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The court cards in the tarot can be tricky beasts. Do all of them represent the querent (the person asking questions of the cards)? Do they represent actual other people in the querent’s life? Are they even really people?

In my view, the court cards constellate a certain degree of embodied action potential. This can come through in any number of ways, with or without personhood, gender, and other markers of human-ness.

To explain what I mean, I wanted to share a few different thinking-structures for understanding what “King, Queen, Knight, Page” can mean within tarot. I’ll be sharing these thoughts in separate posts over the next several weeks.

First, though, let’s talk about GENDER and the court cards. One of the most important things you can do to improve your tarot practice is to endeavor to divorce spiritual gender from human gender. Feminine does not equal woman. Masculine does not equal man. The binary of man/woman does not neatly translate into spiritual masculine/feminine. Kings are not necessarily men. Queens are not necessarily women. Knights are not necessarily boys. Pages are not necessarily girls.

“Feminine” and “masculine” are archetypal energies, two “ends” of a spectrum that’s far less of a line and far more of a multidimensional mega-sphere constantly intersecting with itself.

I’ve heard folks turn towards using “yin” and “yang” as a swap that carries slightly less connotational baggage than “feminine/masculine” in the English-speaking realm, but since I’m not someone who has deeply studied East Asian spiritual practices, I’m not personally super comfortable using that swap. I’ve also heard folks use the Greek letters “alpha” and “omega” in a similar way; again, I’m not practiced or studied in any esoteric or spiritual traditions for which that makes sense, and it doesn’t make immediate sense to me, so I don’t use it.

The point here is that “feminine” and “masculine” are imperfect words used to describe spiritual and material themes; doing what you can to unravel the conceptual knots that tie “feminine” to “woman” and “masculine” to “man” will do wonders for your ability to think beyond conditioned categorization.

A small handful of tarot deck creators will take this into their own hands by giving the court cards titles that aren’t meaningfully attached to gender. For example, the Slow Holler’s courts are named Student, Traveller, Visionary, and Architect -- by renaming the court cards with roles that aren’t already inextricably associated with gender and gender-based hierarchy, there’s more space to get at the underlying archetype present in the cards.

This brings us to an important point: the court cards themselves are faces of archetype, and therefore unattached to particular genders, particular gender roles, or particular job-titles (regardless of gender). Except for the UK and a select few other countries, we don’t really have things like queens, kings, knights, or pages in contemporary society. This is why it is so important to expand your view of the court cards beyond their usual attributions!

As an exercise, try to come up with your own set of different titles for the court cards that aren’t so tightly attached to your understanding of gender, and feel free to share what you come up with in the comments.

How do you approach gender and the court cards? How much does assumed gender play in to your interpretations?

considering the courts part one: on gender