Tarot Thrones | The Court Card Blog

Tag: King of Pentacles

  • Princess Charlotte | Court Card

    Princess Charlotte | King of Pentacles
    Also, looks like her brother, George!

    I was so caught up in Naked Gardening Day on 2 May that I almost completely over-looked a new arrival in the Windsor stable.

    Yes! A Spare has been born to keep young George (the heir) on his toes.

    Both parents looked relaxed as they emerged from hospital clutching a tiny well-wrapped bundle.  Who knitted that wee hat? that’s what we all want to know….

    So what lies ahead Court Card wise for Princess Charlotte (as she has just been named)?

    Being born on 2 May puts her firmly in the camp of Taurus – none of this ‘cusp’ stuff that Boy George has to cope with.

    No, for Princess Charlotte, the King of Pentacles is going to be her guiding light.

    As Fire of Earth, the King of Pentacles tells us that little Charlotte is going to be a hugely practical little gal – think of the practically creative power of Fire and Earth together.  She will be very hands-on in her approach.

    Does this mean that she’s not going to be terribly well-developed in the Smarts department? Well, it could mean that she’s not particularly attracted to book-learning, but there are many different kinds of Smarts and to be a King of Pentacles, you’ve got to be good with money and a practical problem-solver to become a success.  Will she be generous? Let’s hope so.

    I think that she might take after Princess Anne and her daughter, Zara Philips – fantastic horse-women and down to earth characters.

    I’m hoping that she doesn’t have Princess Anne hair though.  *high fives fellow fluffy hair-sufferers* May she have her mother’s tumbling dark mane!

    The King of Pentacles walks confidently through the world, attracting wealth and material success as he goes.  Will the little Princess exhibit the stubborn wilfulness inherent in Taurus? I hope not or tantrums could make her parents’ life difficult.  Or the nanny’s life difficult.  Take your pick.

    Although she’ll be dressed in all manner of pretty things, I’m confident that Princess Charlotte will lose no time in making it crystal clear that if she WANTS to attend a parade dressed in a Celtic away strip and a Barbie cape, she jolly well WILL ….

    Stand by for rows about tattoos, piercings and yoga!  The last word on anything will have to be hers!

  • King of Pentacles | Google’s mobile friendly algorithm change

    King of Pentacles | Rider Waite Smith Tarot | US Games Systems

    I’ve heard from a couple of colleagues now that Google is changing their algorithm to weight in favour of mobile friendly sites.  That clearly also affects Tarot sites, so, with both my web-design hat and my Tarot hats perched precariously on my head, I am impersonating the King of Pentacles.

    Here are a couple of things you might want to take a look at before you pay your webmaster any more money:

    First, run all urls for your website through google’s own mobile-friendly checker:

    https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

    If computer says ‘yes’ then you are good to go!

    If your site is hosted on blogger or wordpress, it is easy to get a mobile version.  I’m on Blogger and all you have to do is go to ‘template’ and there you will find an option to create a mobile-friendly version.  If you’ve customised your blogger site a bit, then pick ‘customise’ version and you will at least get your header.

    If computer says ‘no’ then there are some components that your site is failing on.

    Check out this guide: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/common-mistakes/

    Google is NOT stopping listing non-mobile-friendly sites, but those who ARE mobile-friendly will score higher on their algorithm.

    require([“mojo/signup-forms/Loader”], function(L) { L.start({“baseUrl”:”mc.us2.list-manage.com”,”uuid”:”a1532eabd65d034238367b6cc”,”lid”:”d3826d02b7″}) })

    Normal Tarot service will be resumed directly  🙂

  • 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 😀

  • How to Read Reversed Tarot Court Cards

    If a court card coming up in a Tarot reading can present a reader with a tummy-flipping moment of panic, then interpreting a reversed court card can engender a fully-fledged head-between-the-knees (your own, silly!) brace position.
    But it needn’t be so!

    Any card coming up as a reversal is basically calling your name and telling you to pay special attention to it.  Why does it need your attention? Well, because it means that the interpretation of the card won’t be straightforward.

    The most common ways to interpret any reversed card are:

    1  The information is the exact opposite of what you would usually say
         (perfectly reasonable place for a beginner to start from, I think – but a bit like using a sledgehammer
         to crack a nut as far as sophistication goes!)
    2  The message from the card is unbalanced – too much of the energy or not enough.
    3  The card’s information is delayed or blocked.
    4  The card’s energies are somehow perverted or twisted out of shape.

    And there are LOTS of other ways to interpret a reversed card (for the last Glasgow Tarot Meetup group I thought I’d provide ’10 Ways to interpret a reversed card’ and came up with 11 for the hand-out. So I had to make one of them 10a and the last one 10b.  I am inventive.  I am the Queen of Wands :-D)

    With a court card you get another two options – which I think are REALLY useful.

    Let’s think about the elements that we tend to use in Western Tarot: Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

    Fire and Air are 🙂
    Water and Earth are 🙂               (friendly)

    Fire and Water are 🙁
    Earth and Air are 🙁                   (not friendly)

    Fire and Earth are 😐
    Water and Air are 😐                  (neutral)

    Got that?  OK, Let’s take the King of Pentacles:

    Elementally, he is Fire of Earth.  The Kingly fire partners up with the practicality of Earth and we have someone who is incredibly level-headed,  got lots of practical skills, materially successful, knows what to do to Get Nice Things in life etc.

    Now, here’s the first thing that you can do with a reversed court card:


    SWAP THE EXISTING ELEMENTS AROUND

    Instead of Fire of Earth, he is now Earth of Fire. Gone is the maturity of the King and in its place is the Beginner Mind of the Page of Wands.  So the King of Pentacles, when reversed, can mean what the Page of Wands means rightsides up.  You follow?

    The second thing that you can do with a reversed court card is:

    EXCHANGE FOR THE EXACT OPPOSITE ELEMENTS

    Sticking with our King of Pentacles example, we have Fire and Earth.

    The exact opposite element of Fire is Water and the exact opposite element for Earth is Air.  So you can interpret the reversed King of Pentacles just as you would the Queen of Swords!

    What do you think?

    BTW – There’s PLENTY more of this stuff in my forthcoming e-book on working with the court cards. Excited? Are you? ARE YOU?!

  • Knight to King: Check your mate!

    Tartarus as he is today –
    Still clutching a motorbike wheel!

    So, I started dating my other half when we were at school.  At that point he was a clever, bespectacled lad with a bit of a wild side.  The specs were soon ditched for contact lenses and as soon as the school blazer was abandoned, he embraced motorbikes with messianic fervour.



    The Knight of Wands


    He was, as Lord Byron once put it, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know.’  Well, he wasn’t mad.  But two out of three ain’t bad.  As St Meat of Loaf once put it.

    He joined the merchant navy and headed off to see the world.  He came home tanned and wore his hair, as you can see here, in a mullet.  In his defence, it WAS the haircut du jour.  He also liked to wear sleeveless (fairly tight) t-shirts to show off his tanned and toned bits and bobs.  Dear reader, he was quite the catch.

    He rode a big motorbike.  He worked hard and played equally hard – AC/DC was his drug of choice and, dear reader, to a girl who listened to nothing but Kate Bush it was THRILLING!!!

    Of course, being somewhat bookish and conservative by nature, I wasn’t too keen on strapping my legs cross his velvet engines (as the Blessed Bruce recommended) preferring instead to persuade my long-suffering dad to drive me to wherever it was we were meeting in his permanently filthy orange Opel Ascona.  I wasn’t exactly high-ranking on the cool charts.

    So what did he see in me?  Possibly the challenge of conquest.  He wooed me with gifts from his foreign travels – expensive perfume from distant airports, cowboy boots from America, silk pictures from the Orient, gold and pirated music cassettes from the Middle East….

    It fairly turned a girl’s head.

    Fast forward 30 years *does the wobbly time-shift hands thing*

    He still has hair, but the only mullet that he will ever see is one slightly steamed and served up to him on a plate with some boiled potatoes.  He’s still tanned.  But he avoids anything that might cling to his….physique (he likes his food!).

    Somewhere along the way, he also seems to have morphed into some kind of Silverback gorilla.  When he’s shaving, he has to decide where to stop before he starts, otherwise he’ll still be shaving at his navel.

    He has become very successful at what he does – marine engineering.  He was the youngest Chief Engineer in his Company *swells with pride face*

    Tartarus understands money.   He has bookmarked the thisismoney website and regularly shifts money from one account to another to maximise the interest.  Reader, he understands Equity Bonds.

    I can barely cope with different James Bonds.

    Without a doubt, he’s a Man’s Man.  Apostles Men regularly make the pilgrimage to our garage for car/motorbike/boat engine advice and treat it with the same reverence as one might the pronouncements of a Harley Street surgeon.

    He’s an exceptionally hands-on sort of man and has somehow developed the skills to lay a patio, build a garage, fit a kitchen and…. if I’m really honest….he’d rather repaper our bedroom these days than set it on fire with passion 😀

    Dear Reader, my lovely Knight of Wands has turned into the King of Pentacles.

    I, of course, am still the same radiant slab of Queen of Wands gorgeousness that he married……

    How has your partner changed since you got together? What card represented them at the time and what have they grown into? And what about YOU?!

  • Hello again King of Coins!

    The moon has just hidden her light again and that’s the signal for me to pull another card for myself for the incoming energies from now until the full moon.

    And this particular slice of  divine Tarot gorgeousness comes, once again, from Kat Black’s Touchstone Tarot (see earlier cards here and here.  It’s the King of Coins. Again.

    This guy has been popping in and out of my life recently like a fiddler’s elbow!

    This King regards us with a steady gaze as he sits at table – his plate of oysters and glass of wine await his attentions.  But look at the toppled pitcher, you wouldn’t expect THAT at the King’s table.

    I wonder….what dining shenanigans we have just interrupted?!

    Kat says that this is a man who is enjoying the success that his affluence has brought. He’s no penny-pinching miser of a king – he’s a man who enjoys his luxuries in life.  Unlike our current crop of bankers, this is a rich man who is TRUSTWORTHY.  Prone to giving to worthy causes, he’s kind and approachable.

    The images that swirl together to make this composite King of Coins include Hans Holbein The Younger (for both face and body – from two different portraits).  And, most pleasingly to me, the feather in his hat is by Cecco de Caravaggio.

    I’ve just read Caravaggio by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Cecco was the dimple-faced youth who featured in many of Caravaggio’s paintings, including my absolute favourite ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’.  They may or may not have been lovers – but I like to think that somewhere, just out of sight – perhaps right behind the artist – are a couple of the King’s companions – happily squiffy and up to goodness knows WHAT – maybe sticking a couple of irreverent fingers up as rabbit ears behind the viewer’s head?  In fact, IS that King looking right at us or is he looking at someone just off to the viewer’s left?

    If only those companions had remembered to set the pitcher upright, we would have been none the wiser.

    This King indicates that it’s ok for me to enjoy myself a little.  Cut myself some slack and splash out on a few things that give me pleasure.  Maybe go out for dinner with some friends and not limit myself to a couple of polite glasses of vino….rewind to the good old pre-baby days!

    And maybe it’s time to bin-off the £9.99 skinny-leg jeans from The Factory Shop and splash out on something that isn’t worn through on the behind.  Although I blame this blog for wearing through the seat of my jeans.  And possibly facebook 😀

    What does the King of Pentacles bring to YOUR life?

  • Pick a card!

    You don’t need to know anything else about this chap other than what’s in the newspapers about him – and you don’t even need to like football to take part.

    Have a think about which Court Card Harry Redknapp represents for you…..and then turn your cards until you hit the first court card in your deck.

    In what way is Harry Redknapp (in this story) like the random court character card you have turned?

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/feb/08/redknapp-trial-harry-held-court  <- here’s the story!

    So – what was the card you chose – and what was the random card?!

    Happy Thursday peeps!