Tarot Thrones | The Court Card Blog

Tag: 9 Worthies

  • Meet the Family | Dame Fortune’s Tarot Wheel

    A while back I was enthusing about this Dame Fortune deck because it had a ready-made significator which absolves you of appropriating another Tarot card to use as the significator for your client.  At the time, I said that the Courts of the deck were worth a post on their own, so here they are.

    A year later.

    What can I say? I’m in a Pentacle-type sloooooooow state of mind 🙂

    I’ve written a post on the names associated with these Tarot cards, which you can read here.

    Dame Fortune’s Tarot Wheel was created by Paul Huson, the author of the excellent Tarot books, The Mystical Origins of The Tarot and The Devil’s Picturebook.


    Huson favours the tarot as it was, prior to the meddlings of those pesky kids from The Golden Dawn and draws his inspiration directly from Etteilla’s Tarot of the 1700s.

    Who was this Etteilla person and why are we interested in him?  well, that will be the subject of another post!

    Anyhoo, let’s meet the courts who have been waiting patiently for a year! Here’s my take on Dame Fortune’s courts 😀

    The suit of Coins family are depicted in a verdant green with contrasts of red, which make them a most visually striking suit.  Like The Fool, the Knave has a playful dog at his heels as he focuses on his Coin (and not in the direction of where he walks!), his axe in hand.   He’s named Lancelot.
    The Knight’s tabard is decorated with a trefoil (associated with the suit of Clubs) and he rides slowly through a lush woodland setting.
    Hopefully you will have noticed that all the Courts bear a name.  These names derive from the Paris pattern (learn more about that here).  I would love to know whether you feel the stories of the various characters influence your thoughts about them as Court personalities.
    You’ll note that none of the Knights have a name.  This is because the fashion for naming the Court cards spilled over from playing cards.  And playing cards only have Kings, Queens and Knaves 🙂
    The Queen’s robes also sport the trefoil and this Queen is named Argine. I have searched all the dusty corners of the internet for a woman of importance called Argine, but nothing has turned up.  If you can tell me who Argine was – please let me know!  It may just be a bastardisation of Regina.  I know that ‘argine ‘ is also Italian for ’embankment’ or ‘dam’. 
    Alexander is the King of Pentacles. The King’s Coin has become his shield.  He carries no weapons.  I love his horns.  The King of Pentacles is associated with Taurus and I like to think of these as his bull’s horns.

    The Swords family are largely in orange with a contrast of bright blue. They all sport spades on their regalia in some way or another, linking to their playing card suit.

    The Knave, Ogier, stands attentive while the nameless Knight’s white horse rears up – terribly chivalrous-looking, isn’t he?

    The Queen is clearly Pallas Athene – the Greek goddess of wisdom. I love the blood-like slashes of red inside her cloak – reminding us that this is a woman not to be messed with!  She looks directly towards the Knight – and he to her.  Looks quite an interesting relationship there…..

    I did read in Stuart Kaplan’s Tarot Encyclopedia that this name ‘Athene’ might actually refer to the martial Joan of Arc.

    Our elderly King of Swords is the Biblical hero, King David.  I love the Star of David on the throne and the inclusion of the harp, to remind us of the Psalms he wrote.  You can see the spade insignia on his armour and over his heart.

    The Cups are all in a deep watery blue, coupled with green and red.  The characters in this suit have no weapons nor armour (other than the Queen, Judith) Hearts are the playing card associations for this crowd and you can see this in all of the cards – La Hire’s leggings, the Knight’s jacket, in the robes of the King and the drapes that surround the Queen, as well as inscribed on each of their Cups.

    The Knave stands before a huge display of white lilies and his green scarf flows like water from his shoulder to his open Cup.  The nameless Knight is the least warlike of the four Knights – bare headed and weaponless; very much a character from a romantic tale.  Queen Judith’s cup has a lid on it – perhaps she keeps something of herself under wraps? It’s marvellous that she’s depicted with a sword (she decapitated the General, Holofernes, in the Bible tale).

    The King of Cups, Charlemagne, seems to be standing (the only King to be depicted thus) and is not depicted in armour – so he looks more like a priest than a King, don’t you think?

    The suit of Wands is depicted in blue and diamonds are their playing card symbol.

    The valiant Trojan Hector in his armour stands as Knave of Batons – his pose reminiscent of the RWS Page of Wands, I feel.  What does his baton remind you of? For me it is something quite playful, like a tent pole, rather than a weapon.

    The Knight rides forth down a cobbled path on his white horse looking much calmer than we would associate with a Golden Dawn Knight of Wands.

    The Queen is patient Rachel who waited 14 long years for Jacob to be able to wed her, her robe decorated with diamonds and clutching a spray of oak leaves and acorns (strength? endurance?). Her baton is a shepherd’s crook.  For when Jacob encounters her for the first time in their Bible story, Rachel is tending sheep. Caesar represents the King of Batons and has diamonds on his throne and carries the ‘fasces’ bundle that symbolises the power of the Roman senate.

    So what do you think of these courts? Do you like the names?  Do you like these characters – do their historical/mythical characters feed into your understanding of the cards as contemporary courts?

  • Heroes | Warriors |Worthies

    A long time ago,  I promised to show you the Court Cards from the Dame Fortune’s Tarot Wheel deck (by Paul Huson) because they are REALLY interesting: They are all named after well-known characters from classical literature and the Bible.

    I know.  CLASSICAL LITERATURE!!  THE BIBLE!!! Here on m’blog!!!!

    Before we meet those Court families, I thought that it made good sense to take a look at just why these cards bear the names that they do.

    *does the wobbly hands time thing*

    Back in the 1400s in France, it was the custom to pop names onto the face cards of the standard
    deck of playing cards. Two groups of names were common; one that
    became known as the Paris pattern and the other, the Rouen pattern.  These patterns, or lists of names,  have quite a bit of overlap and it is the Paris pattern that we are interested in today because this is the design that influenced early Tarot decks, such as Etteilla’s Tarot in the 1700s. And it is Etteilla’s deck that forms the basis for The Dame Fortune’s Tarot Wheel.
    The Paris Pattern

                       Hearts         Spades            Diamonds          Clubs
    Kings          Charles       David              Caesar                Alexander
    Queens       Judith         Pallas              Rachel                Argine
    Knaves       La Hire      Ogier               Hector          Judas
    Maccabeus *
                                                                                       Judah Maccabee

    Although we’re not talking about them today, here are the famous stars of the Rouen Pattern.

    The Rouen Pattern



                       Hearts          Spades    Diamonds    Clubs
    Kings         Alexander     David        Caesar          Charles
    Queens      Rachel           Pallas        Argine          Judith
    Knaves      La Hire          Hector      Ogier            Judah Maccabee **
                                                                                 Judas Maccabeus
                                                 

    Info from the International Playing Card Society website                                                                
    You will have noted, because I know that you are a clever and discriminating personage, that there is a Tarot rank missing – the Knights are not included in either the Paris or Rouen Patterns.  There’s nothing sinister about this, just that in ordinary playing card decks (where these patterns come from) there were only the three ranks of King, Queen and Knave.   We’ll be talking about this again when we get on to the Sola Busca Tarot in a week or so, because it’s contrary!  I know, it’s almost like I’ve PLANNED these posts.

    13th century ‘Nine Good Heroes’
    (City Hall, Cologne)

    It was also suggested to me that the Nine Worthies (Neuf Preux) play a role in the names selected for the Paris and Rouen patterns.

    These Worthies were famed rulers of the Christian, Jewish and Pagan worlds and were first mentioned in a chanson de geste (a type of epic poem), ‘Voeux du Paon’  (‘The Vows of the Peacock’) by Jaques de Longuyon around 1312 – all about chivalry.

    It seems likely that similar chivalric tales (which were all the rage) influenced the naming of the cards in both the Paris and Rouen patterns.  

    The Nine Worthies 

    Pagan         Hector, Alexander and Caesar
    Jewish        Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus
    Christian    King Arthur, Godfrey of Bouillon,  Charlemagne
    I’ve highlighted the overlapping names in the Paris Pattern with the Worthies in red.

    * Edit:  Paul Huson very kindly commented on this blog post and provided the following correction:  “Judas Maccabeus was one of the Nine Worthies but his name was never attached to the Knave of Clubs. From 1490 the Knave in both Rouen and Paris patterns bore the name “Lancelot” (of Camelot fame) although the name “Roland,” another name from French legend, was briefly tried but didn’t last”. 

    In the late 1300s,  Lists of 9 Lady Worthies were created, but only Judith seems to be an overlapping name. However, the Lady Worthies seem to change depending on who is creating the list!
    So while the Worthies must have influenced the naming of many of the male characters in the Paris system for playing cards,  the sources of the Lady Worthies just seem to be sourced from the Bible (Judith and Rachel), Argine isn’t a name that I’ve managed to find as a heroine anywhere (but it means ‘dam’ or ‘bank’ in Italian) and Pallas will be referring to the Greek goddess, Pallas Athene.
    King Arthur and Lancelot need no introductions from me but some of the others might need a Big Up:  La Hire was a French military commander during the 100 Years War and comrade of Joan of Arc and although Ogier (The Dane) was one of Charlemagne’s Knights, he became more widely known as a subject of European literature.
    Anyway, now that we’ve cleared all that up, I hope that you’re all geared up to meet Dame Fortune’s Families……in Monday’s post!