Me and My Shadow, or Significators, Court Cards and Shadows
Of all the cards in tarot, court cards are the most likely to cause a tarot reader to scratch their head, but they’re also where some of the most helpful insights can be found. In my experience, the problem stems from the complexity of the court cards and their fundamental difference from the other cards.
The court cards are personas—people and the various personalities that exist within people. Period. New paragraph.
As with all of the tarot cards, you can take their essential meanings and extrapolate to cover the needs of your specific spread or question. But you will learn more about the court cards and what they mean on a personal level if you get to know them at their core first and extrapolate later. Get to know them as people with personalities. It takes time, but it’s worth it.
One of the easiest and quickest ways to do that is to find a court card that best represents you on a day-to-day basis, called your significator* in some tarot readings.
There are many strategies for that supported by various traditions of tarot reading. You could use your sun sign (or your moon or rising sign) to guide you to one of the suits or each a specific court card. You could use your appearance and age, although I find that this tends to be both White-centric and fundamentally racist. You could use the dominant elemental energy through which you approach the world to find your elemental suit. And of course you can just pick one that you like the most because it represents something to which you aspire.
My preference is the precise astrological method because it removes the paralysis of complicated choices and the bias of personal preference. It also highlights the strengths and shadows of your court card, and you know that this shadow worker Hermit loves exploring shadows.
An important note on significators: You don’t need to stick to just one significator; all court card personas reside in you somewhere. But for the purposes of getting to know the court cards, you’re picking one that generally represents you because it’s a person you know. When you’re doing a reading, feel free to switch up your significator (if you use one at all) to serve the needs of that reading. Looking at a new program of study? The Page of Pentacles makes sense to me. Ready to subtly control a negotiation with the right talking points and je-ne-sais-quoi? The Queen of Wands may guide you to the answers you seek.
And if you’ve never heard of a significator, you could benefit from learning to Read Tarot like a Nerd. There’s so much information out there, and it took me about 20 years before I realized what I’d been missing. Don’t wait that long.
Let me demonstrate what I mean with court card shadows and astrological precision. When I was born, the Moon was at 2º Virgo or so, so my Moon is in the first decan (10º segment) of Virgo. That means that my Moon sign maps to the Knight of Pentacles/Disks in the Golden Dawn system. That Knight includes the 8 and 9 of Pentacles/Disks, but it also includes the 7 of Wands, which I learned to think of as the Knight’s “shadow decan” thanks to the geniuses T. Susan (“Susie”) Chang and M. M. (“Mel”) Meleen and their Fortune’s Wheelhouse podcast.
The 8 and 9 of Pentacles/Disks are all about hard work and getting things right in order to reap fabulous material rewards. You can see that in most depictions of the cards. They’re good qualities, especially if you grew up a WASP, as I did. But it’s not all good. Intense productivity and highly polished end results come at a cost.
There’s a hint of that cost in Pamela Colman Smith’s illustration for the 8 & 9 of Pentacles, a metaphorical dark cloud on the horizon once you know to look for it. And it’s made clearer in the Knight’s shadow 7 of Wands. Long hours and fine detail focus doesn’t leave a lot of time for making friends or relaxing with peers. There’s a fierce independence and potential alienation from/by others. Perfectionism, ego, and a general lack of trust in another’s ability to do something properly doesn’t make you a lot of friends. And the fierceness with which this Knight is willing to fight for the quality of their own work? It’s astounding. We’ll criticize ourselves (and others) at the drop of a hat, but all that self-flagellation makes for very thin skin.
I’m a recovering perfectionist, but I don’t think I’m even on the road to recovery for workaholicism because it has such superficial benefits—the 8 and 9 of Pentacles/Disks (and even the 7 of Wands) are generally seen as admirable. But there is a cost to that shadow of he Knight, and stepping into the court card and getting to really know what’s going on inside that Knight’s head—an exercise I use to help students in Awaken the Court Cards—has helped me see some of my own shadows through the Knight’s.
As for the court cards representing my sun sign (the Prince of Pentacles/Disks with the 4 of Wands shadow to the 5 & 6 of Pentacles/Disks) and rising sign (the Prince of Wands with the 4 of Cups shadow to the 5 & 6 of Wands), those have different lessons. But I’m not laying it all out on the table all at once! Thin skin, remember?
There are other ways to explore the shadows and personalities of the tarot court cards, and I have a variety of in-depth exercises in my Awaken the Court Cards workbook, but it’s worth starting here as a first step.
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