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The Card and Its Imagery

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The Card and Its Imagery

Within Waite's four-rank court, the King of Wands sits at the head of the fire suit; in the Golden Dawn's Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess restructuring that the Thoth deck follows, the equivalent figure is the mounted Knight of Wands, assigned the elemental pairing Fire of Fire, fire's own most concentrated expression rather than fire tempered by any second element. The Golden Dawn's full title for the rank, the Lord of the Flame and the Lightning, and its astrological span, the final ten degrees of Cancer through the first twenty of Leo, place him at the threshold where Leo's fixed fire actually begins, the throne positioned to frame the sign's onset rather than to sit inside it.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, an enthroned figure on a carved lion-and-salamander throne, a flowering wand in hand and a live salamander at his feet, gives him a stillness the Golden Dawn's mounted Knight equivalent does not share; the Marseille Roi de Batons, like all four Marseille kings, is a static heraldic figure holding the suit emblem with none of Smith's added symbolism, so the lions, the salamander and the flowering wand are Rider-Waite-Smith contributions with no older precedent.

Crowley and Harris's Thoth card keeps the name Knight of Wands and renders him mounted and armored rather than enthroned, part of the deck's consistent shift of the fire suit's most senior figure from a seated ruler to an active, riding force.

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