Personalizing the Princesses
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In my previous essay on assigning tarot court cards to the Sun, Moon and Ascendant degrees of the natal horoscope, I promised to address how the multi-sign Princesses of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley can brought into the same model. Here goes!
It is a traditional assumption that each King has mastered the ins-and-outs of the element associated with his suit, while the Knave of that suit (later called Princess or Page) has thus far only dipped his or her toes in the mysteries. This gave rise to the idea of Arthur Edward Waite that the Pages of his deck symbolize “students:” they are youthful and wet-behind-the-ears, implying limited skill in dealing with life’s circumstances. In the Waite-Smith (“RWS”) deck I’ve always observed that the Pages are standing still, perhaps mulling over a step in a new direction but not yet committing to it. They therefore suggest unrealized or stalled potential that requires a “kick in the pants” from adjacent cards to seize the initiative that is latent in their tentative posture. They have much in common with the embryonic Ace of the suit; at least in the RWS version (not so much in the Thoth) it could be said that they must be “led by the nose” to get anywhere.
In the Golden Dawn’s Chaldean system of correspondences, the Princesses do not occupy a position on the rim of the zodiac like the rest of the court cards, but instead are placed (along with the the Ace) around the “Celestial Pole” at the center of the wheel, one Princess to each of the four “quadrants of space.” Each Princess thus rules over three signs, one Cardinal, one Fixed and one Mutable; the Princess in each case is of the same suit and element as the Fixed (aka “kerubic”) sign that occupies the middle segment of the quadrant, which not coincidentally houses the Prince of her suit, creating a neat bit of sibling convergence. The Princess and Prince of Wands align with Leo, the Princess and Prince of Cups with Scorpio, the Princess and Prince of Swords with Aquarius, and the Princess and Prince of Disks with Taurus. The Cardinal and Mutable signs on either side complete the picture. Waite shied away from all of this because he felt duty-bound not to reveal any occult secrets.
To bring this into the realm of personalized court cards, I located the Princesses in the quadrants for the astrological decans that contain the degrees of the Ascendant, Sun and Moon in my natal horoscope. Then I proposed that the significant life-lessons related to both the astrological features and the Minor Arcana for those decans would conform to the “learning posture” of the designated Princesses. In my case, the Ascendant is represented by the last decan of Scorpio, which links the 7 of Cups (Venus in Scorpio) to the Princess of Cups; the Sun sits in the first decan of Cancer (Venus in Cancer), joining the 2 of Cups to the Princess of Wands; and the Moon occupies the first decan of Capricorn (Jupiter in Capricorn), matching the 2 of Disks to the Princess of Swords. (The other court cards for these decans were covered in my earlier post.)
Among these correlations, only the Ascendant, its decan card (the 7 of Cups), and the Princess of Cups are elementally friendly; Water and Fire are hostile to one another, as are Earth and Air, so I may not learn much from the Princess of Wands and the Princess of Swords. This suggests that the “path of least resistance” in furthering my character development (specifically at the one-on-one level of the Ascendant) will partake of the nature of Venus in Scorpio, not a particularly charming combination that Crowley titled “Debauch” (debased, defiled, perverted, etc. ) accompanied by Harris’s evocative imagery; Venus — the planet of values — is highly suggestible while Scorpio — the sign of corruption and putrefaction — might make unseemly suggestions, a recipe for unscrupulous designs if not actually tainted behavior.
The only bright spot in this scenario is that, in alchemy, corruption leads to the reductive process of decay that ultimately purifies the Prima Materia by sloughing off the dross, yielding the metaphysical “gold” of the Philosopher’s Stone. Unless I choose to cave in to this process without trying to steer it, it will be up to the “crystallizing” prowess of the Princess of Cups as Earth of Water to harden Venus against the incursions of Scorpio in this unholy alliance (think of “forging a diamond” from humble carbon). Unfortunately, I’m not sure she is up to the task and will most likely defer to the similarly-aligned Knight of Wands (purification by Fire) to keep things above-board until the goal is achieved. Here is a graphic showing the three astrological functions and their cards.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on March 12, 2024.
