Can someone explain these darn Thoth Courts?

Kiama

Well, you can tell I'm not a regular Thoth user, since I just don't understand this whole Knight/Queen change...

Does the Knight still have the same meaning as the King it should have been? Or does it take on the Queen's meaning, considering it is in the place the Queen used to be? Or does it take on the Knight that is now the Prince's old meaning?

And does the Queen take on the old King's meaning, or does she keep the old Queen's meaning?

Sorry if its a stupid question, but this really does confuse me.

Kiama
 

Richard1

From what I understand, the problem is not that Crowley mixed up the Knight and the King, it's that Waite got them confused (or not - in the Pictorial Key he says that the Knight should refer to older men and the King to younger). If you're going by divinitory meanings, the Thoth Knight is the same as the RWS Knight, and the Thoth Prince equals the RWS King. If you're going by elemental attributions, the Thoth Knight is Fire and the Thoth Prince is Air. But the Waite Knight really SHOULD be Fire, as well.
The confusion seems to stem from how the Golden Dawn viewed them, which seems to be Knight and Queen as father and mother, and King and Page as son and daughter.
But, as I said, if you're just using it for readings, none of that should matter; Knights are Knights.
About the Queen, I must confess I have no idea what you mean...have you been using the Cosmic Tribe deck?
 

Emily

I've only just started to use the Thoth too but I read the Thoth Knights as Kings, the Queen still as Queen, the Thoth Prince as the Knight and the Thoth Princess as the Page. I'm still getting my head round it too, I'm still very much influenced by Rider Waite symbolism and so are most of my books - The Rohrig introduced me to this system and for me it does seem to work. :)
 

coldsuns

Shouldnt be the Prince is the King and the Knight remain as a Knight? As the King was a Prince. And the Prince somehow will become the King. Knight is a soldier or "slave" that works for the Prince/King. Queen remain as a Queen. But is Page a servant/maid or rather a Princess?
 

jema

knight=fire
queen=water
prince=air
princess=earth

i find it easy to simply use those elements for the courts and think about the courts as Fire of Water for example = knight of cups.

but if you want to translate them to RWS cards it would be like this:

knight=king
queen=queen
prince=knight
princess=page

or at least that is how i use them:)
 

Kiama

Thanks for the answers guys... I'll try and use Jema's version of it, since it seems simplest at the moment. I am trying to get my head rounf this whole 'Fire of Water' thingy... How does that work?

My boyfriend has been suggesting that it is related in soe way to Quasi-elements. So,

Earth of Air is: Dust
Air of Fire is: Smoke
Fire of Water is: Steam
Water of Earth is: Mud
Earth of Fire is: Magma
Air of Water is: Rain

This seemed like a good idea at the time, but then I realised that Earth of Air (Princess of Swords) would be the same as Air of Earth (Knight of Pentacles) and this just doesn't make sense.

Then I read Crowley's Book of Thoth, about the Knight of Pentacles (Or King if you're going for Rider Waite version) and he talks about Fire of Earth being about earthquakes and mountains, and I can't see how disruptive earthquakes fit into the Knight of Pentacles' steadfast, responsible, business-like meanings.

Can anyone help me out on this one aswell please?

Kiama
 

Strange2

Here's a good article from the online Llewellyn Journal about those perplexing court cards, as interpreted by the Golden Dawn, some aspects of which the Thoth deck incorporates:

"Hidden and Secret Meanings: The Court Cards"
http://www.llewellynjournal.com/article/387/

This article also discusses the elemental correspondences (the sixteen sub-elemental counterchanges of fire, water, air, and earth), and their importance in Geomancy (divinations by patterns in the Earth).

Hope this article helps more than confuses!
 

Silverlotus

Thanks for the link, Strange2. That article cleared up a few things for me, but confused a few others. Why are the astrologically atributes different in the Thoth and Golden Dawn system? In the RWS system, the Queen of Pentacles is Taurus, but the article lists the King as Taurus (which be the Page in the RWS system).
 

Hedera

Don't know if this helps, but I tend to look at the Thoth-ish court cards not as a sequence for four, with one court-person at the bottom and one at the top, but more as 2 pairs of people.
That gives me:
Princess + Prince
and
Queen + Knight.

I think of the princess and prince as more the 'learning' aspect of that suit, with the princess usually concerned with inner learning, and the prince more with relating to the outside world, learning how to put it into practice.
The queen and knight I see more as having mastered the quality of the suit, where the queen applies more to the inner qualities and the knight more to 'puttin' it out there'.

Does this make sense?
 

Kaz

hedera, you are right about that, thats also a way of looking at them, "old" knowledge (knight/queen) and "new" knowledge (prince/princess).
integrated in life by knight/queen and just acquired still toying with it by price/princess.
what jema says also works very well, you can combine both ways actually.
these two things are the way i look at courts, and i quite like it and it works well.