Category: book review

Red Tarot by Christopher Marmolejo (North Atlantic Books, 2024)

On By benebellIn book review, cartomancy, divination, tarot, tarot community, tarot symbolism4 Comments

“When rationality runs dry, it’s Red that will reconcile this world, a hue vibrant and vital inside its brown.”

And so opens Chapter 1, Zero, of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy by Christopher Marmolejo. This is going to be a tarot book like no other. I can tell already. :: hearts for eyes ::

“To be born, this work broke open my heart, and so let this reading be opened by my blood offering, a requisite pound of flesh…”

Marmolego’s writing is going to draw out your feels, that’s for sure. Either you will be fully onboard this train or you will be left scratching your head. You’ll see what I mean. Let’s continue.

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.

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Should We Read the Works of Questionable Authors? On Julius Evola.

On By benebellIn book review, opinion49 Comments

By “questionable” I mean authors whose morality, political beliefs, sociopolitical affiliations, or credibility have been put under compelling scrutiny.

Perhaps more so than any other subject area of interest, when you navigate religious, spiritual, and occult spaces, you have to conscientiously assess and process where you stand on this point. While the issue of where you stand on condoning the reading or the publishing of works by questionable authors is ever present, it floated to the top of my thoughts recently with this announcement by the publishing house Inner Traditions:

Instagram: @inner_traditions

To explore this case study, I recommend clicking on the above IG posting and reading the comments, because I’m not going to re-post the nutty alt-right supporters who resorted to name-calling, homophobia, misogyny, and mocking people’s pronouns. There are also a few very long and thorough comments, too long to fit in a single screenshot, so I won’t be re-posting those either, though they’re worth a read.

Challenge of the announcement with all of the above aforementioned was predictable. What kind of took me by surprise was the strength and volume of voices who were saying, “This is totally fine. Hey liberals, stop being such babies.”

I have so many meandering and tangent thoughts.

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Home is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path by Rev. Liên Shutt

On By benebellIn book review1 Comment

Rev. Liên Shutt is a Sōtō Zen Buddhist priest, educator, and licensed social worker who was born into the Pure Land traditions in Vietnam, then did their meditation training in North American Zen and Insight (Vipassana) Buddhism.

A co-founder of Buddhists of Color and Access to Zen, Rev. Shutt facilitates the Engaged Four Noble Truths program, a restorative framework for meeting any given critical need, especially when applied to oppressive forces and systems. In 2020, that program was called upon to help meet critical needs emerging as a result of the pandemic, and after the murder of George Floyd, to help facilitate ways Buddhist practice can address racial justice.

“This book is for all who have been hurt and harmed by the system of white supremacy and other systemic wrongs,” writes Shutt, “and for those seeking restoration and healing.”

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Refuge in the Storm: Buddhist Voices in Crisis Care (ed. Nathan Jishin Michon)

On By benebellIn book review5 Comments

Refuge in the Storm is a collection of 24 essays by Buddhist chaplains, spiritual leaders, psychotherapists, medical providers, and scholars who share their perspectives on crisis counseling, be that personal or global crisis.

We begin with a poem by Mushim Ikeda, “Five Irises for Mary Oliver.” One line in particular might resonate with you:

We aren’t always reduced to our entangled thoughts, our anguish.

Praying with my friend this morning, he said Thank you, he asked Help– we bow down and rise up.

Crisis is a disruptive event or relationship. A disaster, per the definition published by the American Red Cross, is “an event of such destructive magnitude and force as to dislocate, injure, or kill people, separate family members, and damage or destroy homes.” Disasters produce a ripple effect– the numbers of people affected on a fundamentally spiritual level is far greater than the number of people killed or injured.

When faced with crisis or disaster, how do we lean in to Buddhist tenets to help us emerge from it?

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The Tarot & Astrology Handbook by Argus Kaldea of MoonPriest

On By benebellIn astrology, book review, cartomancy6 Comments

The Tarot & Astrology Handbook: The Quintessential Guide for Harnessing the Wisdom of the Stars to Better Interpret the Cards is a beautifully done reference guide to interpreting the tarot through the cards’ astrological correspondences. This is a handbook that unveils new depths of meaning in the cards by examining them through an astrological lens.

The author, Argus Kaldea, is an astrologer and tarot reader based out of Greece. You might have heard of him or seen his popular videos on TikTok as @MoonPriest.

Not only will you learn the astrological correlations connected to all 78 cards in the tarot, but also how to integrate these two tools– tarot and astrology– together. The tarot reader will learn astrology, and the astrologer will learn about the tarot.

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The Living Tarot by T. Susan Chang

On By benebellIn book review, tarot, tarot community, tarot exercises3 Comments

I’m a huge fan of T. Susan Chang’s work. I loved Tarot Correspondences, which I’ve reviewed before here, have and cherish my copy of Tarot Deciphered, co-authored with M. M. Meleen, creator of the Rosetta Tarot and Tabula Mundi Tarot, two of my all-time favorite decks, ever.

So I’m thrilled about the opportunity to review Chang’s latest book, The Living Tarot published by Llewellyn Books. Unlike her previous publications, The Living Tarot is written with the beginner in mind, and more pertinently, how the modern reader can find personal, everyday meanings to the 78 cards.

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My Thoughts on the FTC Disclosure Guidelines for Social Media Influencers (Specifically, Tarot Content Creators)

On By benebellIn book review, deck review, opinion, professional tarot, tarot, tarot community3 Comments
Random old photo to accompany the commentary. I’m holding the Tarot of the Holy Light by Christine Payne-Towler, which at some point long, long ago I received for free. Do I need to disclose that?

Psst… I have a “TL;DR Short Summary for the Not-Readers” that summarizes this otherwise very long blog post. So if you don’t have the time or you’re only a little bit interested and not that interested, then scroll all the way down to the end for the TL;DR Short Summary.

I’m reviving and sharing a blog post I drafted in 2019 that has sat in my WordPress saved file for the last 3+ years. It’s about FTC-issued disclosure guidelines (“Rules”) for social media influencers, and key takeaways to glean from the Rules if you’re creating content in the Mind, Body, Spirit spheres. I never got around to finishing and posting that 2019 draft, back when the FTC disclosure guidelines first gained traction, but I think now is a good time to reopen the discussion.

What’s of note to me is how the legal minds who are often the ones drafting these Rules seem to be people who have no personal experiences or insights into the communities they’re drafting the guidelines for. Even when they employ subject matter experts, those SMEs tend to be biased, or come from a very particularized segment of the community, and therefore do not fairly represent all interested parties.

There’s consumer protection, which nobody’s against. But then there’s untenable rules of compliance that aren’t clear enough for practical application by the people the rules are demanding compliance from.

By the way, none of this is my legal opinion, and do not rely on it as such. All of this is personal commentary in reaction to the FTC disclosure guidelines as someone who considers herself a deck reviewer but who could potentially be categorized as an “influencer.”

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Complete Book of North American Folk Magic, edited by Cory Thomas Hutcheson

On By benebellIn book review, Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Taoism, traditional witchcraft1 Comment

Cory Thomas Hutcheson, author of New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic (2021), has brought together an incredible assembly of folk practitioners from across North America– Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

You will get an own voices insider perspective of Appalachian mountain magic, brujeria, curanderismo, Detroit hoodoo, Florida swamp magic, French Canadian sorcellerie, Irish American folk magic, Italian American magic, Melungeon folk magic, New England cunning craft, New Orleans voodoo, Ozark folk magic, Pennsylvania powwow and braucherei, Slavic American folk magic, Southern conjure, and more.

North America stretches five thousand miles across, nestled in between two great oceans, and within that space, frozen tundra, glaciers, pine forests, deciduous rainforests, blooming deserts, prairies, and towering groves of redwood.

This is the homeland of hundreds of Indigenous nations for millennia, a land ravaged with invasions and displacements, of dark legacies but also a hope for and collective effort to forge a brighter future.

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Vintage Tarot Texts (Gebelin and the comte de Mellet), trans. by David Vine

On By benebellIn book review, tarot, tarot community6 Comments

David Vine is one of those rare treasures in the tarot community. Combining his academic training, knowledge of the classical languages, medieval literature, and art history with a passion for the tarot, Vine has translated several seminal French-language tarot texts, and Vintage Tarot Texts, Volume 1, is one such treat.

Just a random comment– A beautiful touch in this edition are the captioned historical illustrations throughout, such as this print of an array of ancient sistra and rattles. I so appreciate the added illustrations.

Volume I consists of seminal essays on the tarot by Court de Gebelin and comte de Mellet. The first text to address tarot at length in a symbological context was by comte de Mellet, and thus in one sense, his work is the foundational document for everything we have come to understand about the esoteric tradition of the cards.

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Oracle of Initiation: Rainbows in the Dark by Mellissae Lucia

On By benebellIn book review, cartomancy, deck review, oracle deck5 Comments

Mellissae Lucia’s Oracle of Initiation was first released a decade ago in 2012, but it’s new to me, and I am utterly in awe of the breadth and scope of this divination system. This is a review of the deck, but also its 400-page companion book by the same name.

The Oracle of Initiation is the narrative story of one woman’s descent into the underworld and return. It is a mesmerizing photographic memoir of loss, initial resistance with numbness, realizing you need to surrender, and reawakening your inner magic.

At the age of 33, Lucia lost her husband to cancer. She entered limbo. But then she chose to live, to thrive, and supported by spirit guides along the way, went on a 7-year vision quest. These images chronicle her Artemis Return, a concept coined by Lucia.

Artemis

Artemis is the Greek goddess of the hunt, the wild instinctive wisdom of the feminine within nature. She is a guardian of the untamed within all of us, the primal aspects of our original essence.

Working with Hecate

Like a Saturn Return, an Artemis Return is a cyclical return after a pivotal event in your life, in which you cross a threshold of catharsis, maturation, and awakening, and re-align with that wild instinctive wisdom within.

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