Knight of Wands

In the Golden Dawn's restructured court that the Thoth deck follows, the figure corresponding to Waite's Knight of Wands is the Prince of Wands, assigned the elemental pairing Air of Fire, the suit's fire expressed through intellect and motion rather than through fire's own raw force, which the system reserves for the King. The Golden Dawn's full title, the Prince of the Chariot of Fire, and his astrological span, the final ten degrees of Scorpio through the first twenty of Sagittarius, place him at the threshold where Sagittarius's mutable fire begins, one of three such thirty-degree spans the fire suit's senior court ranks divide among themselves.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, an armored figure charging on a rearing horse, salamanders on his tunic marking the fire element, gives him considerably more visible motion than the Marseille Cavalier de Batons, which like all four Marseille knights is a static heraldic horseman holding the suit emblem with no sense of charge or urgency at all; the rearing posture and the salamanders are entirely Rider-Waite-Smith additions.

Crowley's Thoth card keeps the Golden Dawn name Prince of Wands and depicts him mounted in a fire-drawn chariot rather than on a rearing horse, closer to the literal Chariot of Fire of his full Golden Dawn title than Smith's more conventional cavalry charge; Harris's rendering keeps the sense of headlong motion while adding the chariot's more explicitly mythic frame.

Upright the Knight of Wands is read as adventure, passion and impulsive momentum, energy that moves before it fully plans; reversed, as recklessness, impatience, or the same energy scattered past any useful direction.

As a person card, he is conventionally read as bold, charismatic and driven more by feeling than by calculation, and readers commonly distinguish him from the King of Wands on the same axis the Golden Dawn's structure draws formally, the King's Fire of Fire as mastered direction, the Knight's Air of Fire as intellect swept along by fire rather than governing it; where the King sets a course and holds it, this knight is still discovering his course by riding toward it.

Waite's own printed meaning, departure, absence, flight, emigration, ties the card more concretely to travel and leaving than the broader passionate-momentum reading most contemporary practice now favors; the drift toward reading him as a personality type rather than as a literal departure follows the general twentieth-century pattern seen across most of the deck's court cards.

Because the Golden Dawn assigns him no zodiacal decan of his own but a full thirty-degree span framing Sagittarius's onset, some commentators read his restlessness as structurally built into the position itself, a court rank defined by transition between signs rather than settled within any one of them.