The court cards: people and stages

Court cards are the hardest cards for beginners, because they can mean three things: a person in your life, a role you are playing, or a stage you are passing through.

• Page: the student and messenger. Curiosity, news, first attempts, beginner’s nerve.
• Knight: motion. The quest, pursuit, enthusiasm, and its excess.
• Queen: mastery turned inward. Care, depth, emotional intelligence, judgment.
• King: mastery turned outward. Authority, law, responsibility, control.

Combine the rank with the suit. The Queen of Swords is mastery of thought turned inward: clear, perceptive, not easily fooled. The Knight of Cups is feeling in motion: the romantic, the one who follows his heart, sometimes off a cliff.

This deck takes the idea of stages literally. The Cups court follows one liver fluke through its life: the Page is the newly hatched larva swimming toward its snail, the Knight is the larva that leaves the snail with a tail, the Queen is the adult settled in a liver. The King is a different creature altogether: a parasitic barnacle that rules its crab from inside. Growth is the court’s secret subject.