Knight of Wands

A knight in dark armour leaps through flames on a black horse, his cloak streaming, holding a flaming torch aloft; his crest is a unicorn head and the whole card is fire in motion.

The Yod of the Yod: the Fire of Fire, the most volatile card in the deck, energy at the instant of release. He rules the last decan of Scorpio (the Seven of Cups) and the first two of Sagittarius (the Eight and Nine of Wands), so his year runs from the depth of the Scorpio water into the archer's fire.

Rules Seven of Cups (Scorpio III, Venus), Eight of Wands (Sagittarius I, Mercury), Nine of Wands (Sagittarius II, The Moon). 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: Wands give Thunder, Knights give Thunder. The result is hexagram 51, Chên, the Arousing (Thunder over Thunder). See I Ching and the courts.

Intuition in its most fiery, extraverted form: the visionary who acts before he thinks. Read as a figure in the psyche, the animus as pure drive. 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 Wands. 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.

Scorpio (“I desire”): depth, loyalty, intensity, psychological insight, resilience, emotional power. Shadow: jealousy, obsession, vengefulness, control, secrecy, destructiveness.

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

The card holds the last ten degrees of Scorpio and the first twenty of Sagittarius, so its character is mostly Sagittarius with a trace of the sign before. Anyone born Nov 13 – Dec 12 has this as their court card. Find a birthday.