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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.tarot,alt.divination,alt.magick,alt.pagan.magick From: nagasivaSubject: Court Cards in Readings Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2003 08:07:02 GMT 50030529 VII Courts in Card Readings in strict fortune-telling the focus is usually on some person influencing the querent's life, or at least in the area about which was asked. sometimes the reader may range farther afield in interpreting a layout and consider these to be references to people in the past and future. if imaginative, she may examine the character of the Court with respect to the cards around it: Smaller Cards indicate the Court is subject to direct influence (these often people of some relation to the character of the Court representing, whether in appearance, role, or actuality), and Trumps may indicate cosmic forces may be appearing in the guise or manner of, or by virtue of someone indicated by the Court. in Tarot, the reading may gain somewhat greater depth and range of meaning, because the Court Cards are associated with a elemental matrix: Fire of Fire Fire of Air Fire of Water Fire of Earth Air of Fire etc. they form a 4 x 4 graduator of personae or appearance for which all manner of additional quality may be supplied (e.g. one may substitute Solid (for Earth), Liquid (Water), Gas (Air), and Plasma (Fire) and mean by these some protocol of movement, stability, utility, and any number of other energies or intelligences that are capable of combining meaningfully) and derive significance. suit is prerequisite to Tarot and many fortune- telling decks, but is not always present in cards used for readings. some of the parlour decks are merely series of themed and helpfully-labelled objects or events depicted on the card. sometimes these will not be numbered. in these decks there may be no immediate analogy to the Court, excepting cards specifically indicating a person, such as through art or name (e.g. the cards labelled "Officer", "Sweetheart", "Widow", "Judge", "Lover", etc.; or those like "Merriment" which depict a person with whom the merriment is supposed to be enjoyed). the fact that they are called 'Court' cards and by definition have human beings on them, usually of high station, indicates their societal and personal nature. occult association of suit and element predisposes a further zodiacal mapping but for the numerical disequivalances (4 x 4 rather than 4 x 3). as some Playing Card decks (e.g. American) dispense with the Knight and leave J/Q/K x 4, this facilitates a very easy zodiacal attribution (my arrangement for the Piscean Age -- follow from Pisces diagonally- upward and to the right for a zodiacal band-series): Hearts Clubs Diamonds Spades Water Fire Earth Air Mutable Jack Pisces Sagittarius Virgo Gemini Fixed Queen Scorpio Leo Taurus Aquarius Cardinal King Cancer Aries Capricorn Libra which occult Tarot symbolists have maneuvered *very inelegantly*, omitting the Knaves/Princesses and considering for zodiacal attribution in Courts only those three highest in rank, AND out of sequence(!): Queen WofW WofF WofE WofA Pisces etc. from above Prince AofW AofF AofE AofA Knight FofW FofF FofE FofA [source: Crowley's Book of Thoth] with a vague description of how the omitted Princesses form some kind of Polestar Quarter Guardianship (very unconvincing!! anyone know of the source for this awkward construct?). instead, when constructing any Tarot, the Mage in charge of design should key whatever Courts are selected for their numerical resonance and plainly admit of ill-fitting matrices, reconstructing the entirety if necessary. for example, with a 5-suit Tarot, incorporating 5 Court Cards, this 25-card composite might be hard-pressedly applied to zodiacal standards. its pentafold division makes quaternal formatting even more awkward and ugly than a 16 => 12 mapping (trying to map 25=>12). distributing these Courts around a zodical circle uses at most 24 elegantly, and so makes necessary some kind of arbitrary delimiter like dropping a single card to arrive at this, selecting out a fraction 12 by virtue of rank and/or suit. leaving zodiacal association behind, one might go about applying it to something like Blum's Runeset of 24 + 1 blank or something more or less arbitrary (ideas for 25-sets? please let me know about them!). of course, this presumes that "zodiacal" includes some consistent 12-fold structure, whereas alternate zodical designs (e.g. one based on *5s and 10s*) might facilitate this, and interestingly (because the Chinese seem to enjoy both), may mesh better with a 5-element-suit-base. departing from tradition as I know it, there are FAR more elegant choices that can be made for developing the Court attributes than the zodiacal, ignoring their personal qualities and adhering to a strict numerical designation. Geomancy's 16 figures and Yijing's 16 tetragrams are two major examples. each of these is mappable to personality also, and need imply no temporal correlate (compare the personality-types that are usually ascrubed to what is called The Enneagram). by convention in card readings, Court Cards have been associated with personality by virtue of rank and element by virtue of suit. as such, card reading traditions have developed sets of characteristics which vary over time and serve to map out a broad generalization of influence (usually personal) for apprehension by the querent (known or an impending arrival into their perceptual sphere). the structure of the deck in question will have a determining affect on the manner in which signification may be discerned in the cards, and the deck's function in reading (e.g. for fortune-telling or for self-discovery or for a discovery of some occult Mysteries) will make for greater and lesser elegance of design. ------------------------------------------------- (c) copyright 2003 nagasiva yronwode. all rights reserved. nagasiva -- yronwode.com@nagasiva; http://www.satanservice.org/ emailed replies may be posted; cc replies if response desired; HOODOO CATALOGUE! send street addy to: catalogue@luckymojo.com
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