Correspondences + Awakening the Court Cards

As a kid, I loved fantasy. I read books about people who spoke telepathically with dragons and rodents who lived in tiny castles and took up arms against their enemies and, of course, wizards and witches who enchanted people and transformed their worlds. As a teen, I discovered magic and spells in the real world, by which I mean a kind of energy rechanneling and conduit creating that shift probabilities and that have powerful influences on internal psychology. I leaned heavily into nature magic and a specific form of it called “sympathetic magic.”

The concept behind sympathetic magic is pretty simple, and it’s found huge resonance with a lot of people who don’t realize that that’s what they’re doing: it’s the idea that like attracts like. In simplistic terms, it’s the idea that types of energy converges into specific forms. Spicy foods are naturally imbued with energies that we associate with heat and fire; as are red flowers. And what is hot and fiery? Passion, violence, sex, anger, and just generally high energy. So magically, we might bring in red candles and dried peppers or cinnamon schnapps to represent and call in that kind of energy while working a spell. Whatever magical effect or lack thereof that you believe these ingredients play, they definitely (in my experience) have an effect on psychological state. Thinking about and focusing on a certain set of ritual tools based around a certain energy helps bring the related energy to the forefront of one’s mind. And when we are focused on things, we are more likely to seek them out and to acknowledge when we have encountered them.

Because of this, sympathetic magic does not need to be especially complicated. Instead, the complexity and personalization of rituals come mostly from correspondences, the things (e.g., colors, flowers, scents) that a person associates with their real target of interest (e.g., health, love, happiness). If making more money is the goal, it’s common to bring in green or gold and things of value as these represent literal money, luxury, and growth. What exactly you bring in and you do with it all varies by practitioner, tradition, and experience. 

Ritual magic is only one way to use correspondences. Because of their simple and practical psychological effects, you can also bring correspondences into your everyday life by just intentionally surrounding yourself with correspondences that attract the kind of energy you want around you. If you know Feng shui or color psychology, you have a good basis for everyday correspondences. But there are other simple ways to incorporate correspondences, such as wearing planetary colors on the right planetary day if you want to enhance some planet’s influence in your life. (For example, I typically wear green or pink and buy a lavender latte and sweet treat on Fridays, the day of Venus.) Just being in pink isn’t going to do the same thing for you as some highly ritualized and focused Venusian spell, but it’s a lot easier and many small steps add up to something much bigger. You can find plenty of correspondences for free online or in dense reference books dedicated to the topic. But you can also look to your tarot deck. 

If you’ve read much of my blog, you probably know that I love T. Susan Chang, creator of many great tarot resources. One of the first “modern” tarot books that I bought once entering the Instagram tarot community was Susie’s Tarot Correspondences (published by Llewellyn Books), and I was blown away by all the new ways of interpreting and understanding tarot through those correspondences. Part of the goal of the book is to introduce active, expressive magical practice into tarot work as a complement to the more passive, receptive magical practice of divination. Essentially, the cards tell you something and then you act on it, which you can actually do through the correspondences of those same cards. It’s a great resource, and I highly recommend it along with Susie’s (free) podcast, Fortune’s Wheelhouse, co-hosted with M. M. Meleen, creator of the geniusly devised Tabula Mundi Tarot (and other decks).

However, if you’re looking for court card correspondences, there are fewer resources out there. And to my reading, many of them rely on elemental correspondences, which is made possible by the court cards’ elemental attributes in the Golden Dawn and Thoth systems. It’s useful, but as I have discovered over the years, the court cards are complex individuals within simple types. They deserve more nuance and attention. To me, they represent different personas within people that we can activate and channel, almost like their own cluster of energies. 

Awaken the Court Cards: A workbook to bring the court cards to life [PDF]

$15.00

That need for nuance is partly why I created an intermediate tarot course exploring court cards and the different layers through which you can interpret them. And that course is why I created my new digital workbook, Awaken the Court Cards: A workbook to bring the court cards to life, which includes correspondences for the suits, court ranks, and individual court card personas. That’s how it started, but then it morphed into something much larger, with exercises and activities for getting in touch with the court card personas and then building upon their strengths or examining their shadows.

In the book, I help you assess where those personas may already be active, as well as where they may be harder to bring into focus. And of course, there are court card-inspired tarot spreads to help you learn from their wisdom too. I’ve actually shared two of them here on my blog, the spreads for the Page or Princess of Swords and for the Queen of Pentacles/Disks, with one more coming, but the other thirteen are exclusively for those who buy the workbook.

Whether you buy (and use) my specific workbook or not (and you can find it on Amazon as a paperback version), I hope that you try out correspondences and sympathetic magic. Even if you don’t believe in the magic part of it, the mental focus can do wonders for your mental state, and you may discover new favorite foods, scents, or other correspondences as you experiment. And if you do choose to work specifically with awakening the court cards, you can use this sigil that I created to help you get deeper into the work. (It’s specific to awakening court cards, not to using correspondences more broadly.)

If you’re curious about sigils (or just have no idea what they are), you can read more about them in a blog post from earlier this year.