In the run up to Christmas (yes, I dared speak its name!) why not carve out an hour or so with me on Saturday 9th December at 2pm (UK) while we go through our elemental tarot court card families and how to place all 16 of them on the Wheel of the Year?
You don’t need to be a member of TABI to take part, but it’s a few shekels less expensive if you ARE a member – £5 for members and £8 for non-members.
All you need is a tarot deck and stuff for note-taking. Maybe bring a mince pie. Maybe a li’l Christmassy sherry. Maybe a party hat. Maybe a sweater with a Santa on the front. Maybe a flashing red nose a la Rudolph. You do you! Come along and join the gang!
Look forward to seeing you – the more the merrier!
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
The latest book to drop with a satisfying thud onto the doormat here at Tarot Thrones Towers is Tarot by The Moon by Victoria Constantino (Llewellyn). I’m always on the search for new books to deepen my Tarot knowledge or widen my spiritual horizons, so I was eager to see what this book had to offer.
Let’s start with the book’s vital statistics, shall we? Tarot by the Moon is a good-sized paperback, running to 240 pages (including the index); about the same dimensions as Mary K Greer’s 21 Ways To Read A Tarot Card. The cover artwork (see image above) by Kevin R Brown is very attractive with phases of the moon on a soft matt black background flanking a glossy Moon tarot card; it’s very tactile! Inside the book we have lots of spread illustrations and graphics in black and white.
The author, Victoria Constantino, is a new name to me (but hey ho, I’m not exactly Ms Tarot filofax, so don’t read too much into that lol!) but she has a background in publishing and a slew of publications that includes poetry and fiction as well as a Master’s degree in Writing. Although her website biog confirms that she’s a longterm tarot practitioner, Tarot by the Moon is her first tarot book.
So – it’s time to dive in!
The book is laid out in chapters that are named after the months of the year along with the best-known full moon name for that month. For example, Chapter 1 is ‘January: The Wolf Moon‘ and carries on in that vein through to December (The Cold Moon) and then includes a chapter for The Blue Moon and then zooms off into some useful Appendices.
But let’s just back up a little and focus on the Introduction which runs to 20 pages. In this section Victoria gives us a Tarot Ready Reckoner section for those who are perhaps new to card reading – how to use the book, a comprehensive outline on how to interpret the tarot that includes four pages on common tarot symbols (which is actually not bad for content at all!) and numerological correspondences before looking at days of the week and their planetary associations … and rounds off with the energetic qualities of the various moon phases (eg the dark moon being a good time for journey work, past life regression and so on). The introduction closes with an explanation of the more unusual moons – mini moon, super moon, blood moon etc.
There is a lot of content in that Introduction, so don’t skim over it!
Since it is almost November, I thought I’d focus on that month to see what the book could offer me. The full moon for the month is called The Beaver Moon and the chapter begins by linking the productivity of beavers (who are busy getting their dams in order at this time of year) to creating stability (important in a beaver dam!), getting your foundations right, clearing blocks etc.
And this is how the chapters function throughout the book; Constantino paints a broad summary of the energies of that month’s particular moon, based on the Algonquin full moon name, and then crams the chapter with spreads and spells to help work with that energy. Of course, you don’t need to restrict ‘creating stability’ to the month of November – you are encouraged to dive in to any topic at any time, depending upon your own need and interests. I think that using the full moon names is an inventive way to group spells and spreads together.
So, back to November. There are six tarot spreads, most involving 10 cards that allow you to explore productivity, stability, foundations, security, clearing blocks and a work and career spread to round things off. The chapter then delves into spells and rituals – summoning a perfect career opportunity, creating solid financial foundations and paving the way for success.
Victoria gives recommended days and moon phases for the spells and rituals. They involve quite a lot of stuff – crystals, coloured candles, herbs and spices, coloured inks etc – so this isn’t really about just grabbing gear from your kitchen drawers and getting on with it. It’s about preparing, which is a vital part of RITUAL after all!
Throughout the book there are side bar tips. For November it’s thinking about animal symbolism in tarot and automatic writing – which is fun, if you haven’t tried it yet! There are a lot of interesting snippets to explore – cleansing and charging crystals, what repeat cards might mean, the wisdom of flowers … just to name a handful.
It was time to try out one of the spreads from November and since it’s Nanowrimo month … the productivity spread seemed like the obvious place to start. I’ll be writing up the actual reading in a couple of days time. In summary – I found the spread useful.
Now I want to scoot ahead into the Appendices. Appendix A covers Meditations, B concerns amplifying your intentions (a full moon ritual), Appendix C takes a brief look at incorporating Feng Shui Ba Guas. And then we have a few pages for you to make your own Notes at the back.
A quick look at a spread and a tip from the selection provided for June.
So, what do I think of it now that I’ve shown you around?
First of all, I have not read every chapter prior to this review. I read the introduction, dipped into the other chapters and then worked through the chapter that I would be using for the coming month, by way of deeper example.
It’s a book that dips into different belief systems – Native American, Wiccan, pagan systems and even forays into feng shui – which is a massive cultural arc but which works because the author does not focus too deeply on any one system – for example, the feng shui Appendix is about 200 words and a brief table. This is enough to whet your appetite if you want to explore further, but not too much that it bogs you down in detail. As Victoria says: “It is written from the belief that we are all one, that there is truth to be found everywhere – in every culture and belief system – and that we all share more similarities than differences.”
I really like how the various full moon names have been the focus of the chapter contents. I think this is inventive and there is a lot of bang for your buck as far as spreads and spells are concerned (the book contains 66 spreads and 45 spells/rituals). However, if you buy it thinking that everything in the book is directly linked to something lunar, then you will be disappointed. It’s as it states on the cover: Spreads and Spells for Every Month of the Year.
Who would enjoy Tarot by the Moon? Victoria says on her website that the book is: ‘the ultimate guide for seekers of wisdom, for those on the healing journey, and for anyone who wishes to become empowered in manifesting the life of their dreams’. For me, I think it’s fun for anyone who loves exploring new tarot spreads or who loves rituals to help them take action (and who also has a lot of crystals and that kind of thing around the house – which is not me lol!). It will be a useful resource if you want to work on specific areas of your life on an organised monthly basis, and I can see it being a neat first tarot book for someone who mostly does rituals – a nice way for them to expand into our crazy tarot world.
You can find out more about Victoria on her WEBSITE.
Book published on 2 November 2021 in UK, but e-book already available. Available from all good retailers – buy locally if you can!
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
Top left: Total Tarot boxes Top Right: Total Tarot – The Thelema Tarot Bottom Left – Total Tarot – Radiant Wise Tarot Bottom Right – Lo Scarabeo card from Tarot of The Master
A few months ago, I spotted a new Tarot magazine on instagram – Total Tarot – and wrote about it HERE. Working in partnership with Lo Scarabeo, this bi-monthly magazine (twice a month – I’m never very sure if that’s what bi-monthly means though!) is about building your collection and is now on Issue 2 (£3.99). It seems to have something for everyone – beginner and experienced readers alike.
If you are just starting out, the magazine itself has got a lot of great information in it to help you get to grips with the cards on a step-by-step basis, how to use them, the terminology etc. If you are a collector of decks and a more experienced reader, you are getting your paws on a full version of a Lo Scarabeo deck every two issues (The Majors and box in one issue, the Minors in another). AND there are lots of other freebie goodies available too.
TRANSPARENCY: I had a lot of questions for the folks at Total Tarot, so they very kindly sent me copies of their first few editions for me to look over and answered my questions and concerns. So, any initial misgivings that I had have been dispelled: The magazine is beautifully laid out and easy to read with lots of white space to avoid info-clutter.
Concern no 1: Will the magazine suffer from being linked with only one publishing house?
Answer: Lo Scarabeo may be the sole publisher involved in the project, but they ARE one of the leading (if not THE leading) deck publisher in Europe. They have over 150 tarot decks on their website at the moment, ranging from the Radiant Wise Spirit style deck through Marseille decks to Pagan Cats (and everything in between!).
They also produce top quality Tarot accessories which are also included in the Total Tarot subscriber package – a journal, pendulum, reading mat, crystals, candles, crystal ball, tarot pouch etc
And NO adverts – just card reading information all the way!
Concern 2: Taking out a subscription will lock people in.
Answer: Nope – you can cancel your subscription at any time. And you don’t have the stress of having to schlep out to the newsagents or supermarket – you get everything delivered straight to your door.
Concern 3: You don’t get a choice in what decks you get.
Answer: This is true, but there really are so many decks available from Lo Scarabeo that unless your collection is already large, you won’t find yourself with duplicate decks. The Total Tarot team’s goal is to provide a wide variety of decks to suit different moods and styles. The decks covered in the first few issues are: Radiant Wise Spirit (a RWS deck), Thelema Tarot, Harmonious Tarot, Pre Raphaelite Tarot, John Bauer Tarot and the Golden Art Nouveau Tarot (which builds over many issues). You get a full deck over two issues.
And there will be a Marseille style deck included in the series too, I believe.
Concern 4: There will be a drop in quality for the magazine’s decks
The Lo Scarabeo decks are produced under licence for Total Tarot magazine, so they are not exactly the same. However, I compared their Radiant Wise Spirit deck to my Lo Scarabeo Tarot of The Master and the two decks are the same size. The Total Tarot Magazine’s Thelema Tarot has a green border, unlike the original, which is borderless (I think) … so there ARE differences. I am not an expert in card quality, but there isn’t any discernible difference in the card stock as far as I can tell. However the boxes are different. The Total Tarot boxes are branded with the Total Tarot on the side and, of course, there is no LWB in the Total Tarot box because you get the magazine!
If you opt to become a Premium Subscriber, you get your paws on the David Bowie Tarot (comes with issues 9 and 10 I think) and lots of the associated paraphernalia – the journal, mat and pouch. I think this deck comes in the full Lo Scarabeo box.
The cards are nice to shuffle! And so far no chips off the coloured border edge for the Thelema Tarot.
Concern 5: The gifts will be a bit crap.
Absolutely not! The accessory gifts are all from Lo Scarabeo too! They are what you would expect from a big international publisher. The journal that I received has a Rune-style cover and is 160 pages of hard-backed loveliness.
The Total Tarot people have also created an Instagram account and Facebook group, so I think that they are keen to get some kind of Tarot community flourishing around the magazine. It’s nice to be able to share a journey – and nice that they are making the effort for their subscribers.
If you want to find out more, here’s the link to the Total Tarot website. PLEASE NOTE: The UK national roll-out of this magazine launches on 12 January 2022!
Edit: Jenn asked, in the comments below, how many decks there would be. I asked the publisher and this is the reply: ‘The series is planned for 78 parts, which means 40 decks in total. If they opt for Premium it’ll be 41 decks as they also get the Starman deck as well! They are free to pause or cancel at any time.’
Edit (19/1/22) Thanks to Susan Parker who commented below. As mentioned above, The Starman deck is part of the PREMIUM subscription and comes in sections across the following Total Tarot issues: 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75.
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
What sets Total Tarot apart from the other two marvellous magazines is that it has exclusive links with the well-known publishing house, Lo Scarabeo.
Details of Delivery 1
The magazine is a marriage between Byline Publishing in London and the Italian publishers Lo Scarabeo and the first edition of their glossy mag became available in October 2020.
I believe that the magazine may only be available to UK- residents at the moment, (I need to double-check that) but perhaps it will be rolled out in the USA with a local publisher there too?
To have such close links with an established publishing house is very interesting. On one hand, this means that every issue of the magazine comes with a full Lo Scarabeo deck, which is AMAZING … but on the other, it might mean that content is limited to the confines of one publisher.
However, this is not a magazine that is intended to go on forever. There will be a finite number of issues of Total Tarot – very appropriately, 78 issues will be published.
There are a variety of subscription levels that you can sign up for – and you’ll want to sign up for at least one of them if you intend to collect all 78 cards of the Golden Art Nouveau Tarot which will be released piece-meal across the magazines 78 issues.
I confess that I find the different ‘Delivery’ options a bit confusing, but if you love the full Lo Scarabeo decks and marvellous freebies that are included with each issue, then this is a fun way to get hooked on collecting decks!
Have you signed up for this? I’d love to hear from you if you have!
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
A few years ago, I created a facebook group for people like me who had lovely (and often expensive!) tarot decks lying at the back of a drawer gathering dust. The goal was to turn these decks into hard-working tarot tools. I created over 100 exercises for a handful of friends to apply to a 78-card deck. And now we are just about to start our eighth round! That’s EIGHT YEARS!
Eventually I gathered all the exercises together and turned them into an ebook, Tarot Kaizen, which you can find in all kindle stores worldwide.
Although it’s all geared up for a RWS type deck, folks have used it for Marseille work too, but in all honesty, I wouldn’t recommend it for Marseille type decks.
Solo Tarot Work? Group Tarot Work?
You don’t need to join the fb group – you can study alone. All you need is a journal of some description – a reporter’s notebook will do just as well as any fancy leather-bound journal – a tarot deck that you really want to connect with and the ebook. There are over 100 daily tarot exercises to flex your tarot deck muscles with.
However, if you would like some company on your journey, you can join us at Tarot Kaizen VIII over on facebook. Again, all you need is something to write in and a tarot deck that you are not familiar with.
You are very welcome to join us! It’s a small group (usually about a dozen or so), but very friendly.
This year we are using ‘units’ over on facebook, which will mean that the learning experience will be smoother for those who struggle to access the search box on their phone, tablet or desk top.
Because it’s our first time using this new system, I am loading up the exercises a week at a time, rather than the whole thing – which might be a bit mind-blowing in the beginning.
Still not sure? If you are curious about the book, here’s the first exercise for you to try out:
Tarot Kaizen: Exercise 1
When you bought this new deck, you probably flicked through it quickly to see whether you liked the imagery.
Today we are going to take our first official look at every card in your chosen deck.
You'll need your journal for the last part of the exercise.At this opening exercise stage, some people can't decide which deck it is that they want to work with and perform The Flick Through exercises on several decks at the one time.
This is fine – a great way to find out the best deck for you to start with.However, I wouldn't recommend that you continue for many more exercises with multiple decks as you won't learn about any deck very deeply. And you will burn up a LOT of journal pages AND time!
Let's begin.
Without thinking too deeply, you are going flick through your cards quickly and create three bundles. Go with your gut responses, not what your head tells you.
The three piles you are going to make are:
‘attract’ (you like the imagery or find it intriguing) ‘repel’ (you do not like the imagery) ‘meh' (the imagery doesn't wow or repel you)
Done it?
Good!
Now, let's dig a little deeper!
Take a look a the height of the resulting bundles.If your 'attract' and 'meh' piles are the biggest piles, this is a good sign, there are lots of cards in this deck that you instinctively love or are at least not repelled by.
If your ‘repel’ pile is higher than either of your other two – consider whether you wish to continue studying with this deck. There are lots of cards in this deck that you instinctively don't like – do you want to keep working with it?
This initial exercise is a good opportunity to make sure that you’ve not been struck into a stupor by a couple of gorgeous cards when buying this deck!
A word of advice, even if your 'repel' pile is the tallest, and you may struggle to make this into a working deck at the moment, don't automatically put the deck up for sale. Keep it safe, you may well return to it at a later date and be amazed that you didn't gel with it initially.
You have two more tasks today:
Next, list the QUANTITIES of cards in each pile eg:
2 cards in the REPEL pile 67 cards in the ATTRACT pile 9 cards in the MEH pile
Secondly, write out at the back of your journal the ACTUAL cards in each pile as this will be useful in future (eg 3 Wands, Temperance etc)If possible, leave the piles as they are because tomorrow's exercises will refer to them.
Sound like fun?
Not every exercise contains as much work as this first one does, but it DOES require some dedication if you are to be one of the last Tarotists standing in 110 days time!
If you would like to be part of the group, then it costs £50.00 to join. Sound like a lot? BUT once you’re in, you are IN for all future rounds of TK AND you won’t need to wait for a round to be initiated by me, you can just jump in at any point in the year and find friends on the same journey!
Interested? Send your payment using paypal to alisoncross007@gmail.com (in the Notes box add Tarot Kaizen Group) and I’ll add you into the group.
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
There are two Divination magazines that I would recommend to you, if you are looking for something to read: The Cartomancer and The Esotoracle.
The Cartomancer – Spring 2020 cover
The Cartomancer is based in the US and offers and paper and digital option for $15.00 and $5.00 respectively. Postage and packaging included!
The Editor in Chief has been the lovely Arwen Lynch for as long as I’ve been reading it, but she’s recently handed over the reins to Amanda Bell and Caliope Muse who have got the Spring 2020 Edition ready to rock and roll.
The Esotoracle is the new kid on the divination magazine block, with only one edition under its belt so far. It’s run by Kim Arnold and Steven Bright, two well-respected Tarot entities in their own right!
The Esotoracle| First Ed Cover
The Esotoracle is also available as a paper copy and a digital version. The paper copy is £7.00 (if you are within the UK). Postage adds to the price if you are in rest of EU or US/Aus, with copies coming in at £9.00 and £12.00 respectively.
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
Photo by Ba Phi from Pexels | What makes us who we are – nature or nurure?
It’s a hotly contested
subject in real life – do external forces such as environment and
education fashion who you are or are you born with a predisposition
to act/be a particular type of person? While the argument goes on,
it is currently accepted that much of who we are, mentally and
physically, and what we do as adults is a combination of our nature
and our nurture.
So, how do these
factors manifest in our Court Cards?
Our cards come with only two pieces of information, the rank and the suit. Which of these represents our card’s nature and which represents our nurture?
The RANK (Page, Knight, Queen, King etc) shows us the NATURE of the card while the SUIT (Swords, Cups, Pentacles, Wands etc) gives us the NURTURE, the environment that the character must function within.
Consider the Queen of
Wands – she is a Queen by nature, but she must function in a Wands
environment. How does someone who is by nature caring and empathetic
function in an environment where assertion/aggression, adventure,
courage and ambition are ways of life?
The answer is: with
difficulty.
Here’s an example to
consider:
Picture the scene *does the wavy hands thing* we’re in a play park: A group of parents is sitting on benches chatting amongst themselves while their children explore all the exciting features – they are on swings, they are sliding down chutes, they are climbing over the frames, they are chasing each other.
Suddenly a wail rises through the conversations and laughter and the parents turn to see who is crying. A small child stands in tears, with knees scraped and bloodied after tumbling off the slide.
This child’s parent is
a Queen of Wands type.
The challenge that the parent faces is – do I kiss the knee and make sympathetic noises, give cuddles and dab away the tears (which would be Queenly) or do I encourage the child to shirk off the minor upset and run back to join in with the game again (Wands)?
A healthy Queen of
Wands knows when to kiss the knee and when to chivvy the child along.
In my forthcoming book,
Genetics of the Tarot Court (yeah, it’s not catchy, still working on
a title), the Queen of Wands lies on the same axis as another three
court cards who face equally challenging integrations of their nature
and nurture.
I hope that you’ll enjoy finding out who they are and the challenges that they face.
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
One of the documents that historian Franco Pratesi found in the Library at Bologna University was 4029 Caps 119R.
It is, as far as I am aware, the earliest written record of divinatory meanings associated with the Tarot of Bologna. The documents all date from the mid 18th century, which makes it about 40 years earlier than Etteilla’s writings on esoteric uses for the cards.
Full details of the Library papers can be found at trionfi.com (and a great deal more in fascinating research too, if you have never visited the site).
The ‘cartomancer’s document’ (which I prefer to call it rather than the dry 4029 info!) outlines divinatory associations for 35 cards. So, this is for a restricted or stripped deck – not the full deck as we mostly use today for divinatory purposes.
For the Tarot court cards, the earliest written divinatory meanings for 14 of the 16 court cards are:
RD (King of Pentacles) – The man CD (Knight of Pentacles) – The thoughts of the man FC(Page of Cups) – The woman FB (Page of Wands) – The thoughts of the woman CB (Knight of Wands) – ‘The door knocker’ CC (Knight of Cups) – Accommodation or arrangement FD (Page of Pentacles) – Money FD (Page of Pentacles) Girl QB (Queen of Wands) ‘Puttana’ – whore QC (Queen of Cups| – Married woman QD (Queen of Pentacles) – Truthful RS (King Swords) – Gossipmonger RC (King of Cups) – An old man RB (King of Wands) – An unmarried man
Clearly we have two Fanti di Denari (Pages of Pentacles) in the document, so one of these must be an error. Pratesi believes that he second FD should really be the other Fantesca, FS (The Page of Swords).
If you wish to incorporate these meanings into your own contemporary Tarot work, it may be more appropriate to regard the Queen of Wands as ‘A career woman or independent woman’ rather than a sex-worker.
I absolutely loved the idea of the Knight of Wands being ‘the door knocker’ and for those of you who are fans of Breaking Bad, this scene is a perfect example of The Door Knocker.
The Swords Courts are presented without the Knight of Swords or Queen of Swords.
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
Every Sunday I (try to!) switch off the computer and rely on good ol’ fashioned real life to keep me entertained. This used to include reading the Sunday papers with a leisurely coffee and a wee bit of laid-back Spotify, but no more – it’s all doom, gloom, Brexit and The Great Orange Trumpet in the papers, so they are now GONE. I prefer to spend my Sunday being more … uplifted … so that, by the time Monday morning hoves into view, I’m refreshed and raring to go.
So, I tend to write instead of read – goals, about dreams, hopes and fears, blog posts, diary entries, lists, quizzes, work sheets etc etc.
I’m in a fountain pen group on Facebook and these Personalised Stationery journals kept popping up in people’s posts and I was intrigued. When I saw one of them had ‘#digitaldetox’ as a title, I loved the humour (hashtag? for a digital detox?!) but also PINK! An order was placed and lo! two journals winged their way up the country to Scotland.
The Personalised Stationery website offers a wide slew of hand-made in the UK notebook options – cover designs AND paper options. If you don’t want a pink Digital Detox journal, it’s also available in Natural. I’ve now got one in white too!
It’s got 52 pages (this is Post Quarto size – so think ‘school jotter’ size) and the paper is uncoated 85gsm by Fedrigoni. You can choose from lines, plain, grid, dots or seyes (‘seyes’ is that weird lined stuff your French penpal used to write on).
So it can take your fountain pen jottings (but give it a wee mo for the ink to dry!) and has little or no feathering or bleed through to the other side of the paper. Because the paper is quite thin, there is a little show through when working on the other side of the page, but not enough to bother me and make me want to take a fresh sheet.
And the very best bit about the whole thing?!?!?! I have discovered that you can CREATE YOUR OWN JOURNAL!!!! Yes indeedy! You can buy your creation as a single journal, or a pack of 10 or even a pack of 100. So if you are thinking of having journals made for your Tarot event, I would, without a shadow of a doubt, get them from Personalised Stationery.
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
A useful technique to add to your Tarot tool box of skills is looking for a Secret Path between the cards. This is an idea that I first heard about years ago in a book called The Secret Language of Tarot by Ruth and Wald Amberstone.
A Secret Path is where you can link the symbolism of one card directly to another in your deck, perhaps even more than one) and then use this ancillary information to help flesh out your interpretation of the original card.
While the technique might not be new to you, you maybe haven’t considered applying specifically it to your Tarot Court Card work.
It can be especially useful if you are working with single card readings. It allows you to talk about a Secret Path card as well as the card in hand. You’ll never run out of good divinatory information!
I should point out that It has to be a symbol within the card,, rather than a suit symbol, otherwise it doesn’t work. For example, if a Cup is depicted in every single one of the suit of Cups, you are not going to make much sense of your ‘Cup’ symbol as a Secret Path!
Likewise, a crown is no use as a Secret Path if all your King and Queen cards are wearing one.
However, if one of your court cards – not of the Cups suit – happens to be holding a goblet, can that non-suit symbol goblet provide a secret pathway from THAT card through to the suit of Cups – is there an element of that card that speaks of relationships and empathetic emotions?
Or is there another character, hiding away in the deck, also holding a similar goblet?
Here is a Secret Path example from The Wildwood Tarot that runs to two additional cards:
The Queen of Vessels (who is the Wildwood Tarot’s version of the Queen of Cups) is Salmon. If you are stumped about what to say about this court card, look at the other symbolism in the card. There is a hazel tree in the top right and a waterfall behind her.
Let’s think about the hazel tree first – are there any other cards in this deck where you will find a hazel tree? The one that springs to my mind is X The Wheel.
The Wheel in Tarot represents the changes of fortune, which can just as quickly cast us on a downward path as it can to grander things. Does Salmon have anything in common with that? Salmon is a fish that undergoes incredible changes in order to fulfil her destiny – transforming from a salt-water fish to a fresh-water fish. Salmon powers its way upstream, battering endlessly against insurmountable odds (leaping up, being cast down – like The Wheel?) to reach ancient spawning grounds.
You may even know the legend of the salmon and the hazel and can work that into your interpretation too.
In the background of The Wheel card, we can see three long legged birds – cranes – which catapults my insights from The Wheel to the three dancing cranes found in the 3 of Vessels and the communally experienced Joy associated with that card. Salmon is, ultimately a joyful card – thanks to this final link!
Now you can turn your attention to the waterfall – is there a waterfall that you can immediately think of in any other card in the deck? How about the splashing waterfall in the 10 of Vessels with its keyword of Happiness. This strengthens our earlier ‘joyful’ insight, doesn’t it?
Not every Court Card will have such fine symbolism included as The Wildwood Tarot does, but there will be other things for you to consider – hair styles, backgrounds, clothing, colours, hand positions, standing positions – these can all act as secret paths through your Tarot deck.
I recommend sitting with your current working deck’s courts and methodically going through the rest of your deck to find hitherto undreamed of links to other cards. It can take a long time! So set aside a weekend for this project!
To do it, take the first of your 16 court cards and select a symbol in it. Look at every other card for that symbol. If it arises more than three times in other cards, it may not be hugely useful to you as a hidden path, but more useful to you as a symbol in its own right.
Do this for all symbols in your card before moving on to the next card. If your cards are complex, you can see how this will take a dog’s age to carry out!
For example – if only two cards have a full moon, then this would constitute a hidden path. Six cards? Less useful as a hidden path, but absolutely becomes a significant symbol within your deck for you to research further.
Stop being confused by court cards! Start being excited by the possibilities! Become a court card adventurer along with me 🙂 The Tarot’s Court Cards are my specialist area. They talk to me. Not LITERALLY though ….
