getting rid of the court cards, ah,ah,ah

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 04 Mar 2003, and now archived in the Forum Library.

anjocoxo	04 Mar 2003
I haven't been reading with my cards for some time now (about two months), and I couldn't understand why... it was sooo dificult, the cards that once drew me, now seemed to keep me away. Suddently, three days ago, one thought pass through my mind at light speed: throwing the court cards away. I don't why or how that came to my mind, but I couldn't rest until I went to all my decks (only 5) and took out all the court cards (I've put them in a small box, you never know). Imediately I felt the diference: I felt like a huge weight had just been taken from my back... and I also felt a sudden urge to read the cards, touch them, feel them, my precioussssss..... Did this kind of thing ever happen to you? Have you ever felt a need to change something in your decks (shape, for instance) taking cards, etc? Anjo

Faerie Lin	04 Mar 2003
I don't know how to comment on that court card thing.. all I have to say is 'Wow!' If it made the deck feel better to ya, then yay!! lol@ your "my preciousssss" comment! hahaha I do that alot too now! Can't wait till' the next part comes out in the movies! Have you tried looking for an oracle deck that you can really connect with? But then again you just made your own! :) I actually felt the need for more court cards, to represent each sex of each court card. The Cary-Yale Visconti does that. Ohhh and I actually did CUT the borders off of this deck. Yep I cut up a $40 deck and the cards look like they are suppose to know. Actually they HAVE the border thats in the artwork, just don't have that nonmatching offwhite/greywhite border of the cards that weren't part of the original cards anyhow. The edges now have ups and downs, little grooves, softly jagged and looks very authentic to me now. Took a long damn time for me to cut all them cards also.. couldn't cut in a straight line, so many little teenie weenie movements this way and that! Thats the only thing I've done, but that was pretty major to me! Took me awhile to get up the guts to do it! But was quite relieved when they turned out lovely!

Eissej	04 Mar 2003
I had a slightly different problem, but you still might find the story amusing... I came about this close (holds fingers up millimeters apart) to just not making court cards for my deck. I had finished almost everything else and just couldn't get my minds eye around the idea of doing 16 cards that represented people. Well, I debated and I thought and meditated and put off reading with them until I was clear in my mind about court cards and why I didn't want them. It seemed to be a fairly dramatic change to make to a deck with no reason. And what came to me was that I didn't not want court cards, I didn't understand the symbols I'd seen other cards use well enough that I could paint them. They cards I wanted to use seemed to me to be personality types not actual people. So I couldn't paint a human on a throne for a queen or a person on a horse for a knight. Even the names I kept finding didn't suit my idea of what the court cards should be. Once I realized that the problem was that I couldn't use the common symbols of page/kinght/queen/king and pictures of physical people to illustrate them, I figured out what I actually wanted rather quickly. I ended up with human outlines in a color connected to the element of the suit (the pentacles are green) against the second color I used for the suit (they have brown backgrounds) with several personal symbols for what the personality type is floating above it. And the names are child/youth/mother/father. These actually seem to work pretty well for me. Even if they don't have quite the same type of voice I've been told that normal court cards should have. They almost never represent individual people, but parts of people. I don't often ask questions that require them to talk about a specific person, when I do, they tend to use a major about half the time. Something I think is rather common... reading with only one suit, or just the majors or drawing a major and a minor etc. I understand that the decks are put back together fairly quicky though.

The getting rid of the court cards, ah,ah,ah thread was originally posted on 04 Mar 2003 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.