About me

My name is Luis Felipe Tenorio, born in 1969 and live in Cali, Colombia.

 

From childhood I was exposed to many and very different beliefs, but luckily their defenders were never to be polarized, which allowed me to develop my ideas.  I must say that nobody ever wanted to drown my questions about God and faith, nor I had to deal with one of those rural priests with sour gesture that use to appear in films about the Spanish Civil War; the ones I DID have to deal with always tried to do their job, but accepting my options.

 

I studied in high school and college with Jesuits at prestigious institutions of my country. The kind of institutions that have mass every week and Christology classes. I had in my early years nuns as teachers who I remember fondly, used to do the readings at Mass and some priests were very good friends of mine (in fact, some of them still are), who stared at my doubts without suspicion and never threatened me with the wrath of hell (or expulsion from school, which would have been far more effective My father is a Catholic zealot but he didn't mess with me either. And one of my best friends, my brother by choice, go to Mass every Sunday and his family says grace before each meal. I studied Mass Communication with the jesuits and earned a Cum Laude Degree and I also have a MBA title from my country and an eMBA from Tulane University, New Orleans
 

All this is to say that my taste for divination, occultism and esoterism is not a rebellion against an overly rigid education and I presently have magnificent relations with high hierarchs of the church (among my dad's friends there are who knows  how many archbishops) and neither is ignorance, because I applied myself thoroughly to my education (according to my mother, when I was four I wondered who put his name to God and if it was His name or a noun for "any of its kind" ...)
 

So, where and why did I go to get such  a taste for tarot? Through my mother I was exposed to esoteric books (many of them not very serious, but for a child of six years fulfilled their function) and  casual chats among mom's siblings and friends on the subject. Yet it wasn't like they were trying to indoctrinate me, the books were out there, they occasionally chat about these topics when I was around and nothing was forbidden from me. And if I asked,  they answered. Among mom's siblings there is one of her sisters, an aunt who I love a lot (she doesn't live here, so it was a novelty to see her and when she came she brought me fantastic presents ) who really lived for these items, though with some disorder.

Halfway in my career at college I was late to enroll in that period and I had to take whatever the courses were available at whatever the schedule. One of the subjects that period was History I, and as hard as I tried to be admitted into the seminars of World War II or Postcolonial World (subjects which I'd have to study very little if at all) no more students were allowed into those seminars and I had to go for the one that nobody wanted: Satanism, witchcraft, demonology and dark arts. There were five of us in a huge empty classroom! And none of us wanted the damn thing but we were forced anyway into it if we want to complete the credits of the period.
 

Why a religious university, regardless how open-minded the Jesuits might be, established such a chair, remains a mystery to me. Anyway: If at any point the universe has conspired to do me a favor, it was that. The teacher was Jaime Humberto Borja, who at 25 was an authority on the subject of international recognition. Some of my classmates were older than him and it was not unusual that he went out to a pub with us to have a beer.
 

Jaime ordered the din in my head. I performed with him (and incidentally with the girl I liked the most in the classroom) some sessions of spiritism, a practice I abandoned years ago. Borja and I discussed about the astrology of the birth chart or pre-Christian mythology ( "discussing" so to speak, he spoke). And in 1989 he put me in touch with tarot and gave me the first ideas to handle it. I have worked with the deck since then with no interrumption, improving my skills and understanding. A few weeks ago it was 20 years from that day which, as the tango goes, are nothing ...
 

My friendship with Jaime and legends about the deck probed to be an irresistible combination. And two years after my first encounter with him my extremely catholic dad gave me my first deck, a Rider-Waite with its companion book. It was the first of a library and a collection which recently reached the 50th deck. During all these years I made readings for dozens of friends and casual acquaintances who asked for it, most often quite rightly.
 

For some not-very-clear reason 2000 seemed to me a good time to sort out my knowledge on these topics and decided to write. But since I didn't want a textbook, I wrote a novel. The outcome was a monster of 980 pages that has gone through many changes (the last manuscript has a more respectable 260 pages ... . . "The assembly of heretics," but I never published it.
 

The last year a group of friends decided that if I wasn't going to publish the novel, I should set up a blog, made a seminar... do something! I had complained for long time about the liars who published real farces on this topic and there was enough people giving bad name to the poor deck everywhere, for they use it without any knowledge beyond the minimum required to charge. My first effort was in Facebook but it didn't have the scope I wanted so I set up a blog in spanish, my native language and now this one in english, almost a year after the first post in spanish. I offer free online lectures (with some limits in the number of questions allowed per consultant) and there are also more specialized and complete readings here but these have a price and I always encourage people to try out the free ones before to see if they are satisfied with my work.
 

And that's me. When I'm not disguised as occasional fortune-teller, esoteric arts researcher, amateur and little boring writer and accidental lecturer, I work as a consultant in organizational development, which pays my bills and leaves me time for these other interests, which in addition to the tarot include classic rock / pop (Queen rocks !!!!), classical music, art, movies (I have a collection of nearly 3,000 films) and conversation with friends I have from school, washed down with a glass of whiskey on the rocks that usually lasts a whole night!