Tea-break Tarot School

Morning.  Notices first (settle down at the back there…) here is the promised grounding exercise. This is for after your tarot work.  It’s super simple but gives you an idea and a tool until you’re happy doing this for yourself.

Next a reminder that this is self-paced, come as you are course.  Lessons are aimed to be around ten minutes for the basic content, although you can take longer with exercises if you have the time :-).

If you want to share photos, ideas, questions, reflections then please come over and join the Facebook group.

Wonderful, let’s begin.  We’ve had a quick look at the Major Arcana and began talking about the Minors in the last lesson.  Today I want to talk about the court cards.  The courts are generally considered some of the most difficult cards to read.  They can be viewed in different ways.

You can consider the courts to represent someone of that age in your reading.  For example, say you’re doing a reading about work and a King card comes up, you might think of your boss (because obviously it’s 1950 and all bosses are men who say “doll” a lot and wear fedoras).  Or you might be doing a reading about relationships and a Queen card comes up that might be your best friend/ future lover/ significant woman in your life.  A Page might indicate your child or a young person in your life, a knight a teenager or young adult.  You get the idea.

I tend to look at the Courts as representing an energy.

• Pages are child-like and I link these to my inner-child aspect.
• Knights are full of energy and enthusiasm but have  a tendency (as can be seen on  the RWS decks) to go charging into action or get lost in dreams of greatness, so a caution is to stay grounded.
• Queens have a collected inner wisdom, a togetherness, as well as some of the “feminine” nurturing energy,  they often remind me of priestesses I have known or the divine mother aspect.
• The Kings are the strong, “masculine”, directed, external, focussed energy of their suit.

Each court card carries the energy of the suit.  My favourite courts are those in Joanna Powell-Colbert’s Gaian Tarot which move right away for the gender norms of the traditional RWS and focus on energies and archetypes.  Beautiful and relatable to life as I experience it.

Exercise 6

I first learned about the court cards in The Alternative Tarot course.  This course encouraged me to imagine them as people.  What kind of person would that be?  If you met them at a social event, what would they feel like?  Enthusiastic? Aloof? Would they be easy to talk to?  How would they interact with each other?

• Today pull out the sixteen court cards.
• Have a look at them.  Compare the images, what is the same, what’s different?
• Read a few of the descriptions in your guidebook, is that someone you could get on with?  What might they have to teach you?
• You might want to have a cup of tea with one of them…Say the Queen of Cups…I bet she’d have a whole string of incredible romances to tell you about, as well as all that aid work she did overseas, great stories!
• Then come and share your first impressions in the group.