Red Tarot is not an easy read, but it’s not intended to be. It’s filled with dense layers covering symbolism, mythology, history, present day politics, literature, and so much more. This book is about shedding red light on each card in the tarot to reveal it as a prism of political praxis, inspired after Prof. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy.

Each tarot card entry draws from four key disciplines:

1. literary fiction as political expression,

2. gender studies and theory,

3. anti-colonialist philosophy of education and decolonizing pedagogy, and

4. performance studies, whereby theatrics, divination rituals, ceremonial rites, and social expressions are revelatory of core truths in the human experience.

This is achieved by weaving in the teachings of Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and José Esteban Muñoz.

Marmolejo seamlessly navigates different cultural paradigms and even historical epochs, like–

• addressing racial justice and Indigenous American sovereignty in the Justice card, explored through the theme of duality, opposition, and balance found in the numerology of Two;

• or drawing our attention to the Sword of Damocles reference in the Four of Swords;

• or the nod to bloodletting and lavadoras ritual cleansing in the Five of Cups (a card that Marmolejo notes as being “an offspring of the Tower” card), just to name a few.

  Each card entry is also a personal essay with memoir-esque reflections. Marmolejo shares having to “get up and get dressed,” putting on jewelry, makeup, and perfume to write about the Nine of Pentacles, a card that, per Marmolejo, is an invitation for us to invest in beauty. The words on these pages do bleed red. They move you. This is rubedo, the final stage of achieving the Great Work. It is a series of thoughtful narrative essays edifying on the lived experiences of marginalized peoples, and thoughts on how we might subvert white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy through spiritual practice with the tarot.