Queen of Cups

A woman seated on still water, so veiled in light and reflection that her form can hardly be seen; she holds a shell-cup from which a crayfish emerges, an ibis stands beside her, and lotuses grow at her feet; her crest is an ibis.

The Heh of the Heh: Water of Water, the pure reflecting sea, the element at its most receptive. She rules the last decan of Gemini (the Ten of Swords) and the first two of Cancer (the Two and Three of Cups), carrying the year over the summer solstice. Crowley's hexagram, 58, the Joyous Lake, is the doubled trigram of her suit.

Rules Ten of Swords (Gemini III, The Sun), Two of Cups (Cancer I, Venus), Three of Cups (Cancer II, Mercury). The courts of the twelve arcs each take the last decan of one sign and the first two of the next, so that every court contains a hidden tension between two signs.

Crowley builds each court's hexagram from two trigrams, the suit below and the rank above: Cups give Lake, Queens give Lake. The result is hexagram 58, Tui, the Joyous (Lake over Lake). See I Ching and the courts.

Feeling internalised to the point of pure receptivity: the mirror. As an inner figure, the anima as reflection, whose danger is that she has no shape of her own. The four ranks are often read as the four ways the suit's function can be lived: the Knight extraverted and initiating, the Queen introverted and sustaining, the Prince as its intellectual form, the Princess as its embodied form.

This card corresponds to the Rider-Waite Queen of Cups. Crowley renamed the ranks to follow the letters of the Name: Knight (Yod), Queen (Heh), Prince (Vau), Princess (final Heh), so that the Thoth Knight is the Waite King and the Thoth Prince the Waite Knight. The figures' mounts follow the Golden Dawn: Knights on horses, Queens on thrones, Princes in chariots, Princesses on foot.

Gemini (“I think”): curiosity, wit, communication, versatility, youthfulness. Shadow: superficiality, inconsistency, gossip, nervous scatter, two-facedness.

Cancer (“I feel”): nurturing, loyalty, emotional depth, intuition, memory, protectiveness. Shadow: moodiness, clinginess, defensiveness, manipulation through guilt, living in the past.

The card holds the last ten degrees of Gemini and the first twenty of Cancer, so its character is mostly Cancer with a trace of the sign before. Anyone born Jun 11 – Jul 11 has this as their court card. Find a birthday.