Prince of Wands

A crowned youth rides a chariot of flame drawn by a lion, holding a phoenix wand; his crest is a winged lion head, and the flames around him are shaped into ordered waves.

The Vau of the Yod: Air of Fire, the fire made intelligent and directed, the flame that knows where it is going. He rules the last decan of Cancer (the Four of Cups) and the first two of Leo (the Five and Six of Wands): the heart of summer.

Rules Four of Cups (Cancer III, The Moon), Five of Wands (Leo I, Saturn), Six of Wands (Leo II, Jupiter). 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, Princes give Wind. The result is hexagram 42, I, Increase (Wind over Thunder). See I Ching and the courts.

Intuition carried into action by thought: the strategist of energy. As an inner figure, the animus as planner and mover. 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 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.

Cancer (“I feel”): nurturing, loyalty, emotional depth, intuition, memory, protectiveness. Shadow: moodiness, clinginess, defensiveness, manipulation through guilt, living in the past.

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

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