When Thought Becomes Theater

It’s absolutely creepy how academia can generate modes of thinking that actually prevent thought. I just saw a new tarot deck claiming to “decolonize tarot.”

I can't stop wondering what that even means.

Tarot originated in Christian Renaissance Europe as a set of playing cards, not as a colonized object. It was never imposed on indigenous cultures. In fact, over the centuries, it’s been "culturally appropriated" (to use another slippery term) by esotericists, spiritualists, Jungians, New Agers, art nerds, cat fanciers, and everyone in between.

If academic language were at all consistent or rooted in historical logic, “decolonizing tarot” should mean returning tarot to its roots in the art, symbolism, and Christian cosmology of Renaissance Italy. But that’s clearly not what the authors of this guidebook mean.

Words like “decolonize” are incantations ("dog whistles," perhaps) with no clear definitions or historical grounding. They are reducing rich, complex traditions into ideological props to support whatever moral performance someone is trying to stage.

In the case of The Decolonized Tarot Illustrated Guidebook: A Diverse Approach to Divination by Maritess Zurbano and Cathleen Abalos, the term is simply a catchword for advertising and self-delusion. They use the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (arguably the most Eurocentric deck) to support a claim that Filipino-American culture "by default, embraces all others."

Filipino-American culture has been shaped in part by a long and complicated history of colonization: Chinese, Islamic, Spanish Catholic, and American. To portray it as universally inclusive by default is not just inaccurate, it’s erasure. Zurbano and Abalos flatten out real cultural tensions and colonial entanglements for the sake of feel-good universality. It’s syncretism dressed in buzzwords, marketing disguised as academic theory.

Their work is not a search for truth. It’s the use of an academic buzz word to shut down inquiry, overwrite complexity, and manufacture consent for vague ideological goals. The "language of liberation" is being used to obscure rather than reveal. This is academic cosplay without the burden of thought.

I'm all for cultural change. I'm even in favor of syncretism, as long as we acknowledge that’s what it is. But we can't evolve if we aren’t allowed to think clearly. And we definitely can’t think clearly if every act of questioning is met with moral panic, and every idea is wrapped in jargon that conceals more than it reveals.

The most useful (and radical) thing we can do is ask questions that make sense and use language that helps us think.