Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Card and Its Imagery

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Card and Its Imagery

Within Waite's four-rank court, the Page is the air suit's junior figure; the Golden Dawn's equivalent rank, the Princess of Swords, carries the elemental pairing Earth of Air, intellect given the most grounded and least active of the suit's four expressions, a curious pairing for a card whose picture is the deck's most visibly windswept. Like the other three Princess ranks, she carries no zodiacal decan; Book T instead completes air's contribution to the sixteen-card elemental matrix through her rather than through any decanic assignment.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a youth on a windswept hill gripping a raised sword, hair and clouds blown sideways, watchful rather than attacking, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Valet d'Epees is a static heraldic figure holding an upright sword with no wind, hill or alertness of expression at all; the visible wind is one of Smith's clearest single devices for making an abstract element, air, into something a viewer can see moving.

Crowley's Thoth card keeps the Golden Dawn name Princess of Swords, her full title the Princess of the Rushing Winds, and renders her amid a storm of geometric cloud and blade fragments, Harris's more abstract equivalent of Smith's windblown hill, without the single watchful figure Smith gives the scene.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.