Knight of Wands

The Plate

The horse rears at nothing visible. The desert is empty, the three mounds sit far off on the horizon, and yet the animal is up on its hind legs while the rider leans into the surge, stave couched against no one, his yellow surcoat figured with the court's salamanders and his mail showing at wrist and knee. Waite (1911) supplies the right instruction for reading it: "the motion of the horse is a key to the character of its rider." The motion here is vertical. The card is all leap, with the landing left outside the frame.

The Reading

A knight is a suit's element in action, and fire in action is the charge. Upright, the card brings the departure made real — the offer pursued at speed, the ally whose arrival changes a stalled matter's temperature in an afternoon. None of this is criticism; half the suit's business never gets done without someone willing to ride at it. The caution is only what the plate already drew: an empty desert crossed at full gallop is motion whose object lies somewhere off the card, and it is fair to ask, before cheering, what exactly is being ridden toward.

Reversed, the object never existed or changed mid-ride. Read haste that unmakes its own errand, speed kept up because stopping would require an answer, the brilliant beginning filed beside the other brilliant beginnings.

In the School

Fire is the wands' element in the elements table of the astrology course — the will. The court wears the element as a person wears a coat, and the knight rides it: fire as temperament, at the age where speed and sincerity feel like the same thing.