Tarot 101: Methods of Reading Court Cards
(GIF by @horrorandhalloween)
Last time, I introduced the court cards with all of their quirks and complexities, but I didn’t really talk about how to read them. Below are a few methods for using the court cards in readings from the obvious to the more adaptable.
Court Cards as People
(GIF by @nawtacop)
One of the most clear-cut ways to read court cards is to understand them as representations of people based on their archetypal traits. (I should note that though some of those traits are heavily gender-biased, you don’t need to include gender to read court cards as people, but more on that later.) It can also be useful to consider the cards’ motivations when you choose to read them this way. For instance, if you pull a page, is it indicating a youthful person that you are interacting with or is it asking you to look at your own progress toward a kind of message, knowledge, or adventure?
When you read them this way, it is important to remember that a court card may represent you as well. A lot of this depends on context (what question did you ask for your reading?) and the cards that might surround the court card in a reading, too.
Court Cards as Timeline
If you haven’t already noticed this from the story of the Major Arcana, tarot cards share connections with one another. One of those connections is within the small family of court cards which can be seen as a kind of cycle on their own. This cycle is not nearly as expansive as the Fool’s Journey, but when read as timeline, the court cards can provide you with a different kind of perspective.
Here’s the timeline:
Page —> Knight —> Queen —> King
Youngest—————————-Oldest
While I have defined the timeline above in terms of age, there are other ways to use these four cards to understand progress (experience is one I am particularly fond of). To understand this, as I have pointed out previously, it is useful to notice the parallels here between the court cards and the Major Arcana.
Pages act (on a smaller scale) in the role of The Fool but with more advantages. If we meet The Fool as a kind of baby, we meet the pages as tweens. They are eager, but not completely blind. There energy comes from possibility rather than the blank slate that drives The Fool.
Queens and Kings operate similarly to The Empress and The Emperor in that they can be guides and they have a specific level of maturity that allows them to make solid decisions in different ways. (I do not rank the king above the queen. Instead the queen and king are at a similar level of maturity but approach things differently, the queens with diplomacy and the kings with snappy decisiveness.)
Knights might be tied to both Strength and The Chariot for various reasons, but I tend to let knights stand alone in the court card cycle as the adventurous in-between of the excited pages and the more collected queen and king.
The most important thing to note when reading these cards as timeline is that you can’t understand one without the others. (This is similar to considering the upright when pulling a reverse card.) When you pull a knight, how might that knight’s rash go-getter attitude be an indicator that you need more of a queen’s perspective? How can the page push you to grow? (Growth is not an indicator of value either!)
Court Cards and Gender
(GIF by @animatedtext)
It always comes back to gender, doesn’t it? I’ll spare you a rant about gendered correspondences and instead say this: Though “court cards” are tied to images of people, we don’t need gender stereotypes to understand them.
For instance, I resist the idea of the queen and king as parental figures. For one, we already have enough of this with The Emperor and The Empress (who are doing a fine job and also don’t need to be gendered, by the way), and beyond that, the idea of the queen as a mother or the king as a father diminishes their presence in the deck. The queen is a diplomat. That is a card that takes a decision and considers it in a philosophical way. The queen’s experience has taught them that consideration and success go together. The king has learned that authority lends them the space to make decisions unquestioned (for better or for worse). Gender is not tied to this. Active/passive (which I also find to be pretty gendered) is not really tied to this either. Those binaries are too reductive and prevent the court cards from acting as complex indicators in a reading.
Focus on the energy of these cards and what they have to tell you, not hypothetical and often-forced gender roles.
Ok—maybe that was still a bit of a rant, but you get the point.
All of these work in tandem with the general understandings of each cards and their suits, of course. You can use these methods individually and set out to read in a specific way based on context of your reading. But you might also consider combining these methods and considering everything! (For instance: How does a court card’s space in a particular cycle impact your understanding of it as a representative person?) Court cards are complex. Always consider the possibilities.
More Tarot 101: Welcome to Tarot / The Story of the Major Arcana / Card Keywords / Choosing a Deck / Practice Makes Perfect / Bonding with Your Deck(s) / An Introduction to Court Cards / Methods of Reading Court Cards / Using Personality Types to Understand Court Cards / Tarot Journaling