wild encounter. We will be birds murmuring together, the many who remain many and become, in their multiplicity, a new entity entirely.

We will summon the spirit of the unknown and the disorderly to disrupt convention. We will be held in a warm embrace even and especially as our Brown, Black and Red bodies are continuously cast as the wild ones that must be tamed.

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 will then engage a disobedient reading of animal images, representations, and stagings toward oppositional purposes of their colonial context of creation. Thus, this course disrupts anthropocentrism, which is the fourth logic of white supremacy. These Wild Cards will tie together aesthetics, anticolonial theory, subjugated knowledge, and desire.

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.

The students who study with me provide uncanny contributions in oracular explorations. Each run is unique, but students are consistently stunning. I’m so excited to see this class continue to deepen and expand as more students encounter its wilds.

Jan 17 - Feb 28 / Saturdays, 3pm PST

In the Red Madonna Mary Magdalene Tarot writes about the sacred bee keeper:

For me, it sounds like Mariah.