Adobe has come up with a fun quiz – with excellent graphics – to help you not only identify which creative type you might be, but also which other type you would collaborate well. I thought that it might be fun to try to map them to the court cards!
Although we have 16 court cards, we do have four suits (Wands, Swords, Pentacles and Cups) and four ranks (Page, Knight, Queen and King)
If you were to pick four of these types to represent the four suits, could you allocate the remaining four across the four ranks?
For example:
If you associate Swords with ‘Thinking’, could you associate Cups with ‘Dreaming’, Pentacles with ‘Making’ and Wands with ‘Adventuring’?
This might lead you to associate Pages with Innovators, Knights with Visionaries, Queens with ‘Artists’ and Kings with ‘Producing’.
This gives you another way of looking at the creative styles across the characters of the Court Cards – Could the Queen of Cups represents people who are artistic in the field of dreams; the King of Wands would be a Maker in the field of Adventure; the Knight of Swords would be a Visionary in the field of Thought …. The Page of Pentacles would be an Innovator in the field of Production. Yes? No?
Worried that I’ve got completely untethered from reality?! Well, it’s just another suggestion to think differently about the Court Cards!
Come along to my session at this year’s TABI Tarot Conference and find out other ways to work with the Court Cards using their Secret Squirrel Names. And yes, my court card e-book will be available to pre-order on Amazon very soon!
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 ….
Spotted this description of personality types in Thalassa Therese’s timeline this morning on Facebook – the 17 Genders as per the Regles de Composition by Marc Antoine Charpentier, 1682.
Of course, we know already that the sexes of the characters in the Court Cards has no bearing at all on the SEX of the personality type being discussed in a reading – Queens can refer to men etc but, what of these 17 types as court cards?
Two of these are the same description – serious and magnificent – which leaves 16 descriptions. Do you think that you could peg each of these to each of your court card personality types.
Which one, for example, describes you?!
Me? I’d like to be A Major, I think – but I’d settle for Bb Major!
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 ….
Just a bit of Tarot Court Card fun to start us thinking about what we want for ourselves in 2019. I’ve done this for the past three years or so and it’s just a bit of fun, not rooted in any deep and meaningful ancient system. Just my own 🙂
So, you might be working out your Major Arcana card for 2019 to give you a THEME for the coming year, as inspired by your personal year data.
To find our what your personal year card is, take your day and month of birth and and add to 39 (ie 20+19, the incoming year).
Here’s an example: mine!
13
+ 8
39
60
Since there is no Major Arcana card numbered 60 (hey, we’re not using Minchiates here, people!), these digits need to be further reduced by adding them together, giving us a total of 6.
My theme for the year will be inspired by The Lovers *and I absolutely need to make better choices for myself!*
But since my blog focuses on the Court Cards, I thought we’d have a little fun and extend the exercise further:
Instead of adding up your digits, above, until they total 22 or under (ie the number of Major Arcana cards we have), total them up until they are 17 or less.
I numbered the Page of Pentacles, the lowliest of the lowly, as 1. But your numbers will not reduce to one, so I’ve also accorded him 17 (because he’s also VERY special, as well as being the lowliest of the lowly).
So, if you add up to 17, then you are having a Page of Pents year 🙂
Taking my example again, this means that my 6 – Lovers year – becomes further compounded by Court Card 6…. which is The Knight of Cups. This year is going to be my Grail year, and my search will involve making better choices for myself! *gives facebook some side-eye*
Want to take it further?! Well, you will be able to when my self-published book on court cards comes out at the beginning of July (at the latest!).
Have a try yourself and tell me who you end up with as your Court Card theme for the year!
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 ….
So, Thursday rolled around – the date that we’d all been dreading – the day that my mother was moving to an apartment in an ‘independent living’ complex.
Why the dread? The flat is lovely and I expect her to be much happier living there with lots of people around her and lots of emergency cords in case she has a fall. BUT she has lived in a 3-bed semi for 56 years and it is pretty full of 56 years of tat.
By Saturday evening she was a weeping rag of a woman, sitting in her little armchair unable to process any more requests from my SIL or myself about what was to stay and what was to go.
And my SIL and I were getting tired and fed up – irritated at the sheer volume of crap that we were packing at one end, unpacking at the other end and trying to find a home for.
The laws of physics states – you cannot cram the entire contents of a 3-bed semi into a 1-bed flat.
But by God, we have tried.
I was a ruthlessly efficient Queen of Swords, able to bin off boxfuls of charity lapel pins as easily as my old Mother’s Day presents that had been quietly punted to a shoebox in her wardrobe as soon as every Mother’s Day was over.
My SIL was more caring – constantly monitoring my mother’s physical needs over the day – cups of tea, glasses of water, enforced breaks for lunch etc. A healthy Queen of Pentacles.
‘What about this?’ I say tersely as I stand before her holding a china nut-bowl in a raffia basket.
“I am taking that with me,” says mother defiantly.
“When was the last time you used this, mum?” I ask (knowing full well that it has never been out of its box).
“I’m planning on having some get togethers in my new flat. I’ll need it.”
I pack it with a sigh.
I pull out another nut bowl, this time with bright Spanish-style flowers painted on it. “Can I put this one in the charity box then?” I ask.
Out comes the hankie. “No,” she weeps. “That was the last thing that your dad bought me on our last holiday together.”
Only someone with a heart of stone would have thrown it into the charity box. I considered it, because I am that heart of stone.
“Could you maybe just take this one and put out the other one?”
Mum shakes her head. “No, the other one was a gift from Old Andrew, my old friend from the art class. Do you remember him?”
I do. I also know that Old Andrew was probably glad to get rid of the raffia-swaddled nut bowl back in 1971 when he passed it on to mum.
And so the days went on …. and out of 3-bedrooms, we have only one large box of outgoing items for the Salvation Army. We have moved, however, many, MANY boxes of stuff that SHOULD go to the Salvation Army into her new house.
So, here’s what this Queen of Swords would advise you all who are still to move their aged parents.
1 Start thinning down everything NOW, long before your folks need to move – clothes, the drinks cabinet, the contents of the garage, bedding, kitchen cupboard stuff. Does my mother need THREE vacuum cleaners for a 1-bed apartment. A 1-bed apartment that she will pay a cleaner to actually clean for her. Apparently she does. *rolls eyes*
2 Try to encourage your folks to see objects as are they are, not as the stories they attach to those objects. Those stories tie you to that clutter. Without that story would you want that thing in your life? Old Andrew lives on in my mother’s heart, not in his nut bowl.
3 Prepare for your own move – to sheltered housing or even just your next house move – and thin down your own stuff. I’m starting this week!
4 Stop buying new stuff unless you are replacing old stuff. I promise you, you do not need 15 coats, mum.
5 Don’t hang on to things just because they are ‘good’ or may be useful. Get ‘good’ stuff that you don’t ever use out into the charity boxes so that someone else WILL find it useful.
6 Don’t put out anything shabby for the charity shops. If it’s not fit for you to wear/use, it won’t be fit for anyone else either.
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 ….
We all have roles that we play in life – child, sibling, friend, lover, partner, parent, colleague, boss, grand-parent, high priestess …. hey, it’s your life, your roles 🙂
Whether we are anchorite nuns, mothers of millions, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, we will all experience, God help us, that lightning strike that leaves us shattered like a broken mirror.
Most often we associate this colossal blow with personal disasters such as the death of a loved one; an incident that leaves us cored, without a centre, without the familiar roles that anchored us to our lives so securely.
The tarot card that illustrates this collapse of ourselves is The Tower.
We build a tower for ourselves in life out of all these roles. Each brick builds the tower walls thicker and higher.
Sometimes the tower that we unconsciously create is a restrictive prison – how fed up are you at returning to the family home to slot straight back into the role of ‘rebellious teen’ and you’re nearly 55? Just me?!
Sometimes we nestle inside, secure and hidden behind this enormous facade that we have built – it can protect us. We’re safe here from The Big Bad Wolf. He can huff and puff as much as he likes, but he’s never blowing down these walls.
But of course, he does.
Because they were never really bricks and they were never mortared in place with anything other than our relationships -with outselves and with others.
The bricks tumble and fall and our view of ourselves – and sometimes the way the world views us too – is forever altered.
The number of The Tower in the tarot deck is 16 and we have 16 court cards in the deck. Yes, it’s just a co-incidence but humour me and stick with it for a couple of moments.
For me, all the bricks in the Tower are the court cards. They are all the different faces that we show to the world. The caring Queen of Cups sits alongside the enthusiastic student Page of Swords. Of course, some bricks will be bigger and more important than others. If you are the Head of the IMF, your Pentacles Court bricks will be GINORMOUS and maybe those Cups bricks are reduced to nothing more than some pebbles in the mortar.
Suddenly the lightning bolt strikes and the whole edifice falls apart. Well, that’s got to be the end of the world, right?
But I put it to you that while it is the end of ONE world, it also offers up a brand new opportunity to step into a new one. One where the bricks are in a different order, perhaps with a different priority.
The lightning strike can illuminate you and awaken you to new possibilities.
You can consciously build yourself a NEW Tower. One that better reflects who you are NOW.
And, over time, THAT tower will also tumble and we will take our bricks and begin again.
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’s a new yoga teacher in town, Kate. She’s a former ballerina and you can tell. She is in control of every bit of her body and moves into positions fluidly and strongly.
I’m as envious as a very envious thing.
Inside my head, I am good at yoga – very bendy, very strong and about 20 years old. Outside my head I am not very good at yoga – I’m reasonably bendy, my language is stronger than my body and I am, of course, considerably older than 20.
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 ….
Recently I’ve been seeing a few tweets and fb posts about gender and ethnicity in the tarot and how we can ensure that the entire spectrums of both are represented. People, perfectly reasonably, want to see themselves reflected in the tool that they work with on a daily basis.
Since my own Tarot specialism is the court card arcana, I am especially interested in how these issues might be best resolved in the courts.
From what I can see, we have three issues:
the gender split in the ranks
the order of the genders in the ranks
the appearance of characters on the cards.
Looking at the deck ranks, we generally have Page, Knight, Queen and King. Knights and Kings are regarded as masculine while Queens are regarded as feminine. Pages tend to be the one rank where there is a bit of leeway and youthful males and females abound.
If pressed, I’d say that Pages and Queens represent a Yin energy whereas the Knights and Kings are more Yang. If that’s the case, then we have titles that are 50:50 with regard to the sexes associated with those rank titles.
There are increasing numbers of decks that switch things around a bit. Some have gods and goddesses (with the goddesses allocated the most Kingly rank, thank you very much). Others have titles that bear no relation to the sex of the incumbent nor give a clue as to any order of ‘importance’ rank – Teacher, Adventurer, Postulant etc.
So we ARE breaking out of the traditional mould and most people should be able to find a deck where the court ranks are more appealing than Page to King.
Another issue that can arise with the ranks is the erroneous assumption that the King is the ‘top’ or most desirable rank. Just because the King card is the final card in the series, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s the most important card or the most desirable ‘character’ in the court series.
Far from it.
King energy is great when you have got to walk the talk, but if you are learning a new skill, the Page’s energy will serve you so much better than a King’s energy.
Similarly, a teacher would aspire to the Queen energy and a medical or software pioneer (for example) may hold the Knight energy to be their most prized court.
No one rank is more important than the others.
We are a multi-hued and sexually fluid bunch these days and we do not want to limit ourselves to the gender- or monochrome cul-de-sac that is depicted in most tarot decks (especially old ones).
As far as the appearances of the various characters in the decks, yes, we do have gazillions of Caucasian or European-looking characters. This is not surprising, given the European history of the Tarot deck. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, we could benefit from more decks casting their nets wider as far as appearance and gender goes. If someone wants to use a Tarot deck because all the characters are African American…. or red-haired …. or all male or all female …. that’s absolutely fine. We all want to feel that we are part of the picture, and it would be great if there was a gorgeous deck for everyone!
But here’s the thing. For ME, neither the sex of the characters on the cards, nor the sex associated with the rank, nor the ethnicity of the characters on the cards has any bearing on how I read those cards.
For example –
The Page of Cups indicates a type of PERSON who may be tentatively embarking (Page energy) a new relationship (Cups energy). This could be a guy, could be a girl, could be a Caucasian person, could be an Asian person, could be red-headed, could be a blonde… could be a 6′ transexual from Bolton who calls herself Alan during the week and Tania at the weekends.
If people fall into the trap of thinking that Kings = men, and Queens = women, they are doing their sitter (and themselves) a disservice.
For me, ALL the ranks apply as equally to women as they do to men. And to men who have transitioned to women. And to women who have transitioned to men. And every sexual stripe and shade of humanity in between.
Court cards are about types of energy and not about sex, gender or colour.
What of the thorny problem of selecting a court card when choosing a significator?
Traditionally, certain courts have depicted specific ‘looks’ when choosing a card to represent your sitter. These Golden Dawn inspired ‘looks’ don’t work in today’s multicultural society – they are too restrictive.
Likewise choosing a significator based on someone’s perceived sex could easily cause offence. You don’t want your reader/client relationship hitting an early bump in the road by making an error in your assumptions, nor by bluntly asking someone how they want to be identified.
Forget choosing a significator with any kind of gender or ethnicity requirement.
Instead consider selecting one based on your sitter’s sun sign. Everybody knows their date of birth. Thus, any Cancer-born person would be represented by the Queen of Cups. Simple.
OR you could just let your sitter pick one of the 16 cards by themselves – then you don’t have to worry and they don’t need to discuss such an intimate detail about themselves with you. And you, as a reader, can talk with your sitter about the sort of energy associated with that court card too.
OR you might be sitting reading this in a daze thinking – who the hell still bothers with a significator these days?! And if this is you – you might be wandering around the halls of Tarot Thrones Towers feeling very confused. Pull up a seat and read some more posts. I want you to LOVE working with Court Cards.
What do you think – find new titles for the 21st century? Expand the genders? Switch up how the courts look?
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 ….
For the past ten days or so, I have been feeling as though I am living through the looking glass – and it’s not good, with cake that says ‘Eat Me’. I’m not even an American. What a challenge it is to be a liberally-minded American at the moment, because:
YES, Trump wants to build an actual wall.
YES, Trump shuts out Syrian refugees from America (allegedly for only a set period of time. We’ll see) Dear America, what happened to ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore’?
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 ….
Last week I shared A E Waite’s thoughts on the King of Wands being the card that bridges the Major Arcana to the Minor Arcana. I could almost hear Waite’s derisive snort as he lowered himself to talk about the Minors. Well, his loss is our gain!
I thought today we could take a look and see just how powerful the King of Wands can be as a bridge card and came up with a little spread purely for his use.
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 side effects of living as Elizabeth Taylor for a week (other than really sore eyes from too much mascara and eye-liner) was an unhealthy interest in her many husbands. And bourbon. Why not, suggested a friend, write about her husbands and relate them to various Tarot court cards? Why not, indeed.
Elizabeth Taylor’s love life is the stuff of legend – death, divorce, adultery – all seen through the lens of a newly born media merry-go-round.
Mine is exactly the same – apart from the death, adultery and celebrity, of course.
There’s a lot to get through – shall we just dive in?
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 ….
