Improve Your Tarot Skills. Tarot Personalities – the Court Cards

Improve Your Tarot Skills

Tarot Personalities – the Court Cards

It’s time to get up close and personal with our Tarot skills this week; by enhancing our relationship with the Court cards. Court cards can sometimes represent situations in a reading but usually represent people. When doing a reading, whether for ourselves or others, we often pick a significator from the Court cards to represent the person we are reading for.

Each of the 16 Court cards has been assigned various ‘personalities’ – character traits, physical appearance and even their star sign. Obviously they can give us a great deal of information in terms of how their actual physical embodiment is behaving; or likely to behave! Therefore, more familiar we are with the Court cards, the more information we can gather on people in our life and the lives of others.This exercise will help you to do that.

The exercise

It is similar to the Tarot exercise I gave you a few weeks ago which involved laying out your entire deck and then picking the six cards you liked the most followed by the six you liked the least.

This time however, using the deck you are most familiar with, lay out the 16 Court cards in front of you. First think of the people in your life who are closest to you. The ones you love and really enjoy being with. Now pick out the Court cards that remind you of them and set them aside. Next think of people you dislike or really don’t enjoy being around. Perhaps a difficult co-worker or relative? Place these cards in other group.

Now take a look at the remaining cards. Are there any you are drawn to or that you just feel you don’t like? Again, take these and make a third group of cards. And did you pick one for yourself? If not, go back and see if one of the remaining cards represents you – or more importantly, how you see yourself.

Review your three groups of cards. With the people you know – what is it about the cards you choose that reminds you of them? With cards that don’t represent people – what is it about the personality that these cards represent that attracts or repels you?

Be open

When I do a reading and I look at the court cards they seem to change depending on who I do the reading for. I see new things and different qualities or information appears. Pay attention to that as you think about the different people in your life. See if the court cards communicate to you in a different way for each person. Be open to seeing new things in the court cards.

The purpose of this exercise is not just to familiarise yourself with the Court card personalities, but to realise that as readers we can have a conscious or unconscious preference for cards (and therefore people!) simply based on the way they look. By understanding where we may be biased or overlaying the cards with our own pre-conceptions we can remain aware of this when doing readings and therefore stay impartial. Just as we learn not to judge people by appearances we must do the same with the cards.