Knight of Swords

A knight in yellow armour charges through the sky on a horse, a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other; his helmet bears a whirling four-bladed crest and swallows fly beside him.

The Yod of the Vau: Fire of Air, the wind become storm, thought at its most violent and swift. He rules the last decan of Taurus (the Seven of Disks) and the first two of Gemini (the Eight and Nine of Swords). Crowley's hexagram, 32, Duration, is thunder over wind: persistent force in a changing medium, which is also the card's weakness.

Rules Seven of Disks (Taurus III, Saturn), Eight of Swords (Gemini I, Jupiter), Nine of Swords (Gemini II, Mars). 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: Swords give Wind, Knights give Thunder. The result is hexagram 32, Hêng, Duration (Thunder over Wind). See I Ching and the courts.

Thinking in its most fiery, extraverted form: the mind as a weapon. As an inner figure, the animus as attacker of every settled position. 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 King of Swords. 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.