Within Waite's four-rank court, the King of Cups heads the water suit; in the Golden Dawn's Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess scheme the Thoth deck follows, the equivalent figure is the mounted Knight of Cups, assigned the elemental pairing Fire of Water, feeling's most concentrated and active expression rather than feeling held in reserve. His full Golden Dawn title, the Lord of the Waves and the Waters, and his astrological span, the final ten degrees of Libra through the first twenty of Scorpio, frame the onset of Scorpio's fixed water, the sign the Golden Dawn associates most closely with buried and transformative feeling.
Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a king enthroned on a stone platform amid a visibly choppy sea, cup and scepter in hand, calm and dry despite the surrounding turbulence, is a considerably more dramatic composition than the Marseille Roi de Coupes, a static heraldic figure holding the suit emblem with no sea, throne-platform or weather of any kind; the turbulent water beneath an unmoved king is Smith's own visual argument for what emotional mastery looks like, feeling present and acknowledged rather than denied.
Crowley's Thoth card keeps the name Knight of Cups, showing him mounted and in motion across water rather than seated above it, consistent with the deck's general shift of each suit's senior figure from a stationary ruler to an active, riding force.