Tarot Thrones | The Court Card Blog

Tag: full moon

  • Full Moon Spread

    So I thought I’d come up with a Full Moon spread for the fans of the Wildwood Tarot over there in facebookland. Am popping it here in case it might be something that you want to add to your own toolbox.

    You can use any deck 🙂

    Focus on one aspect of your life that you seek clarity on and think about The Moon* card from your deck (it’s going to be acting as your totem in this spread).  Give your cards a good shuffle, face-side down. When you have shuffled sufficiently, turn your deck over, face-side up.

    Without changing the order of the cards in your deck, work your way through the upturned deck until you spot your Moon card.

    The card ON TOP (ie the card in front of, or before, The Moon) shows you the energies that can be embraced to gain clarity.

    The card BEHIND (ie after) The Moon will show you the energies that no longer serve you in this issue and can be let go to help bring clarity to the situation

    You don’t need to interpret The Moon card itself as it was acting as our sign post to find the best cards.

    * If your deck doesn’t have a Moon card, pick another card that has a prominent moon feature.  

  • Crow Moon| March 2016 |

    The March full moon has a lovely selection of names that speak of the quickening of the soil and the spirit of Spring:

    Sap Moon
    Worm Moon
    Crow Moon
    Lenten Moon

    I have chosen the Crow Moon to celebrate the full moon of the 23rd because I am surrounded by the flappy black blighters.

    Lots of people hate them – frightening off the songbirds from the bird tables as they craftily work out how to burgle your squirrel-proof feeder.


    They are absolutely the noisiest neighbours in the history of Christendom.

    Many years ago, we were in a BBC Scotland gardening programme called The Beechgrove Garden.  When the producer turned up to ask me some preliminary questions, he was astounded by the amount of noise that the crows were making.  I was surprised- after half a dozen years, they failed to even register with me as being vocal!

    Now nearly 20 years later, I adore my great dark neighbours.  They’re clever, cruel and vastly entertaining to watch.

    I’ve hand-reared fallen chicks – wary-eyed feather dusters – with, erm, let’s say, VARYING degrees of success.

    I’ve rescued one who dangled by a claw from a bird feeder.

    I love their rhythms – wheeling noisily into the sky at dawn and then at dusk dropping into the treetops and settling in waves, like a black tide.

    At this time of year they toil through the skies clutching enormous twigs (usually the spring clippings from some garden border!) often so large that if one plummets from a distracted beak, you can get quite a startle as it clatters onto the pavement!

    The Crow Moon is, for me, a time when Spring arrives proper.  The ground is warming up, the sap is rising, the worms are working madly beneath the ground, pushing up their casts onto lawns all over the land.

    I choose The Queen of Swords from the Mary El to illustrate the Crow Moon.

    What is pulsing into life?

    The creative intellect of the Queen of Swords is what!

    As the year gathers power, so does our Swords energy – communication, brain stuff, book-learning, natural intelligence …. coupled with the Queen’s spirit – protective, nurturing and creative.

    Got a creative project lurking inside you? The Queen is telling you to Get. On. With. it.

  • February Full Moon | Princess of Cups

    The full moon of February is known by various names – Snow Moon, Wolf Moon and Hunger Moon (Northern Hemisphere) and Grain Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Red Moon, Wyrt Moon, Corn Moon, Dog Moon and Barley Moon if you live in the Southern Hemisphere.



    I’m in the Northern Hemisphere and Wolves are a bit thin on the ground here in Scotland. I don’t have any snow (at the moment) and since I’m in the throes of trying to cut down on the amount that I’m eating, I thought I’d plump for the Hunger Moon!

    The spread is just a one-carder gem and only uses the 16 court cards as my deck 🙂

    Who helps me successfully handle my hunger pangs from now until the next full moon?

    The answer comes in the form of the Druidcraft Tarot’s Princess of Cups.

    In this deck, the usual Page is replaced with a Princess, but she serves the same role.

    How she helps me with my hunger pangs, purely from the image:

    1  She has her eyes closed – don’t drool over gorgeous food when it’s a fast day.

    2  She holds a cup – drink plenty of fluids and make them as interesting as possible.

    3  She’s outdoors – get outside whenever I feel hungry.

    4  I like her clothes – focus on treating myself to a new item of clothing when I am less portly.  Honestly, just a few inches off my bosom and belly would be GREAT.

    4  Meditation.  And not involving the glories of the co-op’s almond croissants in any way, shape or form …

    So much for how she looks, but what might her Tarot meaning contributes to my successful wrangling of my hunger?

    Begin a relationship.  Well, Tom Hiddleston doesn’t know that I exist. YET.  So I prefer to flip this to mean that I should fall in love with SOMETHING. Maybe by focussing my attentions elsewhere, I won’t be too conscious of feeling hungry.  You know what it’s like when you fall in luff – you can happily exist on salad, even in the cold and damp 🙂

    The Princess of Cups is also a creative little soul – get the paints out and refocus.  But don’t paint pictures of food …

    How else can the Princess of Cups help me with my hunger pangs? What do you think? 

  • Full Moon in Cancer | Queen of Cups

    Gold backgrounds don’t
    scan very well!

    The Full Moon takes place on 5 January 2015 and appears in Cancer. This means that our world of Tarot Court cards, the corresponding Card character is The Queen of Cups.

    This character is caring, empathetic and often with a psychic streak a mile wide.

    A healthy Queen of Cups understands the power of emotional hooks can help YOU understand – and even dispel – those that are hooked into you!

    She cares how people FEEL and revels in cultivating great relationships and making genuine connections with people. Tom Cruise is a Cancerian and he is as well-known for his abilities to remember, for example, a wardrobe department assistant’s name AND all her family details as he is for his toothsome grin and Scientology beliefs.   Oh yeah, and his ACTING, of course.

    In your deck, does your Queen of Cups have the lid on or off her chalice? If she has the lid on – does this mean that she contains her emotions and avails herself of them when she WANTS to? If the lid is off, does it indicate that her emotions swill around and over the sides whenever idle fancy takes her?  What’s your opinion on the lid on/off interpretation?

    With so much watery energy flowing in and around her, the Queen of Cups is someone who can change direction with grace and fluidity (think: oceanic tides)

    The watchwords for the Queen of Cups are: ‘sensitivity’ and ‘relationship’

    So far so wonderful, but an UNHEALTHY Queen of Cups will be an arch manipulator of your emotions – a moody emotional vampire who leaves you an exhausted wrung-out rag!

    In arguments, an unhealthy Queen of Cups will trump whatever statements of fact you might have with some over-blown (usually!) statement about her health and thus completely wrong-foot you.

    *cough* not that I’m speaking from personal experience AT ALL.

  • Full Moon | Gemini | Knight of Swords

    The sun has swung into Sagittarius, so the silverly light of December’s full moon falls on the glinting armoured outline of the Knight of Swords, Gemini.

    I haz serious hat envy for this Knight of Swords.

    That’s peacock feathers by my reckoning and just the thing to be seen in around town this Christmas.  Also, you won’t need an umbrella with a hat brim that wide.

    One high wind, however, and you will end up in the next county…

    This golden-haired beauty is actually the Knight of Swords from the Visconti Tarot (Lo Scarabeo).

    I see that our Knight is breaking the first rule of superherodom – no capes.

    I would humbly suggest that the first rule of Knighthood should be ‘no peacock feathered picture hats’. It’s not a look that will strike fear into the heart of your opponent, bro.  Unless your opponent is wearing a fascinator.

    Would he look better in this?

    But other than the suggestion of a fancy hat and a cape for Christmas attire, what IS the Knight of Swords bringing to the table this fine full moon?

    As someone who is dominated by the element of Air, the Knight of Swords is very much a head-dweller and values the intellect over everything else.  Whatever story his head is telling him will be his truth – even if that’s at odds with his actual experiences. Neither is he entirely comfortable trusting his emotions either, preferring to go with his head over his heart any day.

    A Knight of Swords person has a lot of wind about them.  And I don’t mean ‘too many beans’ either.  They will be blustery, blowy and capricious.  Possessed of a rapier wit, he loves the ol’ verbal spar and parry.

    He (or she – the sex of the knight is neither here nor there)  makes a marvellous student – especially of mentally taxing subjects.  I can imagine him leading the university debating team and thinking deeply about such weighty issues as Ethics and Morality; working out what he believes, trying to scale his own mental Everest and work out what he stands for.

    A chat with a Knight of Swords will be fast and intelligent. You will need to be mentally agile to keep up with her train of thought, because it rattles along like an intercity express!

    On the downside, the Knight’s mercurial nature means that his point of view changes (depending on what else he has learned) and therefore isn’t the most reliable of opinions to lean on.

    But he’s fabulous if you need picture hats and capes….

    So, while the Full Moon is in the Knight of Swords:

    * Be prepared to challenge what you believe in.
    * Forgive people for changing their minds!
    * Get a cape and a hat for the coming season 🙂

  • Full Moon | Taurus

    As we creep towards Yule, the nights here in Scotland are definitely chillier. I’ve unearthed my bed socks for another season and the central heating has been turned on*.  For us at Tarot Thrones, November heralds the full moon in Taurus.

    In Tarot, Taurus is represented by the King of Pentacles, so for 6 November, here’s how he will be influencing us all!

    In the Druidcraft Tarot, we see an older man who sits in his great hall in front of a roaring fire upon which a boar is roasting. I love how the carved points of the pentacle behind him look like horns!  Perched in the window is a little red-breasted robin.  The sky is darkening.  As the Stark family in that OTHER Game of Thrones might say… ‘Winter is coming!’

    Pentacles is the suit governed by the element of Earth and this, coupled with his Fiery Kingly energy tells us that the Full Moon in Taurus is a very productive time (think of how fire and elements from the earth come together to make pottery, ceramics, glass etc).

    This is a very sensuous character – he’s all about the experiencing (Pentacles/Earth) through the doing (Fire).

    He is very much at home with the finer things in life (just look at his fine robes and surroundings!) and while we may not all have the wealth that the King of Pentacles clearly enjoys, we can make the most of all the wonderful things that we DO have in our lives. Yeah, this is where I get all mushy and point out that even the dog lying snoring gently by your desk brings wealth of a sort to your life.

    Maybe not his in-sleep farting though.

    The King of Pentacles enjoys great wealth, but he is no risk-taking gambler.  His approach is steady and responsible and if you are in business, his influence shows sustainable progress.

    This full moon, he tells us:

    Be productive!
    Slow and steady wins the race!
    Enjoy life!
    Be generous!

    * How do you turn on your central heating system? Simple. You just say ‘hey baby, you are the sexiest heating system that I’ve ever seen.’  Old jokes.  Golden 😀