In "Western" colonial society, the spiritual and material are pitted against one another: religion and science, church and state, intuition and logic. But for many people with Indigenous and animist lineages, spirit lives in everything and there is no separation between the "sacred" and "profane." Tarot is a tangible spiritual tool that has been used by oppressed peoples for centuries to help make real-world decisions guided by spiritual forces.

Join Lane Smith, author of 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World, Christopher Marmolejo, author of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, and Sara Calverese, creator of Turning Terrestrial Tides Tarot for a discussion about grounding spiritual practices in our current political realities to cope with and fight oppression.

Lane Smith is a transmasculine nonbinary writer with over 20 years of experience as an activist, organizer, and tarot reader. They have been involved in struggles against war, the death penalty, attacks on LGBT rights and body autonomy for marginalized genders and birthing people, police violence, and apartheid. They have worked as a social worker in prisons, and in the field of harm reduction with people who are at risk for HIV/AIDS. With a professional master’s degree in social work and an academic master's degree in humanities and social thought, Lane expresses their ideas in clear, nonacademic language in the interest of putting social justice values into practice. Lane is the editor of the Tarot & Politics zine, and a member of Solidarity Tarot where they live in Baltimore City, Maryland.

Christopher Marmolejo 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, California, among the pines, in community with the Yuhaaviatam clan of the Maara’yam (Serrano). With nine-plus years of experience as trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility, they work with students around the world to plant and nurture the seed of a divinatory practice, finely weaving tarot, astrology, and curanderismo with critical, decolonial Black queer feminist epistemology. 

Sara Calvarese is a South Philadelphia based author, illustrator, astrologer, tarot reader, and former owner of The 8th House, a brick and mortar retail space. She left her career in chemistry and engineering in 2020 to pursue full time creative work. Her projects to date include: The 8th House Tarot: An Astrological Tarot Deck, Prism Tarot, Mundane Magick Tarot, Stories: A Collaborative Oracle Deck, and Magick (IRL), an interactive tarot and astrology book.