Red Door Magazine 23

“The horror stories he can tell you, about Katrina, the
paper bag tests that the police would do – they would
hold up a paper bag against your face and if you were
darker than it, you’d not be able to go to safety across
the bridge”.
In discussing the upcoming printing of the Black
Power Tarot, King Khan shares that the new edition
will include more cards. “I changed the Sun Ra card,
because I had a deep conversation with Knoel Scott
who’s been with Ra since the 70s, I played with Sun
Ra a few times live, and was a part of the Arkestra… so
I was talking to them and they said they thought the
card could be better. I realized I wanted to put Knoel
and Marshal (Allen) in the card. (…) and so I changed
the babies in the card to them as young people, the
sun and enlightenment in them… I also wrote Le Panther
Noir (Black Planthers in English) in a card, because
I wanted to put Malik on the deck (…) what we
did is we put him in the card and behind him is a mural
of Angola 3, made by a bunch of kids who wanted
justice, which the police erased the day after it was
made. And it’s Malik raising his fist, and it’s the sign
of infinity, meaning you are forever a Black Panther”.
Michael Eaton, the Irish artist who made the visuals
for the tarot, met King Khan at a concert 6 years before
deciding to write him, asking to collaborate in a
project together. Coincidentally, this was precisely at
the time Khan had been working on the tarot concept
with Jodorowsky. Eaton was working for the Game of
Thrones, so it was easy for him to understand the aesthetics
of the Marseilles Tarot and reinterpret it in the
Black Power Tarot.
“We work like this: I fill up Michael with a dream… I envision
something, or even do little sketches or write
to him, and then we start this process of passing the
idea back and forth until we get it perfect. What I love
about him is that, I am able to harness my bipolarity”.
Here, we enter into a discussion of transforming the
imbalance of bipolarity to push gears in your mind
and go beyond creative expectations:
“I talk a lot about first Nations because I just finished
another deck of tarot, ‘Dots and Feathers Tarot’, honoring
the people of the Americas, from Mexico all the
way to Greenland, and back in the day, in the tribes,
if there was a child with bipolarity or some type of
autism, the way to treat them was to give the child to
the healer, so that the healer could take extra care of
them, listen to them, and guide them, reinterpreting
their dreams as visions or premonitions that should
be shared with the rest of the tribe. We honored these
people. We celebrated them. Then industrialization
happens and they’re put in cages and lobotomized,
or given mind-numbing shit. Now we treat the most
special people like garbage.”
22 www.reddoormagazine.com