Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Card and Its Imagery

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Card and Its Imagery

Within Waite's four-rank court, the Page is the fire suit's junior figure; the Golden Dawn's equivalent rank, the Princess of Wands, carries the elemental pairing Earth of Fire, will and enthusiasm given the most grounded and least active of the suit's four expressions, the fire suit's own energy just beginning to take a concrete, embodied form. Like the other three Princess ranks she carries no zodiacal decan of her own; Book T completes fire's share of the sixteen-card elemental matrix through her rather than through any decanic placement.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a youth in a tunic patterned with salamanders standing in a desert admiring a staff that has visibly sprouted new growth in his hand, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Valet de Batons is a static heraldic figure holding a plain staff with no desert, salamanders or sprouting growth at all; the desert setting is notable among the four Pages, the only one placed in an arid rather than a green, watery or windswept landscape, a contrast commentators generally read as underscoring fire's ability to generate life even where the ground itself offers none.

Crowley's Thoth card keeps the Golden Dawn name Princess of Wands, her full title the Princess of the Shining Flame, and renders her amid a burst of geometric flame rather than any desert scene, Harris's more purely emblematic equivalent of Smith's sprouting staff.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.