Hierarchy of the court cards in different decks?

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 20 Nov 2002, and now archived in the Forum Library.

callahwj	20 Nov 2002
Hi: I'm new, here, and new to tarot in general. I was wondering if someone experienced in different decks could break down which cards correspond to each other. For example, in the Rider Waite, there are kings, queens, knights and pages. In the Golden Dawn Magical tarot, there are knights, queens, princesses and princes. Are the knights in the GD the same as the knights in the RW, or more like the kings (this is what comparing the two interpretations seems to indicate)? Thanks in adavance, Bill

Laurel	20 Nov 2002
Welcome to Aeclectic! I'm at work and don't have the deck in front of me and haven't looked at it in a while, but I'm going to guess that its Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess for Qabalistic reasons, which I won't overwhelm you with. :) But I could be wrong. Even after using the Thoth deck for years (which is presumably is the source or shares the same source for this sequence), I often get the sequence of the Knight and Prince confused even though I can visualize the Thoth cards themselves correctly. During readings themselves, the official sequence never matters. Its just during esoteric study that its relevant. Laurel

callahwj	20 Nov 2002
seems that I had it wrong. The cards in the GD tarot ARE kings, the art just has them on horseback, so I was thinking knights. I just got this deck yesterday, and have been focusing on the majors. Sorry for the confusion. I am starting to study qabalah, but so far have just looked at the sephirot themselves, not the corespondences. Thanks for the reply. This seems like a great forum!

raeanne	20 Nov 2002
Callahwj, Welcome to the forums! You are right, this is a most excellant place to come and learn!

Strange2	20 Nov 2002
Here's a link to an *excellent* article on court cards in the Llewellyn Journal, called HIDDEN AND SECRET MEANINGS: The Court Cards — Part II By David Allen Hulse. This article provides many tables analyzing/organizing the court cards, such as Golden Dawn permutations, Tree of Life assignments, astrological attributes, elemental attributes, I Ching correspondences, keywords, etc. Hope this article helps (it did for me!).

MystiqueMoonlight	20 Nov 2002
Here is a comparitive for you RW and Clones - Thoth King - Knight Queen - Queen Prince - Prince Page - Princess That should get you started, but to be honest there is a great fundamental difference in the Courts of these 2 systems and there "energies" if you will. However I won't confuse you with that at this point. :)

callahwj	21 Nov 2002
Thank you, everyone for the info. The article was especialy helpful in understanding. I think it's going to be very important for me to keep these decks seperate in my mind. -Bill

paradoxx	25 Nov 2002
I would imagine that the knight comes before a prince (since the prince could probably fight the knight) then teh queen and king in that order. the nature pages come before knights, and i have seen decks where there are pages, knights, princes, queens and kings but no 10s in the suits.

The Hierarchy of the court cards in different decks? thread was originally posted on 20 Nov 2002 in the Using Tarot Cards board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Using Tarot Cards, or read more archived threads.