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The Card and Its Imagery

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The Card and Its Imagery

The four tarot traditions do not agree on how many kinds of court card there are or what to call them, and the Knight of Coins is a useful case for seeing the disagreement plainly. The Tarot de Marseille has four ranks, Roi, Dame, Cavalier and Valet, King, Queen, horseman and page in English, essentially the same four positions Waite kept under English names. The Golden Dawn and, following it, Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck restructured the court into Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, with the mounted Knight promoted to head the suit in place of a king and the seated Prince taking a position roughly equivalent to Waite's King.

Within Waite's own four-rank scheme, the Knight of Coins is read as the earth suit's active or questing force, and Pamela Colman Smith gave him the stillest horse of the four knights, standing rather than moving, in a ploughed field rather than open country. The contrast with the other three knights, Wands at a gallop, Cups at an ambling walk, Swords at full charge, is deliberate: the sequence of horses across the suits is usually read as a graded scale of pace matched to each element, fire fastest and earth slowest.

Crowley's Thoth Knight of Coins abandons Smith's genre scene for an armored figure in a chariot drawn by a bull, part of Harris's consistent geometric reworking of the small court cards, and keeps the sense of methodical, unhurried force.

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