At time of going to press we are yet to create our first court cards. We left these last mostly because I have been researching them and am not yet happy with the results. Some of this is the fault of the Golden Dawn's Book T which created opposing instructions.
Firstly there are the titles. You have Knight, Queen, King and Knave in one section and then you have King, Queen, Prince and Princess in another.
In the description of the cards in one section of Book T makes the statement that “The four Kings, or figures mounted on steeds...”... and “the Princes are seated in Chariots” which is later countered by the description of the “Knight of Wands... a winged warrior riding upon a black horse” and King of Wands “A kingly figure seated on a chariot”. Then in another section the 'King' is referred to by the mystic title 'Prince of the Chariot of Fire'.
Different Golden Dawn teachers have used different systems. The Zalewski's and Crowley put the King in a Chariot, Tabatha Cicero and Wang puts the Prince on a Chariot.
Wang says the reason for this is because of a mystery.
“There appears to be a contradiction. The King is called a Knight, the Prince is called the King and the Princess is called a Knave. Essentially Mathers was pointing to the way the older writers attributed (the Tetragrammaton) to the Court cards. But the principle show was one of the great secrets of the Golden Dawn....” [6]
In an idea which looks like it is borrowed from Crowley's Book of Thoth, Wang says that the King, mounted on a horse is the first Young Knight. He becomes the King and marries the daughter of the old King. He is the vital principle as it pours forth into existance. The Queen is his consort and the perfect balance. From their union come the Prince who is himself the new King and the immediate ruler over what we know of as existence. The Princes forms a union with the prince which brings about the activity of the King whereby he returns to being the young knight. Wang admits that this sounds surrealistic and demonstrates how difficult it can be to express anything in our language.
Wang claims that only Crowley got it right. However in my view Crowley's idea is too complicated and does not actually reveal anything other than the fact that he clearly had a thing about sleeping with his mother.
The Knight is not the primal root of the element. That job in Tarot is firmly that of the aces which are shown in the hands of the court cards. In Tiphareth the Prince receives his elemental power from Kether down the path ruled by the High Priestess, so it arrives with at the same primal level that the King and the Queen receives. Symbolically he is the son of the King and Queen so is therefore freer to express the elemental force than his mum and dad who have the responsibilities of their senior office.
Having been around Golden Dawn documents for a while, I think there is a much easier way of looking at the contradiction. Many people believe that the Golden Dawn ideas were written in stone and that there is something like a perfect version. Where there were inconsistencies, these were termed 'blinds'. But GD texts were often reviewed by the authors and adapted. Over the period of years that the GD existed manuscripts were often reworked. Any one who writes a manuscript will tell you that the more times it is worked on the more likely you are to have mistakes. The original idea is often lost, but resurfaces later in the work. This is the case in Book T. Mathers and Westcott started with an idea changed their minds but the original idea was not edited out from the earlier part of the text.
What happened next is that people, such as Crowley and Wang, came along and found reasons for the contradiction rather than deciding that it was simply a mistake. The Crowley/Wang reasoning then gets built into the GD body of teaching.
Obviously everyone can point to Book T to claim legitimacy so when we came up with our Court Cards we have to work out what we think really important.
Firstly the issue of titles was decided for me by the fact that the GD said the Kings on Chocmah, the Queens on Binah, the Princes on Tiphareth, and the Princesses on Malkuth. The Kings were said to be Abba and the Queens Aima. So the King is father and the Queen is mother. The Golden Dawn's colour scale is also called in order King, Queen, Prince and Princess. Book T does mention that the term Knight or Prince is acceptable. Obviously Knight is connected to the traditional Tarot deck as is the term 'knave'; however the world 'Prince' and 'Princess' works better with the Golden Dawn colour scales and the polarity of a modern deck.
Let us look at the problem of the horse and the chariot. To get the answer to this we have to look at the symbols involved. The use of the horse made the chariot in warfare obsolete. Chariots were too slow, difficult to turn, and had limited fighting power. However its use as a ceremonial ride of emperors continued until the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1450AD. The Chariot is a symbol of the state with the King holding the reigns. It is a symbol which is repeated in the Tarot key the Chariot. So therefore the Kings have to be in Chariots and the Princes, as servants of the King, have to be on horses.