Wild Cards
formerly known As Auguring the Animal
Starts Nov 22 2024 ~ 7 WEEKS ~ $440
“Decolonization is only possible through an animal ethic that disrupts anthropocentrism as a settler-colonial logic…What imaginaries and subjectivities are foreclosed when our politics of decolonization is always already anthropocentric? ” - Billy-Ray Belcourt
What & Why:
Wild Cards is a course dedicated to living in harmony.
Considering literacy as an ecosystem enables a communion with the more-than-human, toward a liberation that is not at the expense of the animal or the natural, but alongside, within and in reverence toward the animal, the natural, the wild, the queer, the native.
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.
We will approach these images from the perspectives beyond the lenses of alienating taxonomy. 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 can then engage a disobedient reading of animal images, representations and stagings for oppositional purposes to their colonial context of creation. Thus, this course disrupts anthropocentrism, which is the fourth logic of white supremacy.
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.
Wild Cards aims to position animal knowledges as a possible means for students to understand the epistemic shifts necessary for structural decolonization, while enabling the consideration of animals as cultural mediators and agents of decolonization. This course offers a decolonial ethic that accounts for animal bodies as resurgent bodies. The tarot will be our counterpoint to create a circuit of coherence amongst the various cultural layers, significations, and vantages that coexist within the cards animal references. No prior experience with tarot required but always welcome.
The Assembly of Birds, Fran Snyders
When, Where & How
COURSE SCHEDULE
Nov 22 - Jan 3 / Fridays, 3:30pm PST / $440 enrollment investment
*Please note times may be subject to change to accommodate the various time zones of students.*
Week 1: Introductions, Orientations & Entry points - State Species: The Digital Animal and Domestication
Friday Nov 22, 3:30 pm pst, Zoom
Are you a dog person? How does one learn about wildness? Let us stretch the ingrained notion of the wild animal within our childhood reveries. Animating animality from horses in the chauvet grotto to the cartoon creatures, we will consider the visual politic of how humans control animals as proxies for state formations, affective engagement, responses and the cards that can especially cue possibilities for alterity.
Week 2: From Cage to Stage
Friday Nov 29, 3:30 pm pst, Zoom
How do zoos endorse and naturalize an ethical captivity? How do we regard the idea of decent, dignified behavior due to animals and what is implicated by being denied and despised? What is the role of the displayed animal? How does the wild child “grow up sideways” while also epitomizing the colonial imagination? This week we will examine the white gaze of extinction, displayed by taxonomy established from zoos to museums to the circus. We will examine the Major Arcana that help us understand native land stolen and repurposed to establish the colonial garden of eden.
Week 3: The Legacy of Lion Tamers
Friday Dec 6, 3:30 pm pst, Zoom
If the human humanizes himself through the negation of his animality what doest the Strength arcana offer us? What does it mean to be wild? What does it mean to be tame? We will consider the history of the Strength arcana, as a mode of gendered, racial analysis from the iconographic history. By updating the philosophical underpinnings, along with the association of the feline with the trickster aspect of female sexuality through the tarot’s cat cards, we will connect this to the modern 'Proud Mary,’ Tina Turner, and similarly deploy a disidentificatory move in consciously forging a personal animal association and insisting on the radical hybridity of the self.
Week 4: The Grotesque Bestiary
Friday Dec 13, 3:30 pm pst, Zoom
What is happening in the depth of the forest? Where can the wild take you? How does the bestiary, that is not meant to be zoological, engage animality and what can it offer our readings? What ways can the Devil arcanum engage “monstrous intimacies?” What if some forms of desire stood outside of commodification? Continuing our hybrid explorations from last week, this week we are the attendants to the beasts within and without, and we will shapeshift. It’ll be an afternoon with a faun, serpent women, spider seers and deer ladies. From these stories we understand animals as observers, adversaries, guardians and protagonists with agency and their own perspectives.
Week 5: The Beast and the Sovereign (the Cockroach court & colonization)
Friday Dec 20, 3:30 pm pst, Zoom
Con Que Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? How can the animal extract us from the logic of the human? How can each rank of the court help us reconsider human-animal relationality? Which animal is the pillar of settler technology. Animal allegories are embedded within the major arcana, to which the Wheel of Fortune is a nexus. This week we deconstruct the court cards by looking to the series of lecture by Derrida which call attention the parallel between the monarch and the animal. By focusing on Indigenous relationalities we will disrupt the idea of taming the Wild West. The cards will help us become unbridled and wild.
Week 6: The Assembly of Birds & Siren Songs
Friday Dec 27, 3:30 pm pst, Zoom
What is a bird? What are the cards of extinction? When is innocence tempted? Let us take flight and engage in musical self-questioning, and with enough curiosity we may get free of ourselves. Our insistent hybridity continues in our attempts to reconcile disparate desires of domesticity and independence. The winged women guide us through this tension. Murmurations will meld into our thinking.
Week 7: Sea Country
Friday Jan 3, 3:30 pm pst, Zoom
How can fish provide a problem for colonial authority? Where do interspecies agreement emerge? How do we read like a beast? What does it mean to live alongside wildness? How can animals help us access nonordinary realms? How do we interpret the animal omen? As we wrap up we will dwell in the oceanic depths to contact the leviathan. We will sit at the seacoast and direct a multifocal gaze downwards into the dirt, into the waterways which connect all life forms. We will practice engaging in the speculative narration of animal subjectivities as co-creators of lifeworlds, coexisting in proximity, understanding that these lives are not fully visible or knowable. I leave you with suggestions for animal altars so as to restore the reverence, respect and spiritual communion with animals that was disrupted by the settler project which used these modes of relation as evidence of the savagery of Indigenous peoples. You will leave certain of non-human animals as knowledge-holders, council, independent actors, symbol and signified by the cards of the tarot.
Sources include: Colleen Glenney Bogs, Walter Mignolo, Irving Goh, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Erika Buenaflor, Laetitia Barber, Jack Halberstam, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Christina Sharpe, José Esteban Muñoz, and more!
Students Say:
“Each class was like a portal into 7 different worlds, full of stories, myths, tarot cards, unveilings, and rich connections. Christopher brings a lot of material to each class and offers a perspective that can’t be found elsewhere — on the cards, on history, on ancient symbology. Each class brought forth a surprising blend of animals, their related tarot cards, and important examinations of colonial frameworks that need a critical eye and a reframing as we carry on with our own tarot practice. It takes a little while to digest the richness of the material, but my perspective has expanded widely through this learning experience.
I’m a somewhat self-taught tarot reader, with exposure to several different teachers and writers over time, plus lots of practice. This was the first course I’ve taken that really peels back deeper layers to unearth greater historical context around the cards. I think I’ve wanted this more in-depth study for a while, but wasn’t sure where to find it. Interestingly, it was the idea of working with the animals and the concept of augury that brought me here, and now I’m eager for more. As Christopher says, “The tarot is an archive.” Their teachings really lead us into the Great Mysterious Library of the Tarot, and Christopher is the perfect guide through this layered archive that reaches across centuries and continents.”
“This class was wonderful. The dynamics between everyone were so sweet and open and creative, in great part because of the way you facilitate discussion. Focusing on the deck through animals and both their connection to colonialist history and freedom(s) and separation from it was such an opening. A new perspective to work with when giving a reading for myself or anyone else. So creative and unusual, as all your classes have been so far.
You consistently bring my into deeper consideration of the cards - and not only their images and archetypes or given meanings, but as portals into a new way of being with the world. Through your teaching, I’ve come to understand tarot as something much more than simply a deck of cards or even a daily divinatory practice, it’s just one small part of an entire ontological crossover and newfound trust in my connection to spirit.”
“this course made me feel so affirmed in my identification with creatures and nature and this relationship/ethic as a means of decolonization.
i began this journey when i was in middle school and learned about animal cruelty from the movie Food Inc. which did not relate the matter to the conditions of human beings and our environment. then in college I studied environmental science which linked my understanding of animal relationships to the environment (still excluding human beings and ignorant to intertwined and overlapping oppressions) and it wasn’t until the end of college where this was linked to my concept of humanity and oppression.
i wish where I am at now was my entry point and it makes sense that it was not but it has been very meaningful to experiencing this deepening and “3d-ification” over time. this course as my formal introduction to tarot and divination has given so much dimension to my understanding of ecological existence/being past, present, and future and i feel very excited to explore tarot and divination as a way of knowing and affirming life.
the time in class was definitely well spent! i enjoyed being in class so much and i wish it could go on indefinitely. the class environment centered relationality not just in emphasizing the interrelationship of humans and animals in the class material but also in the way that you hold space. you brought us into relationship with one another at the beginning of each class by drawing cards and checking-in and provided opportunities to form personal connections to the material throughout course by having us draw cards or drawing cultural connections through art, music, film. i find i learn and retain the most in spaces organized like this. i most enjoyed opportunities for active participation such as time taken to observe, analyze, and make meaning of the imagery of specific cards and the discussions that happened surrounding this or prompts for pulling cards. i found the information was well organized and made sense chronologically throughout each session and in its progression throughout the course. ”
Ready to Revamp Our Animal Relations?
Committing to this offering is to accept invitation to a field and frequency of devotion, right relations and revelation. Payments can be processed on automatic monthly basis once you sign up, or made in-full upfront for a discount.
Ready To Revamp Our Animal Relations? 7 week class in decolonizing the animal, attuning to their augurs Wild Cards - in-full upfront, discounted Tuition: $400 ($40 discounted for upfront investment). Payment Plans: Four payments of $110 (totaling $440 tuition)