Seeing Tarot Episode 7: The Knight of Wands

Um, but would you give like an overview of the Night of Wands for us? What's what's he up to?

Oh my gosh, yeah.

What is he up to? So we are coming from the page.

So we have the page of wands and we're like going in order through each suit.

So we're going to do the court cards of the wands and then TBD, what suit we'll do next for the court cards.

But this is like our first encounter with each of...

the characters at play here.

So with the court cards, we get into, you know, the minor arcana is all about everyday life.

And so here we have like the characters, the approaches, the personalities, the strategies of everyday life.

And the pages are the beginners, the youths, they're curious, they're learning.

When we get to the knights, we have sort of this like questing adolescent energy.

And combining that as an overall theme with the element of fire, which is what the wands symbolize, and we get something propulsive and intense and charismatic.

So the all of the knights are fittingly a stride, a horse, and the horses have something to say about each of the knights' personality.

Now we're using he, him pronouns, but these cards are symbolic, so they're meant to represent approaches to life and traits.

They're not gendered.

And we can think about gender as symbolism, but not as hard and fast rules, IRL.

And I think we mentioned in the previous episode too, but in the Rider Waite Smith deck, which was born from the Golden Dawn, their divinatory practice was very much based in, you know, occultism and also fortune telling.

Their interpretations of the court cards were kind of, in my opinion, comical because they're very like a dark young man.

They have these physical attributes, but modern tarot has moved beyond that, which I think is really lovely.

So when we're talking about the Knight of Wands, we're talking about a person, a way of being that is very energetic, very impulsive.

So we can think about the element of fire and how it would behave when unleashed and returning to the horse, you know, their horse is like rearing up in this desert environment and they have this amazing, tunic going on, they have their armor, they're in it, they're feeling themselves.

We're going to get into more of the specifics and ways that this can manifest in different approaches and people, but it is at its heart a card that is about really bursting forth into a quest, acting on instinct, and being very passionate and out there in the world.

Oh, I love that.