Tarot Thrones | The Court Card Blog

Month: November 2012

  • Lunar Elipse Spread | The Result

    There was nothing to see of the penumbral lunar eclipse up here in Scotland.  By the time the moon had risen over the hill behind the house, it had been over for a couple of hours. Pity!

    Undeterred, I carried out the Lunar Eclipse Spread from the other day, using my beloved DruidCraft.  Who was hidden in the shadow of the world?  The Hermit.

    I like this card, but it’s not something that comes up for me much in readings.  I don’t feel as though I’m much of a hermit!

    I love how his face is in shadow here and he holds his light up as much to show others the way as to light his own path.  Heck, his own eyes could be closed! In his lantern sits, I fancy, The Star. She offers us hope, guidance and ambitions…. how interesting!

    We also see the crescent of a waning moon – something is ending – perhaps the Hermit’s lonely sojourn up there in the mountains?

    The dawn breaks on the horizon, emphasising the start of something new, a new day – new opportunities.  Of course, it could just as easily be a sunset! Either way, we have the idea of something drawing to a close.

    The light gleams upon a distant river that twists like a lightening bolt through the landscape.  For me, water in the Tarot represents the subconscious and this is no still pool – this is moving water; Something Is Happening.  Yikes!

    The staff that he leans upon reminds me of The Fool,  HE stepped off the cliff to start his journey.  Our Hermit will wend his way back down into the bosom of humanity via the easier route, the path.  I wonder whether The Hermit created that path – cutting a path isn’t easy!  But then, when you’ve got the energy of the Wands at your disposal (as in his walking staff), anything is possible!

    And the Hermit’s four-legged companion, the wolf – what will become of him? Will he remain on the mountain – a shamanistic guide and teacher? Or will he descend the path to walk amongst us, warily, at The Hermit’s side?

    So WHAT does it all mean?!

    Well, I am really enjoying being a tutor on the TABI Training Course, so perhaps The Hermit heralds a little more in that direction? I also admin the Glasgow Tarot Meet Up Group and am really pleased with how the group is growing.  I have such plans for them! Day-long Tarot intensives! Visits from authors and artists!  My goals are limited by the funds we have…. but I’m a great believer in Things Turning Up when you need them 🙂

    And, just the other day,  I learned that I will be talking about Court Cards at the UK Tarot Conference next October – in the lunchtime slot – and a big thank you to Kim for being brave enough to give me my first chance as a Tarot speaker!

    There are other Tarot projects too, a couple of which have been sitting on the back burners, but with the news that The Hermit needs his light to shine, well, I might just think about giving them a stir!

    What about you? Did you try the spread?

  • Lunar Eclipse Spread

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    Alexander’s site

    Tomorrow night is a lunar eclipse (28 November) – the last one until April 2013 – and it’s a wonderful event to witness.  What makes it very special, for me, is that hardly anyone looks up at the skies these days – perhaps lovers, foxes and those of us who have to travel by ferry 🙂  People are trudging home from the pub or work, usually looking at the ground….and I’m sitting in the garden hugging a mug of tea for warmth, staring at the sky.

    During a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow falls across the face of the moon, turning her cool white face into a warm, earthy blush.  The red moon is magnificent to see!

    It’s a humbling, awe-inspiring event, guaranteed to remind you that you are but a tiny speck on a big ball spinning in space!

    Here’s a fun spread to do during the eclipse.

    Apologies to readers who are also members of the Glasgow Tarot Meet Up Group because they are already familiar with this 🙂

    It’s very easy:

    1  Shuffle your cards whilst contemplating the thought: ‘what energies are being eclipsed in my life?’
    2  Complete your shuffle.
    3  Turn your deck over so that the images are now facing you.
    4  Flick through the cards until you find your World (or equivalent) card.
    5  The card BEHIND the World is what you currently hold in shadow.

    You can also expand upon it by adding in a Solar Eclipse element to the spread.  As you search for your World card, also keep an eye open for The High Priestess card at the same time and locate the card directly behind her too.

    Why the High Priestess?  Well, The High Priestess is the card who represents the Moon, if you work with Astrology in your Tarot practice.  So with THIS adjunct to the spread, we can find out what a Solar eclipse hides from us too.

    You can further expand upon the spread by bringing in more cards – how can I bring this energy out of darkness? How will this energy benefit me? and so on.

    *** Edit: info added:  If the card you are seeking is right on the bottom of the pack, with nothing behind it, refer to the FIRST card on the top of the pile, as if they had been laid out in a circle.

    I’ll be working a Court Card variation of this spread tomorrow and posting on Thursday.

    If you try the spread, I’d love to know how you get along with it 🙂

  • Meet the Courts | Alexander Daniloff Tarot

    Come on in to the wonderful Italianate, medieval-inspired world of Alexander Daniloff! *throws open the door*.  This glorious Tarot is still very new to me, but I wanted to share his Court Cards with you so that you can see why I am so enamoured of this man’s work!

    There is no accompanying book with this deck, but I don’t think that this detracts from the cards as a working deck at all. It’s very RWS-based in its imagery.

    Without further ado, TADAAAAH! Here they are!

    The Swords Courts

    As you can see, the common colour to the Swords Courts is black – quite in tune with the suits associations with grief and loss.  But black is powerful, threatening… also, makes you look slimmer 🙂  There are lovely pops of colour in these cards too – and love the raven perched above the queen! I already spoke to Alexander Daniloff about the Page, with is artfully hidden HEWGE sword here.

    They’re all looking the same way, to our left.  They have the sort of dark expressions that one might associate with the suit – although the Queen looks downright sneaky lol!

    The Cups Courts

    Check out the delightful aqua and blue hues of the Cups, less obvious in the King perhaps.  Unlike the Swords, this family all face to the right.  I adore the big clumsy-looking Knight and love how the Queen of Cups slides her gaze to him!

    The common colour for the Wands is green – reflecting the liveliness of the living Wand.  The Wands Knight looks like a character from The Far Pavilions (not read it? read it. I luffed it.) The Wands look predominantly out to the left other, like the Swords.  Apart from the pesky Page who looks to the right! Look at the sad-looking lion skin belonging to the King of Wands.  He’s skinned the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz.  And the Queen – with her golden ripe harvest and fiery ram’s fleece……. The Wands are scrumptious!

    The Pentacles Courts

    I think that this might be my favourite family in this deck because, if you look closely, the Pentacle in each card is different.  The Page has a game, the Knight has a coin, the Queen has a globe-like sphere and the King’s Pentacle is part of the trappings of his wealth, his robes.  I love the Elephant and Castle on the escutcheon that makes up the King’s torso.  This is where the lack of a LWB can be a little maddening lol! Mind you, I’ve seen fairly significant symbols go unmentioned in lots of LWBs, so there’s no guarantee that I would be any the wiser if Alexander had included one.

    From a bit of an internet trawl, the elephant is associated with strength.  And castles with defence – so strength and defence might be their motto?  And yes, I’m also aware that it’s the name of a significant junction in London 😀
    All the Pages are depicted as youths with banners representing their suits, standing on boards.  They have a small area of influence.
    The Knights are depicted behind helmets and shields (in the Germanic style).
    The Queens are depicted in a similar shield shape and have playing card suit references
    The Kings have their coat of arms as their torso.
    Each card has its associated astrological symbol prominently placed to the foot of the card, which makes these cards lovely to use as Significators based on astrological references. The poor Pages have, of course, no astral real-estate and so have no astrological symbols. Don’t blame Alexander, blame the Golden Dawn 😉
    Knights, who are traditionally mutable, have frilly moveable fronds around them
    The Queens who are cardinal are in a human-heart shaped vignette and are before a swagged entrance.  Cardinal signs are the entrance signs (first signs) encountered when looking at astrology of Courts 🙂  Look, I’m trying to help pin the associations here lol!
    The Kings are fixed, as denoted by the cityscapes in their thrones.
    Oh there is so much else that I want to add about these characters, but I shall save it for another day!
    So what do you think of them? Love them? Loathe them?!
    *whispers* it had better be love or you and I may have to break off our engagement 😀

  • Hors de Combat | The Queen of Pentacles

    I have been under the weather with the Noro Virus and it has been ghastly.  I freely admit to being a bit of a drama queen, but honestly I hate not knowing which end of my body to drape pathetically over the loo.

    It is on the way OUT – if you catch my meaningful drift – so I thought I would take a look at a suitable Tarot Court to help get me back on track.

    Because it’s a health issue, I’m choosing from the Pentacles family.

    I’m going to go for the Queen of Pentacles because I am feeling pretty sorry for myself and want to some ideas about how best to look after myself.  The Queens are all about nurturing, so the Queen of Pents should be the very gal to help me out.

    I’m using the Queen of Pents from my new Tarot from Alexander Daniloff.  Which I am luffing to DEATH.

    Here she is:

    All the Queens are presented in this ‘gallery’ format.  I hope to be able to show you the Court Cards very soon so that you too can marvel at their sheer AWESOMENESS 🙂

    Anyway, let’s take a better look at her.  I am loving her earthy colours and her bountiful fruit – pears and grapes, two of my favourites.  She looks relaxed and comfortable in her environment, with her hand lightly placed upon her Pentacle (which looks like a globe here), so she rules her world with a light and tender touch.  She has luxurious clothes on too…. that appeals to the Leo in me like you wouldn’t believe!

    So how can she help me with my health?

    Why not try upping my fruit intake?
    Relax a little more?
    Treat my ‘world’ (in this case my body) with a light and tender touch – massage?
    Get out of my slobby ‘sick clothes’ and into nicer stuff.

    Would adding an Oracle card or two bring any further information that I could use?

    Delving into my Dreaming in Colour deck by Mindy Somers (my favourite for this kind of exercise), I drew the Power card.  I like how the colours are sympathetic to the Queen of Pentacles shades.

    Maybe I could try some orange/bronze shades to make myself look a bit less corpse-like?

    And of course POWER.  I am loving the whirling spiral as it rises from the bottom of the card to the top.  This is exactly what I need to do –  I really need to be getting out and about again as I’ve hardly crossed the threshold since Saturday night.  I also acknowledge that if I was a bit more active, maybe I wouldn’t be so laid low with this?  In my house I am notoriously sedentary.  My son did a portrait of me and it was basically the back of my head, sitting at the computer. I know.  Scary.

    I don’t want you to get sick of seeing the same sorts of cards on here, so let’s expand our horizon and end with a different Oracle card.  This one is from the Celtic Animal Oracle by Anna Franklin.

    He’s BADGER!  I love badgers and the keywords for this card are Tenacity, Strength and Defence – which are appropriate!

    Badger urges me to look after my home, my world, to be strong ….. and to infect cattle with TB 😀

    What do you think of these cards? Do you have a spread or a card that you refer to when you’re feeling below par?

  • Court Cards | Masks for Protection

    Well, it had to happen.  I promised you a posting today on Masks for Protection and then the fabulously entertaining exercises that had been pinging around in my head for days promptly flew out of my ears and left naught behind but a whistling wind.  I could not remember what I was going to say to you.

    My thought process then went like this:

    ‘I promised my lovely reader a blog post on Masks for Protection and now I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to write.  I’m such a TWAT.  Now EVERYBODY will see how clueless I am.  Why can’t I remember it? It must have been rubbish in the first place.  That’s it, the game Will Be Up and I shall be run out of Blogger as a FRAUD and a TERRIBLE person.  I may as well just QUIT.’

    I then laid my head gently on the cold surface of my desk and wished I smoked cheroots.

    This process of transformation from confident blogger to deranged harpy takes about 2 heart beats.

    But this is, I suddenly realise, just a Protective Mask in itself……

    ….and thus, I remember what it was I planned to write.  Isn’t life weird?

    So, back to masks for protection:

    These masks pop up all the time:  trying on clothes? Think you look more like Michael Crawford than Cindy?  It’s because you’re fat, you’ve got no will-power and you don’t deserve nice clothes (The Queen of Pentacles has been perverted).  Hear someone saying something unkind about you as you walk past an open office door? Well how DARE tbey? And the Reversed Knight of Wands or Swords works yourself up into a state of High Dudgeon as you endlessly churn over Possible Conversations/Fights that you will have with these people. I usually rehearse these fights ad infinitum in the shower of a morning.  I will give myself a heart attack.  I don’t, of course, EVER actually have the fight.

    I like the mask of Confident Blogger. I’m less keen on the mask of Unhinged Babbling Nutcase. Yet, they’re both me. And I believe that the unhinged babbling nutcase is a mask that I put on to protect myself.  And to protect YOU. From ME.

    For me, the mask was trying to protect me from getting hurt or rejected or something ‘they’ll reject you, so you might as well quit now’.

    It was also protecting YOU from me – the fraudulent, terrible person that this mask pops up to hide.

    *pauses*  am I sounding like a complete lunatic here?

    Somewhere along the line, a perfectly sensible defence mechanism mutated and I ended up with all these masks.

    If I can recognise that this mask is just a shield, then perhaps I can stop using it to defend myself (or you) and hang it on the wall as a trophy.

    Here’s a Tarot exercise to help you work with those masks in particular.

    Take out all your Tarot Courts.  Say hello, because EVERY one of them is YOU.  Mostly they are helpful guises, but sometimes they are defensive masks that can really hold you back.  So….

    First, find the court card that you think best suits the character of the troublesome mask.  Sticking with the example above, I decide that my critical, false-logic WRECK of a mask is a Queen of Swords reversed.

    I’m taking her out and having a good look at her.  Rightsides up I really like the Queen of Swords. Reversed, she holds me in a self-restricting critical pattern that is really tiresome to experience.  She is Water of  Air.

    1  What are the best things about this character ? list all the card’s great qualities and include those elemental attributes too – water and air can really be productive.  Use astrological references …. use whatever you danged well like.

    2  What are the unhelpful things about this personna? List those too.  I’ve found that this turns into a list of all the horrible stuff that runs through your head when this mask is being worn.

    If you get stuck, it can be very beneficial to meditate on the card and journey within it.  Speak to every aspect of the card, not just the main character.

    3 Once you’ve excavated all the good and ‘bad’ about this card (the bad being the negative chat that the mask allows you to indulge in) it’s time to address it.

    Take the Tarot court and regard it fondly.
    Hold it with love in your heart – all it has been trying to do is protect you.
    Talk to it and explain how you appreciate everything that it’s trying to do, but that the method that it’s using isn’t helpful.
    Reassure it that it’s not being banished, but that you need it to change.
    Tell it all the things that you love about it.
    And how you’re now letting all that negative stuff go* …….
    Listen to its reply.

    And then see what happens the next time the mask thinks about popping up.

    BTW – I must point out that I’m not a therapist or psychologist, but that these techniques work for me.  I hope they work for you.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a world to conquer 😉

    * You’ll probably have your own rituals for letting things go, but I tend to write things down and then burn them 😉

    **** SOOOORREEEEE!!! this was supposed to post on Friday while I was getting my James Bond fix …. and it failed to post at the scheduled time!  *****  And NO mask popped up.  Just a lot of sweary thoughts aimed at Blogger 😀