Queen of Disks

A crowned woman with the horns of a goat as her crest sits on a throne of pineapples in a desert, looking back at a river and an oasis; a goat stands beside her and she holds a sceptre topped with a cube.

The Heh of the final Heh: Water of Earth, matter made receptive and fertile, the oasis in the desert. She rules the last decan of Sagittarius (the Ten of Wands) and the first two of Capricorn (the Two and Three of Disks), carrying the year over the winter solstice. Crowley's hexagram, 31, Influence, is the lake on the mountain: receptivity in a high place.

Rules Ten of Wands (Sagittarius III, Saturn), Two of Disks (Capricorn I, Jupiter), Three of Disks (Capricorn II, Mars). 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, Queens give Lake. The result is hexagram 31, Hsien, Influence (Lake over Mountain). See I Ching and the courts.

Sensation internalised as care: the one who tends. As an inner figure, the anima as the body's own wisdom. 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 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.

Sagittarius (“I see / I seek”): optimism, honesty, adventure, wisdom, humour, faith, generosity. Shadow: preachiness, tactlessness, restlessness, overpromising, dogmatism, fear of commitment.

Capricorn (“I use / I build”): discipline, ambition, responsibility, patience, strategic thinking, dry humour. Shadow: coldness, workaholism, rigidity, status-obsession, pessimism.

The card holds the last ten degrees of Sagittarius and the first twenty of Capricorn, so its character is mostly Capricorn with a trace of the sign before. Anyone born Dec 13 – Jan 9 has this as their court card. Find a birthday.