Queen of Wands

A crowned woman with flaming red hair sits on a throne of flame, one hand resting on a leopard, the other holding a wand tipped with a pine cone; her crest is a winged leopard head and the flames around her are steady rather than wild.

The Heh of the Yod: Water of Fire, the fire made steady and enduring, the flame on the hearth rather than the lightning. She rules the last decan of Pisces (the Ten of Cups) and the first two of Aries (the Two and Three of Wands): she carries the year over the spring equinox. Crowley's hexagram for her is 17, Following, the adaptable strength that leads by adjusting.

Rules Ten of Cups (Pisces III, Mars), Two of Wands (Aries I, Mars), Three of Wands (Aries II, The Sun). 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, Queens give Lake. The result is hexagram 17, Sui, Following (Lake over Thunder). See I Ching and the courts.

Intuition internalised and made reliable: the person whose sense of direction others follow. The Water-of-Fire combination carries an inner tension between feeling and 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 Queen 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.

Pisces (“I believe”): compassion, imagination, spiritual sensitivity, artistry, empathy, selflessness. Shadow: escapism, victimhood, confusion, deception, addiction, lack of boundaries.

Aries (“I am”): courage, initiative, honesty, energy, independence. Shadow: impulsiveness, selfishness, anger, starting fights and projects without finishing them.

The card holds the last ten degrees of Pisces and the first twenty of Aries, so its character is mostly Aries with a trace of the sign before. Anyone born Mar 11 – Apr 10 has this as their court card. Find a birthday.