#court cards

Hello, and welcome to the first in my series on tarot cards. I began reading cards seventeen years ago, and started reading professionally in 2008. I also study astrology and folk magic, and have an academic background in anthropology.

The court cards, which are the Page,Knight,Queen, and King of each of the four suits of the tarot, usually get interpreted as people in our lives. Some readers choose a significator from among the court cards to represent the querent, or allow the querent to choose one to represent themselves. Traditionally, a person’s physical attributes, their gender, and their age determined which court card represented them. For example, the King of Coins or Pentacles would represent a mature man with dark hair, the Queen of Wands a mature woman with red hair or warm coloring, etc.

Some, myself included, feel that tying the representation of the court cards to such fixed and relatively meaningless attributes is limiting. It is less useful to the reader and querent than exploring the spiritual or interpersonal qualities of the cards based on the element of the suit.  

According to this school of thought, for example, the Knight of Cups still represents a young person (traditionally a man, but modern readers tend to be more egalitarian in this respect). But rather than tying the suit to their physical attributes, the cups here carry the symbolism of water: the Knight of Cups is empathetic, spiritual, emotional. This can be far more useful, and yet designating the court cards solely as individuals can still be somewhat limiting.  

I certainly interpret court cards as representing the querent or people in the querent’s life when the subject of the reading, the structure of the reading, and my intuition lead me to do so. But I also believe that the court cards can represent stages of learning or growth in the individual.  

Interpreting the court cards as facets of ourselves, snapshots of our progress in a particular area of our development lends a richness and a nuance to them that is lacking when we simplify the interpretation to symbolizing a particular individual with a limited set of attributes, physical or otherwise. Additionally, this set of meanings we can ascribe to the cards is much more fluid; regardless of our gender expression or physical attributes, we all find ourselves embodying aspects of various court cards throughout any process of growth, discovery, or learning.  

Furthermore, the cycle of growth represented this way is not strictly linear; throughout any learning process we return again and again to the beginning, hit plateaus, jump forward, step back, etc. Also, remember that we will find ourselves in different stages in different areas of life. The novelist who finds themselves in a Page-phase on a new book might be in a King-phase when it comes to money management or spirituality, or even on another book.

Thank you so much for reading! Next time, I will post some of my guidelines for interpreting the Pages in the suits. 

-Benefica