The Minor Arcana (The Court Cards)
Often lumped in with the pip cards of the Minor Arcana, the court cards (what we would recognize in a modern-day playing card deck as the Jacks, Queens and Kings) are a source of difficulty for a lot of people who are new to tarot. On one level, the wide range of interpretations and meanings that can come out of these cards can make them very frustrating to pin down in a reading. For example, Michelle Tea in her book Modern Tarot goes to great lengths to discuss how the court cards can easily denote a situation, a person in your actual life, or an aspect of yourself that you are being drawn to express, (for better or for worse). Many authors have commented at length about this part of the Minor Arcana, and even entire books have been written about the court cards and how to best work with, and interpret them. As always, context, in the form of position in a spread, or the question being asked of the cards can be a very effective guide to working with the court cards, in addition to experience and one’s own all-important intuition.
On another level, the court cards also can be difficult for ace and aro people to engage with, because over the decades, a great deal of gendered heteronormative and patriarchal sexual assumptions have been attached to these cards, especially the Kings and Queens (one example that comes to mind is the Queen of Wands, and how it is often assumed to be a very sexually vivacious feminine figure). Many, many tarot authors and creators have tried to address this in more contemporary guidebooks and tarot decks, through reinterpretation or renaming but the ubiquity of the Smith-Waite tarot in Western culture makes this an issue that we still have to be mindful of.
My bias here is that I’ve come to view the court cards not purely as specific people that are fated or predetermined to come into our lives, but as inner aspects of our own inner psyche that, for one reason or another, are brought out in how we relate to both our inner selves and the people around us in our daily lives. Instead or promoting traditional gendered or sexual archetypes that only serve to alienate ace and aro people, the court cards have the potential to help us get more deeper into the drives and urges underpinning our relationships, and our behaviour.
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