The Hero with 16 Faces: Diving Deep into the Courts
When it comes to my personal practice, I, like many others in the tarot community, have long overlooked the court cards and focused most of my study and attention on the Major and Minor Arcana. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main reason, I’m ashamed to admit, is that I’ve never found them to be quite as interesting as the latter two. (Is this just me? Let us know how you feel below.) But is this really a fair assessment, or is there more to our courtly cohorts than meets the eye? Over the past couple of days, I’ve begun my own little investigation to find out. I started off by asking myself a few simple questions:
What do the court cards mean to me?
What do I know about them theoretically?
What divinatory applications and trends have I noticed?
When I first learned tarot, I was taught that these cards almost always indicated an actual person, or at least a type or person, but I quickly found this to be rather limiting for my purposes. (Now that I really think about it, this probably has a lot to do with my disinterest as well.) It wasn’t until I had a few months of experience under my belt that I began to notice certain court cards stalking me in my personal readings. I didn’t understand at first, but as I learned more about the cards and about myself, I started to associate them with aspects of my personality, or even patterns and complexes that I was working through. For example, I came to associate the Knight of Cups with the pursuit of my dreams and the Page of Swords with an old pattern of defensiveness.
As my practice continued to evolve, I noticed that I was developing my own relationships with the court cards; I became great friends with some of them and couldn’t help but smile whenever they popped up in a reading, but there were others - I’m looking at you, Queen of Swords - who made my blood boil on first sight. Though I was unable to appreciate it at the time, these attractions and resistances could have offered me some valuable personal insights had I been able to look at the cards - and myself - more objectively. (Back then, I thought the Queen of Swords was just there to taunt me for my perceived “failures” whenever she showed up.)
I discovered another rather useful divinatory application as I began to dive deeper into other aspects of occultism, like ritual magic, spiritual alchemy, and initiation. As I progressed in my studies and practical work, I began to notice patterns in my readings that reflected my improvement, particularly in the court cards. At the start of my magickal journey, for example, the Page of Wands began appearing in my readings frequently, and as my confidence grew, the Knight of Wands took his place, and was eventually replaced himself by the King. (This measurement of progress works particularly well with initiatory systems like the Golden Dawn, in which the aspirant passes through a series of “grades” based on the four classical elements. This allows one to measure one’s progress grade by grade, or element by element.) But this application of the court cards doesn’t have to be limited to esoteric pursuits, however - such a progressive pattern could indicate growth in any area of life, from business acumen, exercise, or even gardening, for example (Pentacles) to art, poetry, or interpersonal relations (Cups).
I will be exploring some of the more theoretical aspects of the court cards in a future post, so I won’t get too deep into them, but I will say that I have come to learn that the court cards, like the Majors and Minors, also seem to have been based upon Qabalistic principles in their design. This lies in the significance of the number four; there are four classical elements, which are in turn related to the four letters in the divine name, YHVH, which themselves correspond with the four Qabalistic “Worlds” of Creation. In short, the four suits are attributed to the four Qabalistic worlds, while the court figures themselves each correspond with a particular letter of the divine name, and thereby a specific aspect of God; the combination of suit and court figure then speaks to a particular manner by which God operates within that realm. (It is very hard to explain, but I will do my best in an upcoming series of posts!)
With my questions answered and the extent of my knowledge and experience of the court cards laid bare, I decided to push it further: since everything else in tarot makes perfect sense numerologically, then what is the significance of the number 16? It didn’t take long for my efforts to bear fruit...
There are 16 individual squares in the planetary square of Jupiter.
There are 16 pawns in a chess set, and each player starts with 16 pieces.
There are 16 different personality types in the Myers-Briggs system.
There are 16 tetragrams in geomancy, an earth-based divination system.
There are units of measurement based upon the number 16 (i.e. 16 ounces in a pound.)
16 is the base number of the hexadecimal numerical system, which has many applications in mathematics and computer science.
16 can also be taken to represent the coming of age in Western society (i.e. after celebrating our “sweet sixteen,” we are then eligible for our driver’s licence, and are perhaps granted other “adult” privileges, like alcohol consumption, depending on our location.)
As we can see, the number 16 has many different applications in our culture - but what does this mean for tarot? Well, for starters, 16, along with its square root of 4, links the court cards to the planet Jupiter and the sphere of Chesed on the Tree of Life. This makes a lot of sense when we reflect on some of the classical attributes of the planet. Jupiter is often seen as a benevolent, fatherly ruler, stately and proud, but also fair and just - much like The Emperor, who is also linked to the number four, and looks somewhat like a court card himself.
It was the next couple of points, however, that really piqued my interest. What if, I asked myself, the court cards are the “pawns” of the tarot, which are expressed through sixteen archetypal personality types? This made me think back to some of our recent work on the magickal applications of the Major Arcana. Over the past couple of years, Julia and I have come to view tarot as its own system of spiritual development, with the Majors representing dynamic, initiatory aspects of the human experience - and possibly even the seven stages of alchemy. In short, we found that by removing The Fool, we were left with 21 cards, which could be arranged sequentially in groups of 3, to represent these stages and explain them symbolically. (Please see our “Frank Files, Pt. 4” post for more details.)
The Fool, we believe, is a symbol of the archetypal seeker, or as Joseph Campbell put it, the “hero with a thousand faces,” who embarks on his own journey through the Majors, or the seven alchemical stages, as he progresses through life. But more than that, he is the one consciousness that gazes out upon the world through the eyes of all, whether they realize it or not. As I sat there pondering this notion with all the court cards laid out before me, they began to look like the character selection screen from an old video game like Mortal Kombat. And then it hit me… what if these sixteen figures are the avatars The Fool “chooses” to manifest himself through in order to play the game of self-realization? The court cards have long been used as significators in readings, but what if they can also act as significators in life and offer us valuable insight into our personal “style” of attainment?
The idea was compelling, but I wasn’t sure how to make practical use of it. Sure, one could assign a Myers-Briggs type to each card and go from there, but what if there was already such a system built into the cards themselves? Since the entire framework of tarot is based upon Qabalistic principles, I decided to start there. As we already know, each court card is assigned an element based on its suit, and, as we saw above, each court figure corresponds with a letter in the divine name YHVH, which also has its own assigned element. Kings, for example, are attributed to the letter Yod, which itself represents fire; therefore, the King of Wands represents fire of fire, while the King of Cups represents fire of water. The Queen of Wands, however, represents water of fire, while the Queen of Cups represents water of water. This, in turn, provides us with a system of primary elements (the suits) and sub-elements (the court figures) that can be broken down into sixteen separate configurations.
The relationship between these elements and sub-elements got me thinking about the relationship between consciousness and subconsciousness. As Paul Foster Case has stated in his work on the tarot, life itself is an interplay between the subconscious forces and mechanisms that exist within us, and our conscious, everyday selves, which, in our natal charts, can be represented by the Sun and the Moon. With that in mind, if we were to take the element of our sun sign and place it alongside the element of our moon, we would find the same sort of elemental/sub-elemental classification we see in the court cards:
In other words, if we take our sun sign as our primary element and our moon as our sub-element, we can determine our personal court card configuration. My sun and moon signs, for example, are Cancer and Pisces, or water/water, which would make my significator the Queen of Cups, while Julia’s sun and moon signs are Capricorn and Pisces (earth/water), which would make hers the Queen of Pentacles. While it’s not an entirely satisfactory system, it is a start - and we can add to our understanding by taking the Majors associated with our sun and moon signs as secondary cards. (In my case, my type would be Queen of Cups, with The Chariot and The Moon as secondary influences.) And we must also remember - though there are only sixteen court cards, there are almost as many different conceptions of each card as there are people who read tarot, so it’s not necessarily as limiting as it seems at first glance. The Queen of Cups will undoubtedly manifest differently through me than it would another person with their own unique set of experiences.
It must be stated, however, that I do not consider this to be a definitive system - just a new and interesting way of working with the court cards. I will be spending some time over the next few weeks looking into other possible court-based personality classification systems, and if I find anything interesting, I will be sure to share! But for now, I hope I've been able to inspire you to do your own little deep dive into this elusive, but ultimately fascinating group of cards.
Thank you very much for reading! Please let us know what you think below, or, if you're comfortable, share your personal court card! Good luck.
Tim