Now is the time of monsters
Call for submissions & announcing our new guest editor
“It is exactly because it is dark that it wants to be understood.”
—Paul Celan, “On the Darkness of Poetry”
It’s Capricorn season—what better time to announce that The Rebis is moving up our publication schedule and opening submissions for our fourth anthology?
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”1 This is a popular translation of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935 while he was imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime. Now is the time of monsters, and the next installment of The Rebis will focus on The Devil (XV).
When thinking about our fourth issue, I had a vision of The Star falling out of the sky and imagined Lucifer, the fallen angel. After all, Lucifer means “the morning star” or “bearer of light” in Latin. Maybe it’s because it was the week after the presidential election here in the U.S., but my mind was on tyranny and rebellion, oppression and freedom. The Devil brings us into the reality of the present moment. What does it mean to exist as an artist within systems of institutional violence, genocide, colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and late-stage capitalism? How does it feel to create from the shadows? To create with the shadows? How do we find beauty in the grotesque? For this issue, we are interested in stories of confrontation, of reckoning, of defiance, of resistance to and liberation from the prisons we inhabit—and the prisons we create within ourselves.
“This card asks us to consider the core of our drives, the reasons that we push ourselves, the hidden needs or secret darkness that motivates our impulses.”
—Meg Jones Wall, “Finding the Fool”
The Devil is not just about our darkest parts, not just about materialism, obsession, addiction, and control. We also consider freedom from shame, pushing against the edges of societal norms and taboos. We grapple with our deepest desires and embrace self-knowledge.
In Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown writes, “Oppression makes us believe that pleasure is not something that we all have equal access to. One of the ways that we start doing the work of reclaiming our full selves—our whole liberated, free selves—is by reclaiming our access to pleasure.” We are interested in these stories of reclamation. Of rapture, sin, temptation. The kind of transgressions that teach, that emancipate, that shake us awake. We want to see work that is subversive, provocative, erotic, and deliciously alive. Stories about power and self-sovereignty.
“The Devil ensures that we give commensurate attention to the violence we’d rather neglect. This confrontation meets the ideology of domesticity, the ways in which we cage, silence, and collar our wild, free desire and authentic expression.”
—Christopher Marmolejo, “Red Tarot”
In my research, I was reminded that the term “demon” originates from the Ancient Greek word daimōn (δαίμων), which broadly meant “diving power,” “spirit,” or “deity.” Our demons, our Lucifers, can be light bearers of truth. The numerology of the Devil, card 15, reduces to 6, The Lovers. A card of vulnerability and connection. This duality within The Devil archetype makes it a particularly appealing card to explore artistically. We can't wait to see where it leads us.
Submission guidelines
Submissions are currently open through January 31! Please read the full submission guidelines and submit your work here.
As with previous issues, the work should be deeply intimate, inspired by your relationship to the archetype. The ideas shared here are simply thought-starters. We encourage you to take an imaginative, deconstructionist lens with your work. We want to be delighted and surprised. We want to learn something new and discover diverse perspectives. And we want to be immersed in the underworlds of your creation.
This is a paid opportunity. Please forward this to anyone you think might be interested in contributing. New voices and underrepresented writers and artists are encouraged to submit.
As a reminder, The Rebis is a not-for-profit publication. We redistribute sales profits to social justice causes committed to reparations and reproductive justice, which is feeling more urgent than ever. To date, we have donated $8500 in total across The Sogorea Te Land Trust, The National Network of Abortion Funds, and Liberated Capital, a donor community and funding vehicle aimed at moving untethered resources to Black, Indigenous, and other people-of-color communities for liberation and racial healing. Read more about our mission.
Meet our guest editor for The Devil
The Devil is a rich card, with profound historical, political, spiritual, literary, and artistic significance. And Meg Jones Wall (she/they) is writing a book all about it. The Devils We Know will be a deep dive into the cultural, psychological, and magical elements of The Devil archetype, which considers how our evolving collective relationships with and depictions of this figure have impacted the ways we interpret this tarot card. I could not be more thrilled to welcome Meg as a guest editor for this issue of The Rebis!
Meg is a queer, chronically-ill tarot reader and teacher, who creates tarot resources and courses for spiritual misfits through her business, 3am.tarot. They are also the author of Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation and Tarot Spreads: How To Read Them, Create Them, and Revise Them (July 2024). Meg has also contributed to the past two issues of The Rebis.
“The Devil is a trickster and a misfit, a rebel and a challenger, a figure that can be activating or inspiring in equal measure—and they're easily one of my favorite tarot archetypes,” Meg shares. “I love exploring the messiness and power of this figure; the truths that are revealed when we're brave enough to ask tough questions and sit in our own discomfort. And as we move into 2025, a year where courage and a spirit of rebellion will be more important than ever, I can think of no better archetype to wrestle with than the Devil.”
I feel so grateful to have Meg as part of our editorial team this year. I am also pleased to share that Xaviera López will continue to act as our Creative Director and Nick Jacobs will be producing and designing the publication again. This year, we’re also welcoming Jesse Janelle as an editorial fellow. Jess is a writer, tarot reader, coach, and MFA student.
Watch this space as we plan to share updates and behind-the-scenes moments from the making of the fourth edition of The Rebis.
Here’s to the devils we know, and those we will soon meet.
Hannah
Editor-in-Chief, The Rebis
This is a popular, albeit liberal translation, of Gramsci popularized by Slavoj Žižek (2010), which renders “the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass” as “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Yas! The most misunderstood card...can't wait to see how this issue develops.
This is incredibly exciting! The time has never been more ripe to unpack the Devil.