COURT CARDS/THE KINGS

 

King/Pentacles

Virgo… Earth/Air

Keywords:  wise, successful, ruthless, controlling, domineering, practical, business savvy, prosperous, opinionated, stubborn, loyal, faithful, enduring, stable, foundational, industrious, honest, paranoid, suspicious

The Dark Side:

Where do I start with this King? On the surface he’s so reliable, friendly, inquisitive, talkative, and appears sunny. It’s only as your contact deepens that you begin to feel a foreboding, when you realize that there’s something more beneath the surface that he doesn’t expose with the general public. He’s friendly yes, but real friendship comes with a price, some would say a heavy price, a relinquishment of your personal freedom, your right to your own opinions, your right to your own decisions, your right to disagree with this King. He is fiercely loyal himself, and he expects complete loyalty from those within his inner circle, and for him, this loyalty is exemplified by complete acquiescence. He assures that he will accomplish this by holding out a golden carrot to the individuals occupying his inner circle. He will reward or punish behavior using his success and his wealth, and he will ruthlessly banish anyone who refuses to play by his rules.

In order for a long-standing permanent and deep relationship with this King as an individual, it often means that you have to give up your individuality. You become what he wants you to be, living in his shadow, mirroring his beliefs and opinions, his choices and those things which carry his special stamp of approval.

The Light Side:

He is successful. He carries the magic of the Midas touch. His business ideas and ventures wreak with the smell of accomplishment. He carries his success to great lengths, spreading it (in a very controlled fashion) among his close circle of family members, weeding out the individuals who are worthy and those who are not.

He is an avid lover and mate. He will fight to the death for the honor and well-being of his beloved. Anyone who would dare raise a hand or a tongue to his partner will find themselves facing a fury and wrath as overwhelming and impressive as that of the gods. He will usually be found in long-standing long-lasting relationships; much like the wolf or the swan, he mates for life.

If you are one of the approved beings inhabiting his inner-circle, he will do whatever is in his power to help you succeed, to fulfill your needs, to bolster your spirit, to brighten your day, to touch you with his magical energy.

King/Swords

Gemini… Air/Air

Keywords:  eccentric, opinionated, cruel, bullying, intelligent, industrious, calculating, eloquent, righteous, narcissistic, moral, judgmental, stubborn, vengeful, exaggerates, self-important, lectures, teaches, expansion of knowledge

The Dark Side:

This King is prideful, and forceful, and loud, and strutting, and bold, and eloquent, and authoritative, and commanding in presence. He is also, at his very core, extremely insecure, and he will do whatever it takes, moving mountains even, to conceal this flaw. If you don’t see past the glorious exterior that he tries so hard to maintain, you’ll get along just fine. But if you should even accidentally say or do anything that may put a small scuff on this armor, you will have opened a doorway that will find you under suspicion, and a much more temperamental cold-hearted calculating King will suddenly be standing before you.

If you have the audacity to actually call this King out on some of his claims or his position on a matter, or to point out any discrepancies in his stories or his opinions, or even just to counter and bluntly disagree with or chastise this figure, you will see the King of Swords at his darkest in the form of a vengeful entity hell-bent on retribution and punishment. He is unforgiving and infinite in his ability to hate.

The Light Side:

This King is passionate in his thirst for knowledge and his desire to pass on what he knows. He is a natural at speech and lectures; he is boundless in knowledge that he seems to absorb and retain naturally, with little or no effort. If you have an honest inquisitive question on almost any topic, something you genuinely want to know, don’t be afraid to ask the King of Swords.

He is surprisingly naive where relationship issues are concerned, no matter how old he may be, and he’s awkward at interaction with potential romantic partners. This is where his insecurity and self-consciousness are most pronounced. Some will find this charming, and others will find it exasperating. But it is truly an honest face for this King. (I had to say this, because this is so extreme in some cases that you won’t believe it’s genuine.)

He holds himself up to extremely high ethical standards, and he expects everyone within his circle, especially those people he loves, to maintain as high a standard, if not even higher. Immorality is his biggest turn off, and though some may find this a golden and appreciated stance, there are those that feel this King carries it to an unrealistic extreme. He cannot comprehend an open-minded frivolous devil-may-care energy or behavior or attitude, and so he has no understanding of how someone elses views could possibly be shaped along these lines.

 

King/Wands

Sagittarius… Fire/Air

Keywords:  controlling, systematic, conventional, honest, spiritual, resolute, finicky, impatient, empathically oblivious, narrow-minded, judgmental, bullying, childish, selfish, industrious, punctual, literal, tidy, suffocating, determined

The Dark Side:

This King, on the surface, is everything exemplary that you would want of a character, a citizen, a son, or a spouse. His honesty, his integrity, his uniformity and conventionality seem to personify the golden individual. He wallows in the glorious haze of perfectionism, drinking in all the compliments and acknowledgments that inevitably come his way. But wait, give him time, and the darker nitty-gritty bits of his personality that float throughout his being will eventual coalesce and give you a broader and a clearer picture of this King’s true nature.

The way he is perceived to his peers is very important to him, and he’ll go to great lengths to maintain this golden caricature. He will ruthlessly control and bully those within his most inner circle in order to maintain this facade. Order is extraordinarily important to this King, and he will wield his weight with a heavy hand within his own domain to keep things, all things, the way he envisions them, the way he wants them, the way he believes them to be. He feeds this fantasy image while purposely and sometimes unwittingly destroying the people, and circumstances, and reality around him.

And the cold hard truth of this King, though he appears strong and forceful and bullying to those within his inner circle, he is actually a coward and will back down and slink away when confronted by outside sources, or the face of true strength.

The Light Side:

He tries, he tries really hard, to follow all the rules, to do everything the right way and in the correct time frame of life. He adheres to the strict standards that he expects from others, and considers spartanism and self-sacrifice beneficial for the soul. He is a natural philanthropist, often giving above and beyond his means to support a worthy cause. This King encourages others to reach their highest potential, to take responsibility for their actions and life choices.

He leads by example; he excels through hard work and determination; he sets goals and realistic plans for action, seeing things through. His word is set in stone, a good thing this usually is, but it can sometimes be unshakable and too rigid. None-the-less, his ideals, his practical nature, and his continuous effort to live a saintly life, pulls this King onto a spiritual and ethical plane that most of us will never be able to reach.

The King of Wands is the individual whom you can depend upon. The individual who will keep their word and never let you down. He will brave the darkest storm and most adverse conditions to live up to your expectations. The thing is, you may often find yourself trying – and failing – to live up to his.

King/Cups

Pisces… Water/Air

Keywords:  narcissistic, hedonistic, addictive, sexual, non-communicative, emotional, jealous, romantic, idealistic, lazy, indifferent, weak, sensitive, easily hurt, prideful, isolationist, dreamer, lover

The Dark Side:

This King is all about his own appetites, desires, and addictions. He revels in the energy and reality, the physicality and mentality, of himself. He does love, he truly does, but he will never place the object of his love above his own desires or supposed needs. His motives, his actions or his inertness, and his spontaneous rash decisions will sometimes be foolish and destructive and will prove devastating to those people in his life.

He sees the world from a very skewered one-sided perception and would often be truly shocked at the negative responses from those around him when his narcissism peaks and dominates his life. This King can find it hard to believe that he’s in the wrong about anything. He will almost never apologize for the results of his behavior, and if he does it will ring with a hollow insincere tone. He seems oblivious to the trail of destruction he often leaves in his wake.

He is a master manipulator at one end of the spectrum, and an inert voiceless puppet at the other extreme. Somewhere in the middle of all this he moves through life that has moments of normalcy peppered throughout, often just enough normalcy to encourage the hopeful to remain in his realm, thinking that the madness is over and regular life might be possible after all.

The Light Side:

When his positive energy comes to the forefront, you will not find a more tender amorous loving nature than the King of Cups. When his positive energy is dominant, his intuition comes alive; his sense of humor explodes on the scene with a light-hearted sweetness that can not be compared; compassion shines within him; and a renewed sense of purpose is awoken.

It is easy to get caught up in the child-like enthusiasm for whatever is the focus of the day. The King of Cups on the light-side is almost a polar opposite of his dark side, imbued with an innocence that overrides practicality, an innocence that is almost ethereal in quality, as though it comes from another source, another entity. When this King is wallowing in his light side, he often needs the hand of someone who will look at things with a firm grip on reality.

You will find this King playful, entertaining, charismatic, jubilantly enthusiastic, impractical, irresistible, and extremely fragile. As the dark side of this King often finds him destructive to other people and their lives; ironically, on his light side, he can be dangerously self-destructive. It’s as though he’s given a window, and from this new perspective, if only for a moment, he’s able to see the reality and the results of his bad choices, his narcissistic tendencies. He’s able to fully see and understand the consequences of his actions, but only for a moment, a single, shattering, clarifying moment.

LEARNING TAROT
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