Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice, and Create the Future

A dynamic re-envisioning of the tarot, including tarot card imagery, that describes how the tarot is queer, that the archetypes are alive, and that tarot doesn’t tell the future; it creates it.

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.

Charlie Claire Burgess (they/them) is a queer and non-binary tarot reader, tarot teacher, deck creator, writer, artist, and witch. They are the creator and illustrator of the self-published Fifth Spirit Tarot, which has swiftly become one of the most beloved queer tarot decks available. They host The Word Witch podcast, which guides the listener through tarot from an inclusive perspective and features interviews with tarot readers, deck creators, witches, magicians, and healers who are creating magic from the margins. They are also a short story writer--their stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, and have received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention (2014) and notable mentions in two Best American anthologies.