Knight of Disks

A knight in dark armour with a stag's antlers for a crest sits on a heavy horse in a field of ripe wheat, holding a flail; a disk like a shield rests beside him and the light is that of late summer.

The Yod of the final Heh: Fire of Earth, energy applied to matter, the labour that produces. He rules the last decan of Leo (the Seven of Wands) and the first two of Virgo (the Eight and Nine of Disks): the harvest itself. Crowley's hexagram, 62, is thunder over the mountain: force spent on small things, which is exactly his virtue and his limit.

Rules Seven of Wands (Leo III, Mars), Eight of Disks (Virgo I, The Sun), Nine of Disks (Virgo II, Venus). 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: Disks give Mountain, Knights give Thunder. The result is hexagram 62, Hsiao Kuo, the Preponderance of the Small (Thunder over Mountain). See I Ching and the courts.

Sensation in its most active form: the doer of physical work. As an inner figure, the animus as provider. 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 King of Pentacles. 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.

Leo (“I will”): generosity, creativity, warmth, courage, leadership, loyalty, playfulness. Shadow: vanity, arrogance, need for applause, drama, domineering.

Virgo (“I analyse”): precision, service, analysis, skill, humility, health-consciousness. Shadow: perfectionism, criticism, anxiety, self-denial, getting lost in details.

The card holds the last ten degrees of Leo and the first twenty of Virgo, so its character is mostly Virgo with a trace of the sign before. Anyone born Aug 12 – Sep 11 has this as their court card. Find a birthday.