Queen of Swords

A crowned woman sits on a throne of cloud, a sword in one hand and a severed bearded head in the other; her crest is the head of a winged child, and the sky behind her is clearing.

The Heh of the Vau: Water of Air, thought made receptive and reflective, the mind that sees through appearances. She rules the last decan of Virgo (the Ten of Disks) and the first two of Libra (the Two and Three of Swords), carrying the year over the autumn equinox. The severed head is the persona removed; the child crest is the clear-eyed innocence that remains.

Rules Ten of Disks (Virgo III, Mercury), Two of Swords (Libra I, The Moon), Three of Swords (Libra II, Saturn). 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, Queens give Lake. The result is hexagram 28, Ta Kuo, the Preponderance of the Great (Lake over Wind). See I Ching and the courts.

Thinking internalised as perception: the analyst who sees the pattern behind the face. As an inner figure, the anima as truth-teller. 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 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.

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

Libra (“I balance”): fairness, charm, harmony, aesthetic sense, cooperation, diplomacy. Shadow: indecision, people-pleasing, superficial niceness, conflict avoidance, codependence.

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