Prince of Swords

A prince in a chariot drawn by three winged fairy figures, who pull in different directions, holds a sword in one hand and a sickle in the other; his crest is a winged pentagram and the sky is full of geometric forms.

The Vau of the Vau: Air of Air, pure abstract intellect, the mind for its own sake. He rules the last decan of Capricorn (the Four of Disks) and the first two of Aquarius (the Five and Six of Swords). Crowley's hexagram, 57, the doubled trigram of wind, is penetration without resistance, and without anything to hold on to.

Rules Four of Disks (Capricorn III, The Sun), Five of Swords (Aquarius I, Venus), Six of Swords (Aquarius 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: Swords give Wind, Princes give Wind. The result is hexagram 57, Sun, the Gentle, the Penetrating (Wind over Wind). See I Ching and the courts.

Thinking carried by thought: the pure intellect that cannot commit because every idea suggests another. As an inner figure, the animus as endless argument. 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 Knight of Swords. 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.

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

Aquarius (“I know”): originality, idealism, friendship, independence, objectivity, reform. Shadow: detachment, contrarianism, cold intellectualism, stubborn ideology, aloofness.

The card holds the last ten degrees of Capricorn and the first twenty of Aquarius, so its character is mostly Aquarius with a trace of the sign before. Anyone born Jan 10 – Feb 8 has this as their court card. Find a birthday.