Five Ways to Choose a Significator
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Jack Chanek, author of Qabalah for Wiccans and the new Tarot for Real Life.
In tarot, some readers will pre-select a card from their deck to represent the querent of a reading. This card, known as the significator, is placed face-up on the reading space at the start of the session, and then the remaining cards are shuffled and dealt as normal. Readers who use significators like to have a card that grounds the reading and connects it directly to the person asking the question. If you’re interested in trying this technique, here are five different methods for choosing a significator in your readings.
The Fool, Magician, and High Priestess
This is a classic technique: the reader selects the Magician as the significator for a male querent and the High Priestess as the significator for a female querent. If you want to include a non-gendered option, you can use the Fool to represent any querent, as the Fool is the hero of the journey in the Major Arcana.
Court Cards by Personality
If you know your querent’s personality well enough, you can select a court card that matches them. For a serious, hardworking person, you might choose the Knight of Pentacles; for an innovative, inquisitive querent, you could use the Page of Swords. This identifies your querent and the specific energy they bring to a reading, regardless of gender.
Court Cards by Visual Appearance
A more superficial way to use the court cards is to choose a significator based on physical resemblance to your querent. Choosing this technique can help querents see themselves quite literally in a reading; however, if you read for a diverse clientele, this method will only work if you use decks that depict people with a variety of ethnicities, body types, and ages. Otherwise, your client may not find anyone in the deck who looks like them.
Court Cards by Sun Sign
Each sign of the Zodiac corresponds to a court card in the tarot. If you know your querent’s sun sign, you can choose the appropriate court card as a significator. The correspondences are:
Aries: Queen of Wands
Taurus: Knight of Pentacles
Gemini: King of Swords
Cancer: Queen of Cups
Leo: Knight of Wands
Virgo: King of Pentacles
Libra: Queen of Swords
Scorpio: Knight of Cups
Sagittarius: King of Wands
Capricorn: Queen of Pentacles
Aquarius: Knight of Swords
Pisces: King of Cups
The Theme of the Reading
Finally, you can choose any card in the deck that is thematically connected to the subject of your reading. For a reading about love, you might choose the Two of Cups to ground the reading; for a querent asking about their struggles with addiction, you could select the Devil. This method focuses on the question more than the querent, but it can still help to focus your reading.
Our thanks to Jack for his guest post! For more from Jack Chanek, read his article “How to Answer Yes or No Tarot Questions.”
