Creating from chaos
Announcing our next issue & our new guest editor
“We have clearly entered the Long Dark. It may be decades or more likely a few generations before we see the farther shore of this crisis, if we make it. I say this not with a note of despair, or with an attitude of hopelessness, but, instead, recognizing and valuing the necessary work that takes place in the dark. It is the realm of soul—of whispers and dreams, mystery and imagination, death and ancestors. It is an essential territory, both inevitable and required, offering a form of soul gestation that may gradually give shape to our deeper lives, personally and communally. Certain things can happen only in this grotto of darkness.”
—Francis Weller, In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty
Art is inseparable from the conditions in which it is made. And we’re living through a period of profound global violence and moral rupture: ongoing genocides, state-sanctioned brutality, mass displacement, ecological collapse, the steady normalization of suffering.
This is not a moment that lends itself to clarity, or to easy meaning-making. It’s a time of disorientation, overwhelm, and ethical vertigo. We’re being confronted daily with knowledge that cannot be metabolized through linear narratives. We’re learning what it takes to live without a map inside this haunting and unresolved night.
It is from within this darkness that we turn towards The Moon.
“The Moon is the nexus of convergence in the tarot … it focalizes all the primordial waters, rivers, and oceans across the cards’ cartography. It is the origin of time, the center of space, where all the threads of life entwine. It is under moonlight that we learn to cope with chaos, disorientation, and uncertainty.”
—Christopher Marmolejo, Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy
There is a widely accepted theory that our Moon formed when another planet brutally crashed into young Earth billions of years ago. In other words: our Moon was born from violent collision.
This feels especially resonant now. As science writer Rebecca Boyle writes, lunar life is both symbolic of “impermanence and the consistency of change” as well as “an act of becoming, cultivating, flourishing, erasing, creating, rebuilding.”
Dissolution. Continuous cycles of endings and beginnings. Shapeshifting. Howling. Creation from chaos. This is where we want to find you, dear readers, fellow artists, writers, and revolutionaries. We invite you to submit your work to us from this nocturnal place. From the shadows, the depths, the vastness. From the spaces where fear and faith, ambivalence and awe, and human and nonhuman meet. We can’t wait to see where the moonlit path leads.
“Even on a new moon night, the moon is still present: replete, whole, while also void, occluded. This is a completion that holds loss tenderly inside its body. The moon is kinetic. It invites you to dissolve your edges rather than affirm them. Lunar knowledge keeps us limber and resilient. … The moon is every gender, every sexuality, mostly both, always trans: waxing and waning. The moon only ever flirts with fullness or emptiness for a brief, tenuous moment before slipping into change.”
—Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine
Submission Guidelines
Our submissions are currently open starting today, the New Moon in Capricorn, through February 17, the New Moon in Aquarius. Please read the full submission guidelines here.
For this issue, we do not want to rehearse familiar themes. We want to encounter The Moon as an initiatory field, as a threshold state where current ways of knowing fall apart and something stranger begins to speak.
Our core thematic interests center on liminality and relational consciousness. This includes nonlinear time, ancestry, grief, and ways of living that resist Western logics of coherence. We are drawn to borderlands, intersections between human and nonhuman, domestic and wild, self and other. Propose stories of tidal intelligence, of submersion, flood states, brackish zones, amniotic memory. Explore different lunar states beyond full and new moons (progressed lunations! eclipses!). Scry us into subcultural spaces and underground worlds, sites of initiation and collective (un)becoming. Ground your work in decolonial, Black, feminist, and mythic frameworks. Get inspired by David Abram, Bayo Akomolafe, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, Edouard Glissant, Hélène Cixous, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Toni Morrison, Rebecca Solnit, Christina Sharpe, Simone Weil, and Francis Weller.
As with previous issues, the work should be deeply intimate. The ideas shared here are simply thought-starters. We encourage you to take an imaginative, deconstructionist lens. We are looking for diversity and originality in both creative techniques, artistic formats, and concepts explored.
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 get in touch.
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 $14,500 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 Moon
Our guest editor for The Moon issue is Christopher Marmolejo, MA. Christopher is a Brown, queer, and trans writer, diviner, and educator. They are also the author of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, which changed my perspective of the tarot in fundamental ways, and has become an essential guide for my personal practice. As a trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility, Christopher works with students around the world to plant and nurture the seed of a divinatory practice, finely weaving tarot, astrology, and curanderismo with decolonial, queer epistemologies and critical, feminist pedagogies.
From the moment I met Christopher, I knew they would make a brilliant guest editor and collaborator. We met during the creation of The Devil issue and participated in an event together last fall at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. Christopher’s work is rooted in ancestral and land-based practices that feel central to exploring The Moon archetype and the questions at the heart of this issue, like how uncertainty can be generative, and how we can learn from nonhuman, nonlinear, and more embodied forms of knowledge.
Below, Christopher shares their thoughts on guest editing this issue:
“It is an honor to doula this edition alongside Hannah Levy who has pioneered and championed this brilliant yearly tarot text that coalesces so many mediums, creators, authors, diviners, artists and theorists. We connected last year with the Devil issue and I had a subtle sense, okay maybe hope, that we’d continue collaborating in the future.
And how sweet is the invitation to guest-edit the Moon issue. I am both an astrologer and tarot reader, but moreso the Moon is my destined light. My natal Moon is a crone and she rules my part of fortune in Cancer. I write by moonlight. I frequently feel buoyed by the grace of 3 of my friends in particular, all Cancer risings. The Moon is a magnet, a siren summoning you beyond the rational, beyond civilization and certainty, beyond the human. Something shifts shape in night, and we meet in uncanny dimensions.
… Divination is an ethic of honest communion. It might be midnight in a world so absurd but for all the seekers scrying into the lunar looking glass, our dreams of freedom are anything but delusion. We may wax and wane with our resolve, our reason, our reunion but a feminine grace is keeping watch over the wandering, wondering souls, refracting her rays into the tarot’s prism to illuminate to transform the night.”
I feel so grateful to have Christopher as part of our editorial team this year. They’ve already opened so many new pathways for us to explore with The Moon, and I believe this is going to be a truly transformative issue to work on together, during this time of fracture and global upheaval. I’m also delighted to share that Xaviera López will continue as our Creative Director, and Nick Jacobs will once again produce and design the publication.
Watch this space as we plan to share updates and behind-the-scenes moments from the making of the fifth (!!) edition of The Rebis.
Here’s to exploring the unknown together,
Hannah
Editor-in-Chief, The Rebis
Beautiful! How exciting. The Moon... *exhales deeply* May we all be with the magic of it.
So excited for this!