I attended a Tarot conference a few days ago. Whilst I enjoyed the day as a former tutor and lecturer I was not impressed by the lack of workshop skills such as health and safety before with evaluation afterwards - there was none - so my advice to workshop leaders is please attend a short 'preparing to teach in lifelong learning' course.
One workshop covered the Court Cards.
There were questions as to what these characters are like. Yes they can all shine when they are behaving at their best...but in readings people come because they have problems. It does depend on the general feeling of the read but many Court cards appearing in a reading will be acting out their worst attributes.
For example: when the question "What does the Knight of Cups have?" With lack of anyone else responding, I piped up: "A girl in every port".
Oh dear - not received well. Never mind, I had a laugh.
When these cards turn up, or any for that matter, it is because the person you are reading for is out of balance in some way. The cards show what and where these imbalances lay.
Occasionally I have read for people who have no apparent problems - all the nice cards (mainly 6s) then appear. Lucky people - there is little to say!
Kings, Knights and Queens are linked to astrological signs. People felt that this link with their sun sign meant that the card acts like them. Oh dear - there is a lot more about astrology than just the sun sign (or even your ascendant). It does not work like that. I found out very early on doing readings to ignore any astrological reference.
It uncomfortably mixes the transitory nature of the read with the natal chart.
Horary and not natal astrology I have found is more akin to tarot.
Court cards are not a fixed lifelong character. In a read. whomever the card refers to, is that person 'acting in the manner of' in reference to the person being read. This is not all the time but only applies for the brief moment of the read and period in question. The card may not affect other people that way (
E.G you can be nice at work, terrible at home).
The second session aligned the pip cards to astrology. This was interesting although I had come across it before. Unfortunatley, there was no question time at the end.
Showing my ignorance, if anyone can answer my questions I would much appreciate it:
1. Why are Aces excluded? Presumably because there are 36 divisions of the astrological wheel .
2. With the assignment of pip cards to the faces/decans (each 10 degrees) of your sun sign has anything been aligned with the terms?
Terms are
irregularly spaced divisions of the
astrological wheel.
3. A few people owned up to having cards like the 10 swords (not nice) as their card. (I'm happy to say that my 2 were the 9 cups and 10 coins). Is there any evidence that ones personal pip card or two works? I haven't noticed anything.
I can only conclude that this was an exercise where 2 systems (very valid in their own right) were forced together. See my post 25th March 2007.
So I took this picture but can't figure out what tarot card this could be.
