Wandering Pages

The Pages or Valets of the tarot can seem lowly on the surface, but there’s something surprisingly powerful about them, whether they’re Pages, Valets, or the less lowly Princesses. You just need to step away from the noble bias of the court ranks.

Pages on the court

When I was learning the tarot, the Pages bothered me. I understood them as young and inexperienced and not especially noble. All of that is true and valid of the cards, and you can derive great meaning from those characteristics. But it’s a very limited understanding of what the Pages (and Valets) have to offer. It took several different approaches, systems, and teachers, and it probably took longer than it should have because of my own obstinateness. (That’s why I teach Read Tarot like a Nerd the way that I do—you get to skip ahead several years in your tarot reading practice!)

The Thoth Tarot uses a royal family structure and labels the Pages as Princesses who will eventually become Queens, and it was thought that system that I started to really understand the Pages as potential Queens in the making. 

Pages from the Linestrider Tarot and Life Line Tarot show that potential to grow queenly or venture out to explore.

I first got this idea from Mantis Tarot in a random post he did when we were both starting up our Instagram journeys. I think it was specific to the Page of Wands being the tarot’s apprentice witch (the Queen of Wands being the full-blown witch of the tarot). And I could actually see that idea play out in the Page of Wands in Siolo Thompson’s Linestrider Tarot: she is seated on a throne beside a dragon, and she is full of magical energy. (The insights that come from different visuals is one reason I’m such a proponent of owning multiple styles of tarot decks.)

It’s definitely a powerful concept, but in the Waite and Marseille traditions of tarot, the Page (or Valet) is not noble, and the most a Page could hope to become is a Knight (and the Valet can forget about anything beyond the servant class). Noble courts are not like chess, where a peasant can become a Queen (or Knight or Bishop or whatever). And that’s actually important. Pages and Valets are external to the noble court. That is meaningful and part of their power.

Pages explore, or Pages off the court

In preparing for my first run of Awaken the Court Cards, I had to articulate this difference and why it was important. In that class, we start with distinguishing the court ranks from each other. What makes a Knight different from a King, a King from a Queen, and so on? That’s because the court members of a given suit share a lot of the same personality traits: for the most part, the court of Wands are all charming and fiery and passionate and sexy; and in the land of Cups, the people are emotional and sensitive and creative and a little bit dreamy. But they’re different cards, so there needs to be a difference. Otherwise, you’re just duplicating cards, and that seems like a waste.

That’s where I came to understand the special role of the Thoth Princesses, who marry into the court via the Princes. The Princesses are outsiders. So are the Pages and Valets! Yes, they belong to their court, but they aren’t “of” the court in the same way that the nobles are. That’s also why they’re so interesting astrologically, at least the way I read them. They are located in the land of one suit, but they carry with them the lessons of surrounding lands.

For anyone who knows what a Page is, this is actually embarrassingly obvious. Pages carry messages between people. That is made literal in some decks, such as Benebell Wen’s Spirit Keeper Tarot, where the Pages are Heralds and indicate a message from one of the elemental realms. For whatever reason, I didn’t think about what that could mean until searching for that outsider status found within the Page, Valet, and Princess. While not many Pages would have done a lot of inter-kingdom travel in historical reality, we can understand their movement as potentially carrying lessons between lands in the tarot, as the Princess does. And if you think of the Page as either an explorer or student, this breadth of experience and openness to new things makes perfect sense.

And if you look at the Linestrider Tarot Pages, you’ll see that that’s also captured in the Alice in Wonderland-like and Dorothy (of Oz-exploring fame)-like Pages of Pentacles and Cups.

Side note: The nuance of that power gets lost when the Pages are reconfigured to a family system as the Daughter, as is done in some tarot decks. (That could be one reason why I never liked the Wild Unknown Tarot, despite my absurd love for the Wild Unknown Archetypes and Animal Spirit decks.) In my classes and the Awaken the Court Cards workbook, I encourage retitling the cards as a fun exercise in defining and reconceptualizing what the cards might mean. Something like “Daughter” emphasizes the youth and femininity of the Pages, and it crystallizes the family dynamic, but I’m curious what value people find in the familial titles of Son and Daughter that help interpret those cards specifically.

So where does the astrology come in?

In the Golden Dawn structure of court card astrology, the Knights, Queens, and Princes all map to 30º of the zodiac. Between the twelve of them, they cover the whole thing. What’s left for the Princesses? T. Susan Chang and M. M. Meleen of the Fortune’s Wheelhouse podcast pointed me to the idea of the Princesses as spatial rather than temporal in astrological terms because they are also tied to the Aces, which are rooted at the North Pole. This, frankly, is confusing to me since I think of astrology as based in time and I have no idea how the North Pole works in astrology, but the emphasis on space reinforces that idea of the inter-kingdom traveler who is bringing fresh blood to the kingdom. 

For me, the Princesses can be mapped to the four seasons, anchored in their element’s fixed sign to complement the Prince but bringing so much more to the table, carrying lessons from the cardinal sign before and the mutable sign after. For example, the Princess of Disks/Pentacles (earth) is anchored in Taurus (fixe earth), but includes Aries and Gemini as well. I’ve talked about other ways you might map the Pages/Princesses astrologically in my series on using astrology to better understand the minor arcana, but I don’t think they’re as interesting or coherent with the other interpretations.

So then what about their Shadow?

I love the idea of the shadows of the court as seen through their “shadow decans,” the 10º portion of their astrological coverage that comes from a different element. But in this model, the Page or Princess has no clear shadow: she has three full signs, not a lesser amount from one or another. In this way, perhaps, the Princess or Page is constantly exploring her shadow. She is as much from another land as she is from her “own” land, and either she has moved past that distinction of dominant or primary aspect and shadow aspect, or (young and exploratory as she is) she has yet to solidify and stabilize enough to make those kinds of distinctions.

If you want to do shadow work through a court card, but you aren’t sure where to start, you could always try awakening one of the Pages/Princesses and see where the journey takes you. As the court cards of earth, they are the most grounded and fertile for personal development.