Radical Tarot

Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice, and Create the Future

By: Charlie Claire Burgess

Narrated by: Charlie Claire Burgess

Radical Tarot meets the tarot in a space of evolution, deconstruction, and creation, using the historical and common meanings of the cards as a launchpad for digging into limiting beliefs and societal conditioning and unlocking the personal truths beneath. The Fool's Journey is re-envisioned as a journey to non-binary thinking, the gender essentialism is ousted from the Major Arcana and the Court Cards-and all the cards-are reframed through a non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist, and intersectional lens. The archetypes are re-imagined in modern, progressive, and queered contexts. For example: - The Empress and the body positivity movement - Justice, not in the legal sense, but as ethical discernment and accountability - Temperance and transcending the gender binary - The Devil and anti-capitalism - Judgement and revolution Radical Tarot also touches on Charlie's personal story of how tarot helped them embrace their queerness, leave their marriage, and radically change their life. It speaks to their queer awakening and how tarot became, for them, a tool for social justice and conscious awareness of the world around them. Their words and experience will help anyone who wishes to be closer to their own authentic selves.This audio product contains a PDF with supporting material, and the PDF is available to download.

Critic reviews

“This book is a vital jumping-off point for conversation, contemplation, and change-making of your own design . . . Queer or not, you will begin to understand why this modern twist on tarot serves each of us and, more importantly, the world . . . You will be transformed.”— Cassandra Snow, author of Queering the Tarot

Transformative

Beautiful, inviting and transformative. The author has a deep understanding of Tarot and has cleared away my fears and misunderstandings. If you want to grow or begin your practice, this is the place to start.

A Must-Hear, Must-Read Tarot Exploration

Indispensable for the future and now of tarot, this book and the reading of it by the author has become my favorite book of the year.

Excellent- a must read for a new generation of tarot readers

A new kind of tarot book - open your mind to new ideas about how to conceptualize and read tarot ! Highly recommend!

Eternally grateful.

This book (and the fifth spirit deck) is such a beautiful and necessary addition to my tarot practice. Thank you for the wisdom, the expansiveness, and the intentionality that went into writing it with reverence to the greats (in my opinion) that came before.

Too Narrow Minded

I am someone who works with tarot cards and has a high level of interest in queer theory so initially I was excited about a book aimed at queering the tarot. Unfortunately I found myself angry with the author by the end of the first chapter and stopped listening. There is a lot of buzzwordy social justice theory jargin thrown around in shallow ways. The author does the frusterating thing of throwing around the word intersectionality to signal they “get it” but then uses the concept incorrectly consistently to the point where it seems to be only about saying the word rather than communicating anything with an intersectional analysis (Intersectionality speaks to how the experience and operations of oppression changes and works differently at the intersection of oppressed identities. The author uses it just to talk about overlapping identity’s in vague and performative ways usually with no relationship to deconstructing and examining how oppression is working).

More than the unthoughtful use of activist language how the author centers free will over deterministic views and misunderstands both platonic forms and Jungian archetypes makes me so angry. Adding to these ideas would be one thing but misrepresenting/misunderstanding them to then present your own take is so frustrating. They keep saying “The tarot is all made up”. Its a problem if you are someone who see the tarot as tapping into deeper archetypes. I don’t really see it as coming into existence out of nothing we don’t exist in a vacuum and social construction is not the same as “completely made up”.

There’s a push in the intro to give pseudoscientific rationales for how the tarot works. Thats also annoying and is a part of how colonizer logics get baked into ideas about the sciences and spirituality that the author clearly does not have an understanding of.

Ultimately its mostly the black and white views of deterministic lenses versus free will that makes me most angry. The author seems unaware of how frames of choice can be used in harmful ways and that deterministic lens versus lens of free will do not automatically map to the views or values the author insists to be the case. There is a sequence in the first chapter that frames deterministic lens as attached to black and white logic of oppressors and uncritically posits free will as being more related to agency or open ended thinking. This is quite ahistorical to a history of colonization and its relationship to spirituality and filled with frankly unnuanced conclusions. The reductionist ideas about determinism or fate is steeped in concepts the author has clearly yet to unpack or become more knowledgable about. The way the author tries to map this onto power is lacking insight and depth about both Tarot and power.