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Court Cards
Aug. 10th, 2018 10:30 pmI've been thinking about the court cards again—I do that from time to time—and my latest inclination is: I really don't care for the traditional Golden Dawn/Crowley associations.
The larger (arranged?) marriage of Tarot and astrology is another point for later, but if you take for a moment that the two systems match in any meaningful way, the court cards are still a weird fucking mess.
In the GD methodology, each Minor Arcana card is a planet in a sign, right? 4 of Pentacles is Mars in Capricorn, 2 of Wands is Sun in Aries (or maybe that's 4 of Wands, it's late and I'm on a slow computer and I don't feel like checking).
This makes sense. If the Major Arcana are the big deal things, the archetypes and so on, and the Minor Arcana is how they manifest, then it's natural that the Major Arcana would be the ideal energies and Minor would be all of it in action.
This renders astrological assignments to the courts redundant, and also a poor fit: twelve signs for sixteen cards? There is a system, of course—for REASONS!!! the Princesses don't actually correspond to any of the signs, but honestly those reasons sound a lot like retconning to me. But let's assume that the reasoning there is sound: now, in addition to representation for all the zodiac signs in the Majors, you also have it in the courts.
Why do the signs get to double dip? Why does Cancer need the Queen of Cups and The Chariot?
Again, there is contradiction in the teachings: the court cards rule the last ten degrees of a sign and the first twenty of another. So the Queen of Cups rules over the last ten degrees of Gemini and the first twenty degrees of Cancer. But the court cards are also still associated primarily with ONE sign. Which is it, Crowley? One or two? I've heard the argument that this is to account for the court cards, representations of people as they are, to be complex and multi-faceted instead of a pure archetype. I call bullshit.
The other model of the courts is the multiplicity of elements: so all of the Pages/Princesses represent the earthy element of their particular element, the Knights/Princes air (or fire sometimes depending on who you're talking to), Queens water, and Kings fire (or air, depending again on who you're talking to). So then the King of Cups is the fiery aspect of water, and his character can be inferred (in part) from the interplay of those two elements. This is a more satisfying system for me, at least on the face, as it does have a Mandelbrot/fractal nature to it, because you can imagine that each subdivision has four further subdivisions, and on and on and on.
Theoretically this model could democratize the court cards, especially if you took away the ranking titles and just renamed everyone "Earth aspect of Air" or whatever. I say "theoretically" because within the Golden Dawn/Qabbalistic juggernaut clusterfuck the four Aristotlean elements have a rough ranking from least sacred to most. (Sacred is probably a poor choice of words here but you can read Crowley or GD/OTO commentary on your own time.) So earth is the lowliest, the least pure, and then fire is the highest and the pinnacle of creation (or whatever). Or ether, maybe. I forget what the official stance is on that. So a hierarchy of sorts remains, at least as long as you're cleaving to a GD-inspired take.
Moving away from Thoth- and GD-specific models of the courts you have what I assume are more modern takes: the courts representing the journey of learning the suits, from the novice Page to the master King; or the courts filling different roles within a kingdom of an element, or so on. One that I wonder might be fruitful is if you take them as manifestations of the different astrological sun/moon combinations viz a viz elements. So all the Cups are water Sun signs, and then the Page of cups would be an earth Moon sign, and so on. (Or reverse it! Depending on if you're practicing Western or Vedic astrology and whether you want to put emphasis on the Sun or the Moon.)
(Aside: age and the court is weird. I'm a proper fucking adult now and so are my peers, and while I've been able to identify with Queens since I started reading Tarot, the idea of thinking of my male peers as Kings is weird. Too weird. They're all knights; middle age is always ten years older than you.)
Also when I started reading Tarot, I thought that it was a happy coincidence that there were sixteen court cards and sixteen Nyers-Briggs types. Surely someone had mapped them, I thought! Nope. I thought up coming up with my own associations but never did (I'm not terribly fluent in MBTI speak, even now.) Googling now, a million years later, and someone has, but their system is weird and inconsistent. It seems only natural that cards should share traits according to element and rank, and yet they do neither.
What I still like about the MBTI as court cards is that it flattens the hierarchical structure, once and for all. If I were to create my own deck, I'd rename all of the court cards according to the MBTI archetypes. The Counselor, The Executive, The Mediator. A functioning society needs all kinds, and one kind isn't a more advanced or developed version of another. And the images would show them in that role, as well. The other thing I always hated about court cards is that, with apologies to Pixie and all of the artists she subsequently inspired, the figures are so flat and dull. (Or in the case of Thoth, they're such fantastical archetypes that they're impossible to read.) The reader is stuck inferring meaning from colors and symbols and whatever they know about the card's associations, rather than how we usually understand our fellow humans: interacting with either things or other people. But depicting someone in the role of a counselor, an entrepreneur, or a logician (lol okay not all the names are great)—that makes something click.
My own system, after a bit of thought, is this:
The Pages and Knights, insofar as they're focused on being curious and inquisitive and gathering data from the world around them, are perceiving types. The Queens and Kings represent the application of the data, and hence are judging types.
Pages and Queens are more receptive, making them introverts. The go-getting Knights and the authority figure Kings are inherently more extroverted.
The elements thus determine the functional pair of a given card: the middle two letters. Based on this rundown, I would argue that:
Pentacles: ST
Wands: SF
Cups: NF
Swords: NT
So then you end with the Queen of Cups as INFJ: the counselor, or the confidante. And the King of Cups then becomes ENFJ, the ideologist or the mentor. Granted, there aren't official archetype names for each type, so there's wiggle room. But you get the picture.
I could see the argument for saying that Wands and Swords would be extroverted while Pentacles and Cups would be introverted (better application of masculine/feminine energies?), in another system. And making temperament a function of rank rather than element. There are a couple different possibilities. But I like them all better than the current mishmash of astrology and Tarot that currently reigns (if you'll pardon the pun).
The larger (arranged?) marriage of Tarot and astrology is another point for later, but if you take for a moment that the two systems match in any meaningful way, the court cards are still a weird fucking mess.
In the GD methodology, each Minor Arcana card is a planet in a sign, right? 4 of Pentacles is Mars in Capricorn, 2 of Wands is Sun in Aries (or maybe that's 4 of Wands, it's late and I'm on a slow computer and I don't feel like checking).
This makes sense. If the Major Arcana are the big deal things, the archetypes and so on, and the Minor Arcana is how they manifest, then it's natural that the Major Arcana would be the ideal energies and Minor would be all of it in action.
This renders astrological assignments to the courts redundant, and also a poor fit: twelve signs for sixteen cards? There is a system, of course—for REASONS!!! the Princesses don't actually correspond to any of the signs, but honestly those reasons sound a lot like retconning to me. But let's assume that the reasoning there is sound: now, in addition to representation for all the zodiac signs in the Majors, you also have it in the courts.
Why do the signs get to double dip? Why does Cancer need the Queen of Cups and The Chariot?
Again, there is contradiction in the teachings: the court cards rule the last ten degrees of a sign and the first twenty of another. So the Queen of Cups rules over the last ten degrees of Gemini and the first twenty degrees of Cancer. But the court cards are also still associated primarily with ONE sign. Which is it, Crowley? One or two? I've heard the argument that this is to account for the court cards, representations of people as they are, to be complex and multi-faceted instead of a pure archetype. I call bullshit.
The other model of the courts is the multiplicity of elements: so all of the Pages/Princesses represent the earthy element of their particular element, the Knights/Princes air (or fire sometimes depending on who you're talking to), Queens water, and Kings fire (or air, depending again on who you're talking to). So then the King of Cups is the fiery aspect of water, and his character can be inferred (in part) from the interplay of those two elements. This is a more satisfying system for me, at least on the face, as it does have a Mandelbrot/fractal nature to it, because you can imagine that each subdivision has four further subdivisions, and on and on and on.
Theoretically this model could democratize the court cards, especially if you took away the ranking titles and just renamed everyone "Earth aspect of Air" or whatever. I say "theoretically" because within the Golden Dawn/Qabbalistic juggernaut clusterfuck the four Aristotlean elements have a rough ranking from least sacred to most. (Sacred is probably a poor choice of words here but you can read Crowley or GD/OTO commentary on your own time.) So earth is the lowliest, the least pure, and then fire is the highest and the pinnacle of creation (or whatever). Or ether, maybe. I forget what the official stance is on that. So a hierarchy of sorts remains, at least as long as you're cleaving to a GD-inspired take.
Moving away from Thoth- and GD-specific models of the courts you have what I assume are more modern takes: the courts representing the journey of learning the suits, from the novice Page to the master King; or the courts filling different roles within a kingdom of an element, or so on. One that I wonder might be fruitful is if you take them as manifestations of the different astrological sun/moon combinations viz a viz elements. So all the Cups are water Sun signs, and then the Page of cups would be an earth Moon sign, and so on. (Or reverse it! Depending on if you're practicing Western or Vedic astrology and whether you want to put emphasis on the Sun or the Moon.)
(Aside: age and the court is weird. I'm a proper fucking adult now and so are my peers, and while I've been able to identify with Queens since I started reading Tarot, the idea of thinking of my male peers as Kings is weird. Too weird. They're all knights; middle age is always ten years older than you.)
Also when I started reading Tarot, I thought that it was a happy coincidence that there were sixteen court cards and sixteen Nyers-Briggs types. Surely someone had mapped them, I thought! Nope. I thought up coming up with my own associations but never did (I'm not terribly fluent in MBTI speak, even now.) Googling now, a million years later, and someone has, but their system is weird and inconsistent. It seems only natural that cards should share traits according to element and rank, and yet they do neither.
What I still like about the MBTI as court cards is that it flattens the hierarchical structure, once and for all. If I were to create my own deck, I'd rename all of the court cards according to the MBTI archetypes. The Counselor, The Executive, The Mediator. A functioning society needs all kinds, and one kind isn't a more advanced or developed version of another. And the images would show them in that role, as well. The other thing I always hated about court cards is that, with apologies to Pixie and all of the artists she subsequently inspired, the figures are so flat and dull. (Or in the case of Thoth, they're such fantastical archetypes that they're impossible to read.) The reader is stuck inferring meaning from colors and symbols and whatever they know about the card's associations, rather than how we usually understand our fellow humans: interacting with either things or other people. But depicting someone in the role of a counselor, an entrepreneur, or a logician (lol okay not all the names are great)—that makes something click.
My own system, after a bit of thought, is this:
The Pages and Knights, insofar as they're focused on being curious and inquisitive and gathering data from the world around them, are perceiving types. The Queens and Kings represent the application of the data, and hence are judging types.
Pages and Queens are more receptive, making them introverts. The go-getting Knights and the authority figure Kings are inherently more extroverted.
The elements thus determine the functional pair of a given card: the middle two letters. Based on this rundown, I would argue that:
Pentacles: ST
Wands: SF
Cups: NF
Swords: NT
So then you end with the Queen of Cups as INFJ: the counselor, or the confidante. And the King of Cups then becomes ENFJ, the ideologist or the mentor. Granted, there aren't official archetype names for each type, so there's wiggle room. But you get the picture.
I could see the argument for saying that Wands and Swords would be extroverted while Pentacles and Cups would be introverted (better application of masculine/feminine energies?), in another system. And making temperament a function of rank rather than element. There are a couple different possibilities. But I like them all better than the current mishmash of astrology and Tarot that currently reigns (if you'll pardon the pun).
