The Liberation Tarot

The Liberation Tarot Deck is a collection of 79 tarot cards and accompanying guidebook created over the course of four years by more than thirty artists and writers. 

Organized and curated by artist Elicia Epstein, with a Guidebook by poet emet ezell, and contributing essays by lawrence barriner II and adrienne maree brown, this deck seeks to serve as a tool for those inspired towards revolution in the face of the able-centered, capitalist, heterocis-normative, white-supremacist patriarchy.

Following in the lineage of projects like Slow Holler, The Collective Tarot, Next World Tarot, Liberation Tarot seeks to serve as a tool to arm those working toward collective liberation— from the spiritual to the material.

Tarot helps us re-write the vocabulary of power, and with it, to strengthen our muscles of radical, revolutionary, and abolitionist dreaming. The deck eschews conventional tarot cards like the Emperor or Knight in favor of non-hierarchical cards honoring revolutionary concepts and figures such as the Crone, the Healer, and the Rebel, among others. Figures in the deck have bodies of all shapes and sizes, colors, genders, ages, and abilities—together, elaborating a vision of collective liberation and co-resistance.

The deck features artwork by INVASORIX, Eva Wu, Elicia Epstein, Cole M James, D. Wright, As They Lay (Karryl Eugene and Abdu Ali), Charmaine Bee, Petra Floyd and Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Katie Kaplan, Cassie Thornton, J. Wu, Anne Horel, Kinoko, Malaya Tuyay, Scarlet Tunkl, Amina Ross, Nissa Gustafson, Malak Mattar, Edgar Fabián Frías, Amir Khadar, Mark Allen, Syan Rose, Aparna Sarkar, Shoog McDaniel, nkiruka oparah, Jennifer Moon and Jarret Hood, and Nathaniel Russell.

The Mutant

[Image description: A smiling, bearded being sits cross-legged, hovering above a lake. Floating between their open hands are a circle, a triangle, a square, and an arc of colored dots. The being is illuminated; a bright beam of light extends from their forehead, their third eye. Their big grin is a joyful invitation to the interstitial. The sky is pink and crisscrossed with rainbows.]

The Mutant arrives in a parade of color and shape announcing with glee that nothing ever stays the same. The Mutant combines playfulness with wisdom and spontaneity with insight. An apprentice of the inconsistent and the incongruent, the Mutant wants to know the mystery of change. Octavia Butler wrote:

All that you touch,

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change

But if change is everywhere, what are its boundaries? How do we summon its ferocity with both intention and improvisation?

Transformation requires an annihilation; what once was is no longer. For change to take hold, its potentiality must already exist, hidden deep inside. The seed must rot in order to sprout—the tree was within the seed all along. This is the art of alchemy, the science of mutation. Change is both the chasm and the bridge between totality and nothingness, the possible and impossible.

The Mutant invites us to inhabit the slippery gaps through which change blooms. What structures can you put into place to better facilitate change? How do we account for the arbitrary moments of transformation?

Listen to change, begging for release.

For further incantation, see “And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud” by Christian Wiman.

Art by Edgar Fabián Frías