The Thoth Court Cards: Old and Trusted Friends
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is the second post in my three-part initiative to explore the Thoth tarot at a profound level that goes deeper than the card-by-card analysis I’ve already presented elsewhere in this blog. Here I’m tackling the court cards, for which I’ve always considered Crowley’s compact explanations to be “some of the best out there.”
The most remarkable thing I’ve realized about his court-card essays is that Crowley, in his proto-psychological descriptions of the “moral characteristics” of each figure shown in the cards, was prescient in weighing in well ahead of the New Age fascination with “all things Jung.” Where Arthur Edward Waite, standing on the shoulders of Etteilla, made a simplistic attempt to delineate the corporeal attributes of each one (while noting that foreknowledge of a subject’s essential temperament should always prevail in any divination), Crowley seems to have understood the futility of that physiological approach in that there are no such portraits in the Book of Thoth. This makes his version admirably suited to modern “personality profiling” to the extent that it can be done with any reliability. (I’m not much of a believer since my own experience has been that natal astrology is much more effective than tarot for this.)
Similarly, Crowley — unlike Waite — doesn’t speak to the specific age of any individual identified by the court cards in a reading, only applying the Qabalistic “Father/Mother/Son/Daughter” paradigm to their relative level of maturity. Waite’s age-related stipulations never made any sense to me (in fairness, his criteria may have been examples of his numerous intentional “blinds”), and lacking a definitive framework from Crowley, I set my own nominal boundaries that specify subjects “under 25” as Princesses; those from “25 to 45” as Princes; and anyone “over 45” as Knights and Queens (while acknowledging that the “age yardstick” has shifted dramatically from the days when life expectancy was barely fifty years). Moving beyond Waite’s androgynous Pages, Crowley substituted the female Princesses, creating masculine/feminine symmetry in the four-fold system, but he was obviously unaware of the the “gender fluidity” that would come to be applied to the tarot in modern practice.
A while ago I made a provisional stab at sorting this out to my own satisfaction. I decided to regard the Princesses as representing youths of either sex, then apply the experimental thesis that the receptive “red” cards (Cups/Hearts and Disks/Diamonds in traditional cartomancy) will suggest female children and the more assertive “black” cards (Wands/Clubs and Swords/Spades) their male counterparts, mainly because of their military connotations. (This concept is entirely off-the-cuff and has yet to prove itself in practice; I realize that it won’t play well in some courts of popular opinion.) The Princes show individuals of “middle years” and of either sex using the same cartomantic “red” and “black”premise to differentiate gender. That leaves the Queens to reflect mature older women and the Knights their masculine cohorts. (I also project this model onto the RWS court cards when i use that deck and ignore Waite’s oddball demographics.) In reality, court cards do not always indicate other people involved in a situation so these distinctions may in fact be moot on a case-by-case basis.
Any in-depth examination of the Thoth court must come to terms with the whole “King/Knight/Prince” conundrum. I’ve addressed it at length in other posts, so here I will only summarize. It all began with the notion of MacGregor Mathers and his Golden Dawn compatriots (later adopted by Crowley) that the dominant male figure in the hierarchy must be supremely active and energetic; it must also symbolize the “Yod of Tetragrammaton” and therefore elemental Fire. The mounted Knights of the TdM deck (this was before Waite created his similar RWS Knights) were a perfect choice to discharge this patriarchal duty so they were pressed into service to replace the seated TdM Kings, who were demoted to riding in chariots (basically “mobile thrones”). The title of the transplanted Kings was originally left intact but subsequently changed to “Prince,” where it stayed in Crowley’s system, and the “Knight” label was retained by the new “top dog.” There is a rather fanciful (and Oedipal) Medieval — and perhaps much older — allegory surrounding all of this that envisions the ambitious young Knight supplanting the established King by killing him (the warrior-kings of old held onto their power only by demonstrating superiority in individual combat), and taking the Queen (ostensibly his own mother) to wife. At any rate, there it is in a slightly oversized nutshell.
I want to mention in passing that Crowley made a somewhat lackluster and uneven effort to append I-Ching-derived elemental validation to some of his court-card essays. I’ve never found that content to be particularly convincing or useful, but maybe I’ve been unduly swayed by the criticism of I Ching authorities with a more encyclopedic knowledge than mine who claim that his approach is largely non-traditional and therefore suspect. There is also a Thoth “clone” deck (the Haindl) that sports hexagrams on some of the cards but they don’t correspond to Crowley’s notation (for what it’s worth, both seem to be unsupported by conventional I Ching commentary), and since I don’t know whom to believe I will believe neither one. I do use the Thoth deck in concert with I Ching readings but I don’t try to correlate the two in the way Crowley does.
One of the most useful innovations of Crowley’s court-card worldview is that they represent “natural forces.” He takes the Fire, Water, Air and Earth correspondences of the Golden Dawn’s Knights, Queens, Princes and Princesses and blends them with the elements of the four suits to create a double classification: the Knight of Wands embodies “Fire of Fire,” which he equates with lightning and other phenomena of “violent onset;” at the other end of the chain he relates the King of Disks (“Fire of Earth”) to mountains (or more properly to the forces that create them). He continues through a number of other cards in the same way, and then bails out by saying “It is very important as a mental exercise to work out for oneself these correspondences between the Symbol and the Natural Forces which they represent.” He does, however include a table in the Appendices titled “The Triplicities of the Zodiac” that gives a slightly more complete (but still meager) accounting; it seems to me that if he in fact followed his own advice he isn’t letting on. Some time ago I created my own fully-developed version that is worth including here:
Elemental Pairings as Natural Phenomena
Fire modified by Fire (+/+): a fire-storm; an explosion; a lightning bolt; a melt-down
Fire modified by Water (+/-): cooling/extinguishing; steam formation; sweat; a wet sauna
Fire modified by Air (+/+): an intense flame; a cutting torch; a blast furnace; a “flame-out;” an uncontrolled burn
Fire modified by Earth (+/-): steady combustion; smoldering; a dry sauna; a controlled burn
Water modified by Fire (-/+): evaporation; cloud formation; condensation; thawing; boiling; a thunder-storm
Water modified by Water (-/-): saturation; flash- flooding; a cloudburst
Water modified by Air (-/+): turbulence; aeration; waves; a water-spout; a hurricane; a tsunami
Water modified by Earth (-/-): turbidity; solidification; freezing; glacial flow; tidal action
Air modified by Fire (+/+): Summer; hot weather; South wind; thermal convection; a tornado
Air modified by Water (+/-): Spring; wet weather; fog; rain; East wind; a low-pressure system
Air modified by Air (+/+): Autumn; dry weather; West wind; a high-pressure system
Air modified by Earth (+/-): Winter; cold weather; North wind; a polar vortex
Earth modified by Fire (-/+): plate tectonics — mountain formation, a volcano, an earthquake, a subduction fault, plastic deformation; metal smelting; kiln-drying
Earth modified by Water (-/-): erosion; irrigation; hydraulic fracturing; mud; quicksand
Earth modified by Air (-/+): drought; desertification; a dust storm
Earth modified by Earth (-/-): compaction; stabilization; settling; cultivation; artificing
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on February 11, 2024.
