I'm so excited to share this lovely conversation with writer, educator and diviner Christopher Marmolejo.
Join us in our exploration of the mysteries of the art of teaching– we discuss the martial power of literacy and Christopher's journey from the academy to the diviner's table.
Note: I apologize for the poor audio quality– I had an issue with my primary recording interface and had to rely on backup recordings.
Christopher Marmolejo, M.A., is a brown, queer and trans writer, diviner and educator. They use divination to promote a literacy of liberation. They were born and raised in San Bernardino among the pines, in community with the Yuhaaviatam clan of the Maara’yam (Serrano). With 9+ years of experience as trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility they work with students round the world to plant and nurture the seed of a divinatory practice, finely weaving tarot, astrology, curanderismo with critical, decolonial black queer feminist epistemology. They are available for readings and enrolling students in ongoing divination classes at www.theredread.com Follow them on Substack, substack.com/@theredread for more writing.
Christopher's Links:
Transcript
00:00
Jove Spucchi
Welcome to episode three of Occulted. I'm your host, Jove Spucchi, and today I share with you a conversation with queer, writer, diviner and educator Christopher Marmalejo. Christopher shares with us their journey from teaching 7th grade English to launching their own courses on tarot, astrology and more. Together, we discuss the magic of teaching and the radical act of claiming knowledge on your own terms through divination. Christopher Marmalejo Ma is a brown queer and trans writer, diviner, and educator. They use divination to promote a literacy of liberation. They were born and raised in San Bernardino, among the pines in community with the Serrano. With nine plus years of experience as a trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility, they work with students round the world to plant and nurture the seed of divinatory practice. Finally, weaving tarot astrology curanderismo with critical decolonial. Black, queer, feminist epistemology join us in our exploration of the mysteries of the art of teaching.
01:16
Jove Spucchi
We discuss the martial power of literacy and Christopher's journey from the academy to the diviner's table. Hi, Christopher, thank you for joining today. I'm really excited to talk to you about your work as a teacher, writer, and diviner and dig into some of the classes you're teaching on tarot, astrology and beyond. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
01:46
Christopher Marmolejo
Thank you. Hello. Thank you for having me. It is an honor. Yeah. I'm Christopher. I am a transqueer diviner, indigiqueer. All the terms are always shifting and whatnot, but a writer, reader, diviner, teacher. I am in San Diego, California currently. I grew up on and off. I mean, it's Serrano land, but formally recognized tribal territory, san Bernardino County. Yeah, I teach tarot, I offer readings. I'm just expanded my offerings, which I'm excited to maybe talk a little bit more about in a bit. But, yeah, that's me.
02:22
Jove Spucchi
I'm so glad were able to connect a few weeks ago when we got to work together on the inaugural witch aid stream, the mutual aid project I just launched with Michelle Embry. It was so wonderful to have you be a part of that. And I know I speak for everyone who attended when I say that the energy and readings you shared with us really set the vibe we wanted for that event. Despite some Mercury retrograde technology issues, were able to come together to raise money and support for a fellow practitioner and artist who was injured while on tour. With the donation of tarot readings and astrology knowledge, our diviners gave spiritual insight and support to the audience who generously donated back to the fund. Christopher, thank you again for all the wisdom you shared with us and for keeping the energy going.
03:01
Christopher Marmolejo
It was so great. You were a great sort of moderator and also holding it down. Do you know what I mean? You were our go to person, right? Like off stage and whatnot? And then on stage, there was a little bit of like, okay, where did our MC go? And so thank you for that. But it was also nice. I definitely felt affirmed and comfortable with navigating some mercury malfunctions that date to ultimately have a really great time, and I thought it ended up beautiful. And I love the readings I gave, and I was just very glad to contribute in any way because you are awesome. Michelle is awesome. She's one of my teachers. And so, yeah, that was a really great experience. I'm glad we connected because we have so much sinastry wise in common. And I was like, hey, after listening.
03:43
Jove Spucchi
To the Tarot readings you gave on the stream, especially the way that you pulled in astrology in the Decans, I had to sign up for a reading myself. We were able to do that a couple of weeks later. And I really appreciated the approach that you took to integrate different systems of archetypes and symbols and imagery, to weave a really detailed and multifaceted take on the natal chart, especially with the narrative use of the Decans.
04:08
Christopher Marmolejo
I love the decans. Thank you so much. Yeah.
04:10
Jove Spucchi
A question I like to ask everyone who comes on the show is what does the concept of being occulted mean to you? Is it something you relate with?
04:17
Christopher Marmolejo
Definitely, immediately what comes to mind is the dark houses, like the 8th, 12th and fourth house, like, probably in that order. Also planets that are averse to each other. My Mars ruling, my Scorpio stellium is to that time of stellium in the 8th house. I think about secreted things, of course. I think about obscurity. I think of how those dark houses being veiled, being in the shadows, being in night, being in death, requires the development of a capacity for psychic communication and faculty people have prominent placements in those dark houses, like twelfth housers. There's more seeing that's available. When you let go of the predisposition to using your literal site, to using your literal visual site, it's like being blind and being tough. From Avatar, where the occulted is like, you're seeing the web, I feel, and like, the web is occulted webs.
05:09
Jove Spucchi
I like the way that image makes you think about what is often hidden and the connections and forces between things rather than just the light of the things.
05:18
Christopher Marmolejo
Right.
05:19
Jove Spucchi
Is occultedness something you identify with in your own practice?
05:22
Christopher Marmolejo
I would I wouldn't necessarily say that it's like maybe the first descriptor I would go to, but it's definitely not one that I'm averse to or anything like that. I've always been drawn to just the astrology section, the Spooky section, all of these esoteric matter. I think I go maybe more esoteric, but that definitely has its own learnedness gatekeeping. There's a steady quality to that word. And the occult, it feels interesting. I think that it feels more rural in some sense. Like, I just get a different topography with that word, that sense of that word.
05:54
Jove Spucchi
Definitely a little more nebulous. What made you jump from perusing the Spooky section to starting a personal practice?
06:00
Christopher Marmolejo
I always knew I was a scorpio. I don't know what I just knew, like, I just was born knowing. I would say I had an interest in astrology from a very young age. And Tarot and Tarot kept getting put sort of into my hands. I got a deck as a kid, like maybe eleven, and had no idea what it was at all, like any of the cultural significations. It was like a game, quote unquote, but I knew it was something more. The cultural fear, the Catholic cultural fear of it being something evil, something demonic, something Satanic made it occulted. And I kind of put it away. I never got rid of the deck. I just put the deck in my closet and I still have that deck, actually. It's like a little mini right away deck. And then a friend gifted me a deck. Venus was in Leo in 2015th, in July, and I went to Hawaii and did like, work stay, a work exchange.
06:45
Christopher Marmolejo
I was woofing or whatnot, basically, and got a reading there and it was like totally magical. It was amazing. It was so synchronistic and just such a gift. Like it was from an elder, someone who has lived with the cards. It was very spontaneous, so it just kept finding its way to me. It wanted to be in my hand and then I went all the way in. Now I teach Tarot and I give consultations.
07:07
Jove Spucchi
Well, it sounds like the cards really sought you out. Did you know after getting that first reading that you wanted to read for others?
07:13
Christopher Marmolejo
You know, I have both of my benefics in the Jawbone, which is Scorpio one, and that I'm a Taurus rising Taurus. Scorpio is so about hunger and so I didn't know that I wanted to give like, I didn't think about it in a business sense ever like that. But I was so intrigued the rest of the trip from there I was just like, oh, you have cards too. Like, oh, how does this work? Let's get more into this fully. And even when I actually actively started learning, it was very organic. I had the little white book and a guidebook, but I also had a deck that was not rider. Wait. Yeah. And now I'm like in the deep bowels of it all. I think at a certain point, something I was so naturally passionate about and helped to make sense of. A lot of darkness that was surrounding me, a lot of loss of control, a lot of disorientation, a lot of pivoting that then I started seeing other people actually actively making this a livelihood, a means of livelihood, and I took it more seriously.
08:11
Christopher Marmolejo
And yeah, my work is the Red Reed, and so it's under a larger project of literacy as a whole in your own development.
08:17
Jove Spucchi
Of spiritual literacy. Did astrology come with the Tarot?
08:20
Christopher Marmolejo
It was a little like I started with Tarot and then I was getting and then of course, there's linkages to the astrology of it all. And I was like, man, am I going to have to learn this? I don't know. I put on the astrology podcast. Chris is amazing, but he's very dry and monotone. I don't know what I was expecting star wars type of thing initially. And I was like, hey, this is another deep study. Am I really going to do this? And then, of course, yes. And then I started formal study and learned that pretty fast as well, though it's an ongoing study. But just like that jawbone nature of me, it's like once I lock my jaw onto something, I'm like biting all the way down.
08:53
Jove Spucchi
I'm sure, too, that having a basis in Tarot, it was easier to learn astrology as another archetypal and symbolic system. Did you find that having that made it faster?
09:03
Christopher Marmolejo
Yeah, that's a great point. It's why I still sort of lead with Tarot. Less a Tarot reader diviner than an astrologer is because of the power of the image and the media itself of the Tarot, like the actual media and medium of the Tarot. My background in undergrad is in communications. Bell Hooks is like my almighty teacher. She is a cultural critic. So the Tarot was a natural crown jewel to my sort of larger visual cultural analysis of just like moving and seeing through the world. Like, I'm so imagistic. I just love media in movies and the harmonics of it all, the way that each card is so compact. It's profound.
09:44
Jove Spucchi
Absolutely.
09:44
Jove Spucchi
It really shows up in the way that you read, too, in the sense that you mentioned Chris Brennan, who has so much technical knowledge and very much take that approach. But there is a more sort of mythic take on astrology, story based, image based that one can take. And I really felt like you approach it that way.
09:59
Christopher Marmolejo
Absolutely. The image is a know. The image helps to make things accessible. We love Chris Brennan. We love the high knowledge and all the work that he's contributed and done. That's why I love teaching, because it's almost like the under the hood type of a know with students and whatnot we can get into the sort of matrix code of how these things are organized. But then the people I work with need this to be translatable. The image is what hooks everyone. Everyone has an entryway in that way. And I mean, my background is English teacher. And with people who don't know how to read and write, you show them the image first. The image is the catalyst towards language.
10:36
Jove Spucchi
And whatnot thinking about the literacy aspect of magical thinking and imagistic thinking as its own form of symbolic language. And that really comes across, too, in the way that you break down the Tarot and astrology in particular in those interactions in Witch Aid, how you were able to really break down the narrative of each individual card, but also how they fit in relationally to one another. To folks who, based on some of the questions, I think maybe didn't have a huge background in Tarot or super deep knowledge. It's one thing to give a reading, it's another thing to be able to teach those skills and teach that way of thinking throughout the read. Is that more of an intentional pedagogical approach or more of an intuitive practice for you?
11:14
Christopher Marmolejo
I think absolutely. It's a developed pedagogical approach. Like there's a commitment there that is towards the development of voice. There are many types of diviners and prophets and priestesses and witches, of course. And so for me, in my own signatures, a big part of it is in the musicality, like the Oracle is an aria. The reading is a delivery of voice. And I'm trying to be virtuoso, I'm trying to be Mariah. You record him and it's like, wow, you did it. There's so much of the deliberation of the voice, like throat piece of it all. Like you have to model, but you also to live in it. But absolutely get students to find their own way. And that was just my own experience with different readers and different teachers like Michelle or whatnot. The way that she says and reads the image, we could both be saying the exact same script and whatnot, but her vocal texture and her lived experience translates.
12:05
Christopher Marmolejo
It just unlock it's like the AHA comes, the epiphany comes.
12:10
Jove Spucchi
It's not just delivering knowledge, but there's a wisdom behind it as well. And I've benefited so much from having Michelle as a mentor and teacher. And when I think about the other teachers in my life that really are able to inhabit the spirit of pedagogy and teaching, Demetra George comes up for me as well. And just thinking about the way she's able to explain things but also hold students in this sense of presence while she's speaking and engaging with them, looking people in the eye and delivering things with a specific cadence in a way that really sinks in. It forces you to confront how the knowledge sits.
12:43
Christopher Marmolejo
The Goat Demetra.
12:45
Jove Spucchi
I feel like there's a different kind of knowledge that's embedded in that kind of teaching as well that does feel more narrative and imagistic in the sense that there's an intuitive sense of what these things mean and something very spiritual that's happening in the way that things are explained. Thinking about how the information is packaged and how it'll be received, what I think is fairly radical form of empathy and interacting with audience. Do you see teaching as similar to performance?
13:11
Christopher Marmolejo
Oh, yeah. Wow. The question and consideration of audience is so apt to bring in and then yeah, absolutely. Connecting that to teaching. I loved teaching because it was like getting on stage. There's a performance of the teaching. When I say that, I also view it as like the symphony conductor of sorts. The learning experience, the learning environment where students are asking questions, where you're challenging, you're posing questions to students, you're having them learn to respond to each other. That all I developed from my background is like a formal English educator and substitute teacher and all the ways I've been in classrooms. It's a bit different with Tarot reading because I think part of it is the storyteller is so compelling. Everyone's like Demetrius talking, you just want to hang on every word. And so there's that balance because there is the Leonine aspect of we all deserve our spot on the stage.
13:58
Christopher Marmolejo
There is something that can only be expressed in the performance, but we all need democratic distribution of that stage space and that consideration of how we're looking, by what lens, like what deck, towards whom, what are we seeing, what are we emphasizing? All these metacognition questions.
14:13
Jove Spucchi
There's a devotional aspect to the material and I think that really comes up with Demetra. And another one of my teachers, Larry Arrington, who I know has studied with Demetra, looking at material as something to be in relationship with, honoring through the way that you consume it, speak about it, live it, relate it, embody it. And that embodiment of the material, I feel like is what really helps me learn when I'm trying to imbibe these more esoteric or occulted concepts, being able to see the other, acting them out and embodying them in this in spirited way I'm able to relate with them more deeply and have this example of how I might be able to do that.
14:48
Christopher Marmolejo
Right, absolutely. And what you're saying, I think, yeah, we write from within our flesh, we theorize from the flesh. Or at least I do, like in my tradition and whatnot that's the work that I've been drawn to.
14:59
Jove Spucchi
I'd love to hear a little bit more about your more formal education and teaching and what that journey was like.
15:05
Christopher Marmolejo
School has been such a major project for me, honestly. I went to Cal State San Bernadino, like I said, and majored in communications and public relations because they didn't have a journalism degree and so they had that. And so I wanted to be an investigative journalist with my Mercury in Scorpio ruling the bounds of my mid heaven. And then I saw the trajectory of news, the mechanism of response and reception and all of these things. And then I started reading about Hooks and expanded my perception of what is seen and what isn't seen.
15:38
Jove Spucchi
So was there a journey from the journalistic into more of the literary?
15:42
Christopher Marmolejo
It was the same intention but just needing a different approach because actively going into traditional media, I could not see a viable route for that. I just had like a muckraker romantic thing in my mind and that was just not the case. And so the authors that I love. I wanted to go to UC Santa Cruz, and I kind of had that school on a pedestal. And I went there and I got my master's and wanted to exist in the same legacy as bell hooks and Glorian. Zeldua and Angela Davis and Dew and yet was disappointed with that program because there was a conflict, a contradiction between the promotion of black and Third World feminist intellectual labor and yet distributing that to still only predominantly white. Students who weren't doing the assigned readings, who didn't have the lived experience, who were wanting to go into the hood and work with all these students.
16:28
Christopher Marmolejo
And yet we're harming them because again, studies show that getting work training on diversity issues does not actually last. These teachers will revert to their inherent biases after those don't actively last. And so we need homegrown educators, we need people from the communities that they are serving to be the ones that are teaching. And so I was disappointed with the program. I'm very critical, very invested. I still think I got a great education, but I was definitely angered and disillusioned of higher education as a whole. And like, no one's doing the reading. We're reading these things. These are not just lip service. We need different bodies in different spaces. Who are you disseminating this knowledge to? And who is it really for then? What is being occulted know? And I think of Paolo. Pierre, of course. Who is the high priestess? He taught people to see the veiled systems of power.
17:15
Christopher Marmolejo
He opened their eyes to what was concealed and gave language to that. And I think that's that work of the High Priestess is to unveil.
17:23
Jove Spucchi
Right? Even with the unveiling of these systems of power, is there ever really an incentive for the institution to change these structures? Their authority and validity is largely based upon these ideas of superiority, right? Namely as arbiters of which truths get to be more true than others. How does one even begin to dismantle those structures and systems while participating within them?
17:47
Christopher Marmolejo
Yes, I mean, it's just complicated journey because they are gatekeepers of power and they do provide access. It is like having a passport, do you know what I mean? It is like your diploma does get you certain access to certain types of knowledge and roles, even for however limited amount of time that I do think is still valuable. And after getting my Master's and my teaching credential, I taught some of the 8th grade for a year in Santa Cruz and my 8th graders just graduated high school and are now headed off to college. And so I feel so old just watching them. And then I couldn't get hired. I couldn't get hired. After succeeding and getting all the degrees and seeing the impact because of an outspokenness, because of a commitment to critique, I think that perhaps I would have been more compromising or just trying to work within the system and we all work within Russian doll systems of oppression at the same time.
18:40
Christopher Marmolejo
It was such a no in my gut. There was just a lot of inertia, and then the intuitive was opening up, and then I was delving into Tarot and astrology at the same time. And it was like, okay, let me orient and learn cosmic cycle and language because, yes, these systems are crumbling, but then what replaces them? Or where do you turn to after?
19:00
Jove Spucchi
Right? How do we take these more cosmic and archetypal truths within these systems forward with us as these structures start to crumble? I imagine it was really difficult to have belief and hope in these systems only to be pretty let down by them, it sounds.
19:16
Christopher Marmolejo
Yeah, that's a deep grief.
19:19
Jove Spucchi
In your transition from more formal education and pedagogy toward more spiritual teaching, did you find yourself moving away from your formal background or more carrying it forward with the new courses and methodology that you've created?
19:33
Christopher Marmolejo
I definitely feel that I carry on the legacies of my teachers, like, in terms of Pierre and bell hooks and Cindy Cruz. I teach as I was taught to a degree in that sense of the pedagogic model that especially UC Santa Cruz offered, but also my intuitive experience of my own experiences in education where I come from. Give me, again, a different flesh value to how I approach it. I think just the politicization, like, teaching critical race theory, then all the backlash against CRT. So we knew how that direction was going. So it's the powers that be, you know what I mean? The neoliberalism and the forces that are, like, co opting the democratic institution of education. Whereas within my classroom, I knew it worked because of my experience and because of just like, it's my own little microcosm of the universe where we could just have a reprieve from the rest of the horses for that space and time.
20:22
Christopher Marmolejo
And so, thankfully, liberal arts education provides you with transferable skills. Learning to read and write and make presentations. Those are transferable. It's still the work, but I am feeling a bit more like at a different stage than what I was then. But the cards were helping me make sense of all of these visceral things. Like, they were more than just like a psychological self reflexive activity, though. They're immense in that way, but they were also corresponding to outer events. That was just it just feels so profound. It refills you where you were devastated by the broken promises of the institution. You lean into paradox, you lean into the mystery. You go back to the forest, back.
20:59
Jove Spucchi
To the forest, back to the liminality that can hold those paradoxes of mystery and multiple truths. It struck me as well that as an educator, you also exist in this lineage that holds a lot of similarities with how mystery traditions work. Embodied knowledge being handed down from teacher to student in ways that can't really happen, just reading a text, but something more in spirited, something sacred, something occulted, even while the structure of the institution on the whole sounds like it was pretty disappointing. Sounds like there was a lot of very beautiful magic happening within these mentor mentee relationships and the sort of meta analysis of the true art that is teaching.
21:38
Christopher Marmolejo
Absolutely. Anna julia Cooper just comes to mind. I love teaching like it is a vocation, is a calling, you know what mean? Like there is something there. Just studying the history of education, the small rooms that they would gather in or not or like the limited materials they would have, that's part of the tradition. There's a disappointment. But at the same time, at a much deeper level, there's no confusion. It's already been the case. It's been worse. It's been all these things. And I miss having a physical classroom with physical bodies. There there's different workshops I do in person and whatnot I'm still looking for that is an intention. But being able to teach online and have students from all over the world have predominantly women, do you know what I mean? Have literally all over the world. That kind of blows me away in the application of how these cards can catalyze their own authority of authorship and learning.
22:33
Christopher Marmolejo
Again, it's like if you know how to read and write, that's what I love about my degrees and my education is it's like I can teach myself. With the whole student teacher dynamic that you were mentioning, it's important not to make your teacher the pope, you know what I mean, who is infallible and is just like and whatnot it's important to critique your teachers and it's important to respond to your teachers. It's important to, yes, carry on their traditions, but also to teach yourself to a lot of these things. A lot of my path has been about self initiation, and I think that's what it is to read and write. It's like, I don't need someone to tell me what this says. I will read it for myself and I will determine what it means and how it applies to my life and my being.
23:14
Jove Spucchi
And that's what feels so lost in today's academy, this self determination, the space to really question and critique.
23:21
Christopher Marmolejo
Absolutely. There is a lot to that, I think, as a teacher especially, too, rather, there's a tempering when your charge is to teach all of these students. Do you know what I mean? Like, there is an equalizing force that confronts inherent biases in whatever way or that forces a confrontation of the structure of power as it's being reproduced within the students, within the classroom, and with the teacher too. And so I think there requires a level of transparency that is all acknowledged, you know what I mean? Again, we're all seeing the power that we're forced to interact with and not acting like it's not there, but also yeah, there's a lot of considerations to that.
24:00
Jove Spucchi
I so appreciate that focus on transparency and self awareness of the power that teachers hold and responding to that with an intentionality to leave space for questions and true confrontation of the material. If you hold that position of power, you have a responsibility to take for critique, to be open to feedback, to allow for questioning engagement in actual Socratic interaction.
24:19
Christopher Marmolejo
Right? Knowledge is co created. Knowledge is not facts. Knowledge is shared meaning and interpretation. Knowledge is an act of communication by which we are both seeing. It's like we're reading the Omen together, do you know what I mean? And we're like getting the transmission together. And that takes a collaborative effort always. There is no knowledge alone. I think that's a part of the reader reading querent reader writer relationship. The reader has a responsibility to understand the writer. Like there's a labor for understanding and to labor for these things. Yeah, education was promoted. It was like my ticket. And I was like, I'm just going to go into this. And then the way that books especially, which is a favored media of mine I love technology and whatnot all the new things that are always coming out. But there is a gravitas to books. There's an endurance, there's a longevity to books.
25:08
Jove Spucchi
There's an undeniable magic for books.
25:10
Christopher Marmolejo
There's a magic to books. Absolutely. And so you start reading authors and they exist across lifetimes and are in conversation against time. So even if you're isolated, like physically, you can be in conversation with teachers through their recorded teachings.
25:28
Jove Spucchi
Right. In a culture that seems so wholly committed to brevity, the book becomes this treat of breadth and depth, of conceptual expansiveness in a purposefully, slower kind of temporality. Nothing really beats a book for me.
25:40
Christopher Marmolejo
Same. Yeah, I love that the brevity too, because I think there's like an illusion of depth in that there's excess of breadth. There's just like a lot of shallowness. There's a pool never gets deep, but it's like there's like a lot of it there's a confusion. It's just like eating chips or something or eating like little bite size nuggets of information. And yeah, they're accessible and yeah, they're entertaining and yeah, there is the power of the image and all these things, but again, I try and balance that against rigor and discipline and the commitment, as you're saying, and devotion and just really going in the jawbone nature.
26:15
Jove Spucchi
Yeah, really digging into this co creation of knowledge and this relational process sounds really core to how it all works. It's not just the raw delivery of facts, but how that information is encoded and later metabolized by the learner in the wider context of their knowledge and experience. And I think this really speaks to the complexity of teaching as an art. It's been really powerful to see you apply these more technical teaching skills in a more spiritual context within spiritual. And magical communities. Seems like most of the teachers don't have this more formal training or often that they really don't think about how they teach. With this level of intentionality. Have you found that certain methods of pedagogy work well with magical concepts and magical thinking while others do not?
27:04
Christopher Marmolejo
Yeah, definitely. Like, teaching is its own profession. Teaching takes its own training. Whereas people have content knowledge about whatever their subject of expertise is, and they want to teach it. And those are not equatable. It takes a different level of knowing to teach something. And at the same time, if I want to learn something, I teach something. But again, I'm trained as a teacher and whatnot, so it's a little bit different. When I went into certain classrooms independent to learn, I think I had the expectation or just like the understanding that if a person had certain markers of identity and whatnot, that they'd also have the ability to be an effective teacher and spaceholder and cognizant of just internalized colonial systems, the banking system of knowledge, that's very hard. There's a lot of knowledge that does need to be protected and stored and studied and all these things.
27:54
Christopher Marmolejo
But the banking model of education, which is like, teacher has all the knowledge and they deposit it into their students is like I see that all the time. There's technicality there's like you're learning a math formula or whatnot. But it needs to go beyond that towards significance, towards application, towards consideration of cultural moment in which is created to the students lived backgrounds. And that degree, I think that degree takes a type of training. And so that is why I like to teach. And I'm questioning myself. I just try and be in my own lane mainly, you know what I mean? I try and make what I want if you will not make what I want in terms of, like, oh, do what I meaning making what I'm hungering for, you know what I mean? In that sense, following desire yes, following desire. Right. Should be the propitiator of those unmet needs at large, in a sense.
28:41
Jove Spucchi
Right.
28:42
Jove Spucchi
And so in the transition from teaching English to teaching more spiritual and esoteric things, how did your process change? I'd imagine that there's a lot more freedom when you're not constantly trying to juggle the rules of the institution with the needs of your students.
28:59
Christopher Marmolejo
Oh, my gosh. Absolutely. I hate testing and I hate a grading homework. Teacher feedback is very important. Absolutely. But just like, it was too much and then testing as well. The standardized forms of testing were just terrible. And so the freedom to talk about any subject, to bring in any material and any reference. Absolutely. The freedom to set my own schedule, the freedom to not have parameters around length externally imposed, the ability to scale and grow as well like my classroom and reach people across contexts and time zones and geographies that has all been so beneficial. And then to be the direct beneficiary of my own labor in that sense where I did feel exploited as a teacher in the formal education system I've been working on gaining full support as an independent teacher. That's its own struggle. But there's a difference from exploitation as well.
29:50
Christopher Marmolejo
There's a nuance. I recently gave readings to 4 14 year olds at a local event. It was so awesome because that helps me in my readings as well. Like my background as an educator, my work with that age group in particular, which is such a volatile time, and they're so into it, and they've got, like, the thinnest shell exterior veneer that I'm totally seeing right through. And I have a soft spot in my heart for that. Sometimes I'm like, would I go back to the classroom just because I love the kids so much?
30:18
Jove Spucchi
Yeah, that'd be hard to give up. Aside from the changes that come with an older student base, how have you noticed the student teacher relationship changing in your transition over to more spiritual teaching?
30:29
Christopher Marmolejo
I think that there's a lot more autonomy. I would love to teach a class for younger folks, but the fact that a lot of my students are now sometimes older than me, there's more required of them for their own learning experience as well. Like, I don't necessarily have to do as much handholding. I provide a lot of resources. I provide a lot of clarity. I give them a lot of entryways in. The teacher has to provide entryways for all their students, and their students, of course, are across different degrees of expertise. Right? And so how do you make a lesson that everyone can be challenged by? That's why I think Tarot is such an excellent teaching tool because of the imagery. Like, everyone can get into that, but then you add the decans onto it. Do you know what I mean? That's like a deeper layer.
31:10
Christopher Marmolejo
You can go deeper in that way. Then you add the text that I provided in Tens and go deeper in that way. So I think that I've been carving out depth, if you will, within these practices and just, like, leaving the trails behind where I can meet the student, where they are in the live portion of my classes. In particular when I teach Live, where there are downloadable lectures on my site and whatnot if you want to just hear me talk about the mark of the exile and aquarius and dispossession of land for an hour and a half for the aquarius cards?
31:39
Jove Spucchi
Sounds great to me. As someone who's recently gone through the learning process and taken classes and used resources from within the magical community, are there learnings from your more formal training that you think would especially help spiritual teachers to better serve their students?
31:54
Christopher Marmolejo
That's a hard question because of the limitations of space and technology. I think about events like NORWAC or something like that. Where it's like a big conference and everyone's learning empowering student voice in a lot of ways. But it's hard because I don't see, like, I'm not in everyone's classroom necessarily. And when I'm learning, particularly, I'm looking for occulted knowledge or gatekeep knowledge that's hard to access code, breaking it in one sense and then translating it and applying it for my students and my supporters. My goodness. Training, of course, like any training to become more formal education training about the design of each of my classes have a different format. It's not all lecture, basically. There's different exercises we do, such as collective spreads. We pull up the chart, do you know what I mean? And we are looking at each other's charts, we're looking at each other's spreads, we're doing like shared divination.
32:42
Christopher Marmolejo
And I feel like I'm always like, I can better. I just want to get my students talking more. And there's so many moments where I'm like, thank you. Because that genius that just was possessed in the classroom would not have been arrived at without your contribution, without you saying what you saw, what you see, what you heard, without responding. That's not necessarily always present with other classes. But again, I'm like it's hard to make larger generalizations.
33:05
Jove Spucchi
It sounds like those genius moments, those knowledge co creation moments, are really driven by student interactions. Would you say that most of the learning comes in those live student sessions?
33:16
Christopher Marmolejo
Absolutely. The live sessions, because the lecture, I can talk about Tarot and all these things for like, hour. I do talk about them for so much. And so they're cursory in a sense, like you're getting the overview, but when you have questions or when you want to see it in the moment or what it looks like in your deck, or get my feedback, or the other students feedback. And the practice to speak as well, like the practice to read a lot of these things. With the birth chart, you can do more prep, obviously, with the birth chart before, like a birth chart reading, or a natal reading or astrology, whereas with Tarot, you don't know what the cards are going to turn over. You don't know what the spread is going to be. You don't know what the question is going to be. And so you're on in a moment in the live class, you can practice, you know what I mean, that moment, and you talk about these cards and work them through it's, that literacy component where it has touch your tongue, it has to come out of your mouth.
34:04
Christopher Marmolejo
And I, as a teacher, can adjust and give further consideration. You're getting like a pro response back to what you're saying, or like, okay, here's this other consideration. Or like, yes, this and but you know what I mean, I can polish it a bit and be blown away just the same, be taught as well.
34:21
Jove Spucchi
Definitely. I worked for a bit in technology education, specifically with system impacted folks, and found that students who were able to teach the concepts they had just learned were far more likely to understand and be able to apply the material. The better they were as teachers, the better learners they ended up being. In turn, no matter what level you're at, if you're able to communicate back what you've just learned, you're strengthening these muscles and this connective tissue that seems to be very present in the symbiotic two way street relationship between students and teachers.
34:55
Christopher Marmolejo
Absolutely. If all your students fail not to say again, I don't grade in my Tarot classes or anything like that, but it's on the teacher, it's not on students. And so it's like they're constantly teaching you how to teach them better to affect their flesh, which sounds weird, but to affect them viscerally to see that moment of understanding and then to hear from the mouth of babes, you know what I mean? Whatever their clarity is, that just stuns you in a moment of their recognition as well, that's a true gift. But there is like a shepherding of sorts, I would say. Absolutely. I love teaching now because I can incorporate it's such an additive process as well. And it's a ritual. It's more than a classroom. It's a temple now. You know what I mean?
35:40
Jove Spucchi
It's really that there's a sacredness to it.
35:43
Christopher Marmolejo
There is. There is a sacredness to it. Absolutely.
35:45
Jove Spucchi
That sacredness really comes across. When reading your class descriptions on your website, you have a really special and novel approach on how you are so intentionally choosing to show up as a teacher to share this wisdom with your classes. There's a clear sense of mission. Could you maybe share a little bit more about what that mission is and what it means to you?
36:03
Christopher Marmolejo
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Learning is a paradise. Learning is a place where paradise can be created. I want students to come, and I very much offer my own flesh in my classroom. And I'm very transparent with my students, telling them where I've been, how I'm learning these practices, how I'm unfolding them, but also trying to model for them to repair all of our rupturings of ritual orientation of myths, which is a like, I for, oh my gosh, I'm forgetting who said that. But mythologizing is something we do. Like, it's a way of being so it's like, rather than like, what is palace? Athena? Am I doing Athena in the chart or in my life? The reading again, it's a summoning of elements, and there are repairs. There are ways of rebraiding. There's ways of sharing knowledge. There's ways of remoulding the body of knowledge that is animistic and that is multivalently in relation with all kinds of worlds and dimensions.
37:03
Jove Spucchi
It sounds like knowledge can almost be interacted with as a spirit channeled by both teacher and student.
37:09
Christopher Marmolejo
Absolutely. The presence of the muse or whatnot? Or it's like the hanging in the air, in a sense, is absolutely there, like, you know, it's there. And I think that's what's always drew me further into study and whatnot is the prudence or whatnot or Sophia or you know what I mean? It's like she's like walking in front of you and you're in the dark and you're just seeing the trails, but you're like, oh, I'm on the path. And then the moment comes. And so a lot of my work, too, as a teacher, it centers the soul. Even in my formal education, this was the big part in my pedagogical thesis and whatnot to repair and to work against colonization and domination which objectifies students, which objects the soul. It denies the presence of an ensouled being that has just like an inherent sacrality and inherent meaning to be exploited.
37:53
Christopher Marmolejo
And so that is the cornerstone that's at the center of it all. That's your Iron Man charge, whatnot powering up everything. And so my work always approached that because that can be like woo and not to make it like New Agey or whatever, do you know what I mean? Is to find and connect that soul work to writers and teachers and activists, like, across time, across struggle, who've engaged with it in a very high minded way, in a sense, but then also maintain that thread towards these central soulful technologies of tarot and astrology. To converge those lineages and to connect them is what I think makes my classrooms unique and also my approach to teaching about the soul and these soulful practices.
38:35
Jove Spucchi
And I think therein lies the true divergence from the banking model of education you were speaking on earlier in the show. That idea feels really dependent on these really well defined and concrete facts. Sophia, on the other hand, or the spirit of wisdom and knowledge, feels like a far more personal and relative experience of truth thinking about how this relates to the oral tradition, which is almost always the underpinning of spiritual knowledge systems. There's a use of narrative structure to deliver information in rich and contextualized ways that are not as focused on banking away these facts as objects, but rather teaching principles that can be more widely applied.
39:12
Christopher Marmolejo
Yeah, that oral tradition on all fronts, like where I'd say I come from as well, obviously the indigenous maintenance of knowledge and practices through the oral transmission, like you were saying a lot of these things, you have to find a mentor. You have to find the words, you have to hear how it's done, in a sense. And then the Socratic method, which is totally like, again, the symphony conductor, it's an orchestra of knowledge, of learning. I'm a Taurus rising. Like I said, I love to talk. I love to hear students voices. I love to see them present and summon through their body the knowledge and activate their cells and sensorium.
39:46
Jove Spucchi
Talking about learning on the level of the sensual, do you feel that there's been a shift towards language as the base component of knowledge. Is knowledge something that you directly relate with language? Or do you see knowledge as something that can exist outside of language?
39:59
Christopher Marmolejo
I would say it definitely can exist outside, but I do. Toni Morrison is one of my greatest teachers. All cultures started with art and art to make sense of facts of their lived experience, to transmit meaning, to create meaning. But then the higher reaches of that art is always language. It goes towards language. And so language, I think's, role is to reach towards the ineffable, to reach towards the divine, to strive while also acknowledging its own limitations in that knowledge. And the symbol itself is always a representation, like it's always a type of icon. And so it's not the thing, you know what I mean? It's still not the thing, though. It gets you there. It's almost like to get you to that occulted place where you're seeing the invisible presence permeate all around you, and that the language is communicable, like that striving, and that reaching, and that finding the new word sometimes feels like getting a breath of air, breathing for the first time.
40:54
Christopher Marmolejo
Or you have a note, a way to hold it, to harmonize with it. But again, it's always going to fail. Language never nails it down. Language never says for once and all, do you know what I mean? Like it's done. It's like, okay, let's try again, right?
41:08
Jove Spucchi
The approximation of the thing, or maybe an emanation of the thing, but can never truly be the thing itself. Would you say that in the more imaginal or archetypal ways of understanding knowledge, you're getting closer to the true essence of the thing itself?
41:23
Christopher Marmolejo
Yeah, I mean, I think as you're saying this, I think of the High Priestess, she doesn't use language like verbal language. She uses image, you know what I mean? She uses synchronicity like she speaks through silence. She listens. And I think so much about the space between words, the space between notes, the liminal space, the in between space. And I think that's like where I've been. My moon is in the 6th House. It's balsamic. It's just like this weak little moon, but it's my destined light. And it's like crone powerful, like dark moon like soul doula. And so I think a lot of that spaciousness is required. And then I'm going to justice. The High Priestess guards the way to Hell and the Underworld and our ancestry and whatnot, and justice guards the gates of Heaven. It's like Athena and the high mindedness and the language and the Law and the proclamation that balance, and that ability to be a judge, if you will, that ability to be the Diviner, it takes know that's the judgment of the Nativities, it's why they say, like, it's a skill, right?
42:21
Christopher Marmolejo
And so as you mature, I think as a teacher, as a learner or Diviner, you appreciate the gray. You appreciate the gray area and how much tolerance is required for ambiguity, for paradox, for consciousness. And that's why I love teaching Tarot as well, because it is different than a different English quote unquote class or something. It's almost like its own subsection or whatnot of English, I would say, or progression of speaking prophecy. There's its own thing. I don't want to say formula or whatnot, but you have to learn to speak in riddles and rhymes and paradox.
42:52
Jove Spucchi
So it has the draw of a puzzle, right?
42:55
Christopher Marmolejo
So that your client, so that who's sitting across from you, so that you are drawn into the marvel of that moment, of you turning the key and reading between the lines and making sense of it all. You know what I mean?
43:08
Jove Spucchi
Absolutely. And I feel like the teachers who have helped me out the most are the ones who aren't just delivering facts, but instead create the negative space for intelligence to feel and think into ultimately setting it up so that I learn from the way the knowledge sort of blossoms and unfolds uniquely in my own mind. And to me, this is where so much of the magic of a good teacher lives.
43:32
Christopher Marmolejo
I love that. I definitely felt that. I felt like a light, like I felt the lightness and a buoyancy to that an uplifting moment there. And I think that negative space that you talk about is so beautiful. It's like movie time or something. Like when it was like movie day in your class and the lights get low and the projector turns on, you know what I mean? And whatnot? And then you can question, you can dream and you can just listen and think about it and then speak back and then hopefully speak up and respond. And even if it's not out loud, speaking wise, the writing of it. Do you know what I mean? This is why I love writing as well. I always felt that to be the blank page is where I could be as smart as I wanted to be, where I could be as incendiary, in a sense, to be as critical as I wanted to be.
44:19
Christopher Marmolejo
Because it was like the ring, if you will. My gosh, I've just been so on a deep dive. But the martial and the literary are so intertwined, right? And so using the words, using the sword, giving a body to this spirit of knowledge that is more than any one body, but still giving it a body, giving it a form, giving it a flesh, is the writing aspect of literacy, which again comprises speaking, reading and writing, right?
44:51
Jove Spucchi
With the sword, there's this velocity, both force and direction to the knowledge. I really like that observation of the literary as martial or the active, maybe more passionate assertion of desire and will through words and language.
45:05
Christopher Marmolejo
I pulled the nine of swords today, which is so that, you know what I mean, which is just a literary martial, even in Gemini. I forget which one, but it's pretty consistent across each of the deck. Ins. But your mailman is not the man of, like, in the armor is also a Gemini descriptor per these ancient descriptions. And so it's, like, just tickled me so much because we all go to our mailman as Mercury, right? We all are like, oh, yeah, that's Mercury. But we don't consider the man in mail as Mercury as well. And so there is a fighting that we do over the sword, because who's got the narrative, who has the narrative hold is a position of power. Like, the person who can surpass brute force through treaties and through all of that is, like, that's a real military militant task that requires, as you were saying, a vigor of mind, a vigor of perception, like a swiftness and an aim and a responsibility and a training as well.
46:03
Christopher Marmolejo
That page of swords, I'm always like, that's a kid with running around with a knife. You know what I mean? We've all been that kid. Be careful what you equip these young ones with. Like, make sure that you're training them because they're going to cut somebody. They're going to hurt somebody.
46:14
Jove Spucchi
Right? Powerful tools. And this man and male as a mercurial and martial figure is pushing on boundaries how words and language come from the breath, which permeates everything moving through the physical in a way that does interact with and ultimately change reality.
46:30
Christopher Marmolejo
Such a beautiful yeah, absolutely. The sword and the feather and the air, all of and that's what I mean. Like, Tarot just stacks them so beautifully that it's, like, constantly unfolding and opening.
46:41
Jove Spucchi
Yeah, Tarot is such a beautiful teaching tool for that archetypal type of knowledge. In particular, the wisdom that can be shared through communicating that lived experience in the narrative language of the Tarot is such an incredible spiritual technology.
46:56
Christopher Marmolejo
Absolutely. Yeah. I think the Tarot is pretty revolutionary in that regard, in particular because I love kitchen table readings for that precise empowerment of the people's knowledge, the people's wisdom, putting the authority of what gets to be knowledge, what gets to be taken as knowledge into the people's hands. And so it's very anti establishment in a lot of ways. That is like a practice, even if they're not conscious necessarily fully of that as, like, a politicized stance. It's like what happens anytime anyone sits down for a reading. And that's why there's always, like, I work markets. I work local markets and whatnot there's a transgression. There's like a risk taking to sit down for a Tarot reading and be like, what is my fate and fortune? You know what I mean? Let's look at this. It's very experiential, too, because people have questions. And I'm like, it's almost like, okay, you just have to do it.
47:44
Christopher Marmolejo
And you see how it works, in a sense, and you'll see how it goes, right?
47:47
Jove Spucchi
Tarot is a way to confront the shadow and to teach others how to confront the shadow as well. You, too can go out and buy a deck and ask spirit about these things. You, too can directly access this knowledge without an intermediary.
48:01
Christopher Marmolejo
What I've been finding as I've been teaching for a few years now in the spiritual field is really this is a trade as well, like learning to read Tarot. You can have a trade and it's real, you know what I mean? I think there's still the stigma of just like there is a carney element to it, you know what I mean? We're all freaks and whatnot out here at the market, but it's a real means of livelihood. And so learning to read the Tarot alts provides you can have a deck of cards and get going from there and make yourself your own. It's an economic alternative as well, true precarity that we exist in and its response to the conditions of neoliberalism that forces us to entrepreneurialize our own inert potential, do you know what I mean, into some sort of means of livelihood. Seeing many of my students developing their own Tarot practice businesses and offerings and whatnot, is like that's significant to me as well.
48:59
Jove Spucchi
Yeah, what a form of empowerment. I was doing a little research and came across some numbers around the market size of what's called psychic services. And so that includes things like Tarot and astrology and other psychic readings. And recently, in the last few years, it's grown from 1.6 to over $2 billion spent per year. And so it's definitely a viable way to make some money and is something that people are actively valuing with their dollars. And with everything going on today. It offers a kind of knowledge that the institution, the academy, just cannot offer, something I think we all truly need.
49:30
Christopher Marmolejo
Wow. Yeah. Cheers to that. Cheers to that.
49:33
Jove Spucchi
You mentioned your threshold classes. Are you enrolling now?
49:36
Christopher Marmolejo
I am enrolling for now. The standard edition, standard run. I have, like, two sort of versions of them, and this is a sort of bread and butter. This is a comprehensive Tarot course. We will go over all of the cards, like every single card, I organize them numerically in order to change the approach in terms of how we go about learning the cards rather than like A to Z, it's like, let's see what all the aces and all the twos and all the fives have in common. And we uncover there's actually real thematic congruences between each of them because then you're working with signs as well. There's astrology that I teach behind each of them. We go into the deck ins. We go into herbal associations, pre recorded lectures and workbooks that you get access to that's, of course, evergreen. And then we have our live classes where we get into, if we're doing this as a means of livelihood as well and pursuing it for that, but also for how we're reading.
50:27
Christopher Marmolejo
You want to read for people if you're laying Tarot. Yes. You want to do your readings, but their cards want to between hands and to do so ethically because there's so many diviners and readers and witches and whatnot out there, and not all of them are ethical. Okay? And that takes the buyer's responsibility in a sense, you know what I mean? Like, it requires your own discernment, but also, again, learning what it is to give an ethical reading, learning broader considerations of these cards, to be able to talk about things in a significant manner that's applicable to your clients, especially like in Witch Aid, some of those questions, like fluff wouldn't suffice. We need some critical consideration to these questions. Will the people in power be held accountable? Well, okay, that's a big question. Let's see how this card can answer that. And I think that requires, again, a specialized education of the Tarot.
51:18
Jove Spucchi
That's a course I would love to take myself. Michelle and I have been scheming about when we can coordinate to take it together. There's so much in there. I encourage everyone to just check out the course descriptions, even on Christopher's website. There's so much knowledge on offer, even just in the course info. I'm particularly interested in learning from your experience with the herbal and decantic associations within the Tarot. I've explored this a little bit, but haven't really ever done the full deck and walk, which is something else I know you offer, too.
51:48
Christopher Marmolejo
Yes. So that's tens, which is like XZ, abbreviated, like Tens across the board. And so this is threshold is an immersive experience, like eleven week course where we're meeting weekly and you're getting a comprehensive education. You'll be able to read Tarot and keep developing and keep growing by the time you leave the course, whereas Tens is ongoing. I hope to keep this going for years and years. I'm working on a year, two and whatnot, but we do a guided deck and walk and decanic. Dignity is the form of dignity that assesses a planet's strength within the birth chart, but that's solely based upon that planet's own designation, do you know what I mean? Whereas all the other forms of dignity are commentary about positionality within state and empire and community and kin and whatnot. And so it's like when we remove all of those things, which so often a lot of my students, a lot of my clients, I am this person who has got a lot of detrimented placements, detrimented heart ruler like this person who knows exile, this person who does not have, quote unquote, normative dignity.
52:51
Christopher Marmolejo
How do we walk a path of dignity? And how do we transgress boundaries and do so together and use the cards synchronized to the stars as a guide for that walk and that path? And so Tens we meet, which I love, I just closed enrollment for that one. We meet. Twice a Zodiac season. One where we examine all the ancient descriptions of the Decans. And then another class where we sort of just integrate and we do spreads and whatnot. And then there's also pre recorded lectures that I've read all the cards and tied them to various texts that are not like astrological and whatnot, like authors of Marcuse and bell hooks and all kind of the colonial feminist queer thought and applying those to the card so that it's carrying the tradition further. Because these decanic images continuously evolve and they are shared across culture.
53:41
Christopher Marmolejo
And so that one is I really love that one as well. That one's a bit more advanced, but it's like you'll really syncretize. We cover the Decans in Thresholds, but it's introductory, whereas we're just sitting with it six cards or so at a time each season.
53:54
Jove Spucchi
Another one that I want to take those connections to the text. That's something I'd really like to explore. I think it's so important to relate astrology and Tarot to all the other forms of knowledge and ways of thinking that we have available. What else do you have coming up? Any events?
54:10
Christopher Marmolejo
I'm always doing local events here in San Diego where I'm at. So if you're local to the area, I post those on my website. And so I believe I got some at the end of the month. There's like a blario. Logan block party at the end of June. There's a few more. The 24th and the 25th are like two events that I have next. And then I'm teaching. I've been teaching this month. I am writing on my substack, which you all should go and support. Please and follow and stay tuned because that is where I am weaving all of these thoughts together and just expressing that written form of divination that I was talking about earlier. Thresholds is open for enrollment and then Threshold intends as well. They're bundled deals where if you just want to study on your own and do a lesson or the whole package, but just without the live component and go at your own pace, those are there as well.
54:54
Christopher Marmolejo
I am available for reading and I just open Olympia sessions for in person Olympia sessions. If you want to come to my home in Know so you can book and get an energy clearing and more of a holistic session with me in that way too.
55:06
Jove Spucchi
Great. And what are the best places for people to find you online?
55:10
Christopher Marmolejo
Yes, the Redread substack.com at the Redread on Instagram and that's Redread and on Twitter as well. And then theredread.com so I have it all linked there and I'll be sure.
55:25
Jove Spucchi
To put those links in the show notes as well. Christopher, thank you so much for sharing with us today, for being in conversation and for joining us on Occulted.
55:34
Christopher Marmolejo
Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure. Oh, my gosh. Till next time.
55:38
Jove Spucchi
Thank you for being a part of this episode of Occulted to follow for future episodes and learn more about me, Jove Spucchi, you can visit spucchi.com . That's S-p-u-c-c-h-i-.com
Note: transcripts are auto-transcribed and likely contain errors.
