Working for Liberation, Reading Tarot
A black person with light skin and shoulder length curly hair wearing a backpack and holding a map in front of a distorted cloud background.
I always thought Hamilton: An American Musical was a corny and fucked up idea.
Patriotism is bad enough, but Black and Latino patriotism? Disgusting. I have nothing kind to say about "the American dream" or "the American Experiment."
And yet, I live in the wreckage of both.
I was living in New York City as Hamilton grew in popularity. My partner at the time is a theater maker. He entered the Broadway lottery every day for a year and a half so we could score ten buck tickets.
It wasn't out of reverance for the material. He simply wanted to know how the sausage was made.
No one can say the soundtrack wasn't an earworm. The songs were well written and capably performed.
That's the problem with nationalist entertainment. It remixes and appropriates the talent of the oppressed in support of their own oppression. In what world does making Thomas Jefferson, a slaver and rapist, Black make sense?
Hamilton: An American Musical had only one real goal: to celebrate the archetypes of American power. It exists to further entrench America's narratives about itself.
Tarot readers tend not to think of tarot this way. Like Hamilton, the deck sometimes hides it's hand.
Yet when we look at the history of tarot, and The Fool's journey itself, we can find similarities. Without looking at those similarities, it becomes harder to subvert them.
Tarot wasn't born a tool for activists and subalterns. The oldest surviving deck was commissioned by the Duke of Milan in 1466 as the era of colonization began. It traffics in the symbols of imperial, colonial, and capitalist oppression.
Modern decks tend to find palatable alternatives to traditional archetypes. Some do this to create a more comfortable reading experience for marginalized readers.
But what comfort is created by ignoring the oppressive context in which tarot developed?
You can't read tarot for the purpose of liberation without addressing tarot's relationship to power. You can't read tarot for the purpose of liberation while choosing to ignore tarot's fucked up origins.
Tarot is a historical document, and should be treated like other documents for which this is true. It's a living tradition, but that doesn't mean it's endlessly malleable.
Its original context lives on in the politics of the present day. Ignoring how imperialism and Christian supremacy live on in the world and the cards isn't liberation, but liberalism.
I'm a poet, and craft is a cottage industry. A couple years ago, Ocean Vuong said:
“I believe similes reside under the umbrella of metaphor…however, I think something happens in the act of reading wherein we collapse the “bridge”, and the mind automatically forges the synergy between two images, so that all similes, once read, “act” like metaphors in the mind.”
People were angry at the time, but it's true. We collapse the bridge in our minds. It's where poetry begins.
An archetype is a metaphor.
The Emperor is a metaphor for all unearned power. The Empress is a metaphor for the power to create abundance.
Like all metaphors, tarot's archetypes do two things at once. They make a connection. Then, through that connection, they shift the meanings of both signified and signifier.
The Emperor morphs to imply any masculinity could hold ultimate state power. I call bullshit.
These cards may draw The Lovers as a gay couple. Yet the biblical imagery that marginalizes same gender loving communities remains.
In seeing each other this way, we extract the teeth from the original archetype. Would we actually find ourselves among the lords and ladies of the Italian monarchy for whom the cards were made?
Or would we then, like now, be their subjects, their servants, and their targets?
This is, to me, where a liberation reading of tarot begins. It starts by being honest about the cards, where they come from, and their aims.
The solution isn't to erase the archetypes as they exist, but to reckon with them. Isn't that what marginalized people have to do every day? Why would tarot be different?
No, tarot is not inherently a tool for liberation. It can, however, lend itself to liberatory readings. The keyword here for me is "lend." There's no eliminating hierarchy or imperialism in the deck.
But we can't reach those liberation readings by pretending tarot is what it is not.
To my mind, reading tarot for liberation is a layer, a lens. It doesn't erase other readings. There are situational and personal readings of tarot that don't rely on the history of the archetypes themselves.
Yet when we discuss what the archetypes *are* on a fundamental level, should that not start with what they literally depict? Why is that layer of meaning so often glossed over?
The age of imperialism isn't over, as we can see from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, and Sudan. The Emperor is still a relevant archetype, from Trump to King Charles and beyond.
Now isn't the time to rely on secondary meanings alone. Those who believe in justice should be able to take on the archetypes of power without pretending they never existed.
There are many ways to modernize and lessen the harm of tarot's original archetypes. All of them start with an honest assessment of tarot as a tool and the origins of the archetypes.
There are also many divinatory modalities that aren't tarot.
There's no reason to presume tarot is the best method of divination. There's no reason to assume that tarot lends itself to liberation-minded readings.
What tarot has on other forms of divination is that we already know the archetypes. We live with them every day.
The freedom and beauty of The Star or The World is as present as the work of capitalism as expressed by The Devil.
To ask for one is to receive both, whether you call it The Emperor, or Structure, or The System. You can't scrub clean the context in which a tool was created. Its origins always matter.
We know these archetypes, and navigate them. My goal is to use tarot as a roadmap. I allow tarot to assist me as I navigate life under oppressive systems.
Since it is a catalog of the system, it works well for these purposes. It reveals the cracks in the firmament. It shows the tears in the blueprint tarot presents.
When I look at tarot from this angle, I find places to steer clear of, people to take with me, and moments of flashing purpose.
If I thought tarot had no purpose in the struggle for collective liberation, I would commit myself to another pursuit. My curiosity is around how that begins, and what it requires.
I believe every tool can be a weapon if you hold it the right way. Even something like Hamilton is a reminder of what not to do.
I simply think there are better ways to use tarot as a tool than covering up imperialist archetypes with our own faces.
That's not to insist that there aren't layers of meaning a little lower between a Hierophant and a grandmother, or The Emperor and a Daddy.
What I ask is that we acknowledge levels of power even as we grok layers of meaning.
Further Thoughts
The Two Eves: The Lovers & The Devil
Surviving Capitalism with the Ace of Pentacles
hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.