Princess as the throne for the ace

wizzle

Yes all you Golden Dawn fans out there. The princess in each suit is the throne for her ace. Yup. Right. Um, what does that mean?

If we follow DuQuette's handy layouts and charts, the Ace of each suit contains the whole suit. The Princess rules a quadrant. Fine. Good. But how does she get to be a throne? She is the lesser bride, right? So she's the personification of Earth/Malkuth for her respective suit. This is about as far as I can get with thought before my eyes cross. Help would be so welcome.

Thanks ATers
 

Fulgour

Rider-Waite-Smith

I don't see any Princesses in my deck...
sounds like something out of the Thoth.
 

wizzle

In RWS the princess is disguised as a page.
 

wizzle

Um... looked at those and others before I asked my question Fulgour. Did a search even, but thanks.

My question is not.. what do the pages mean to you/me/your aunt harriet.

It's why is a page/princess a throne for an ace? See? Different. Not a Pixie type question. Not a question about a pretty picture. I'm fairly sure Waite showed us the answer, but I just can't quite get the hang of it.

Thanks again for your efforts. I thought this was a more GD oriented forum, but I'll give my question a whirl on the Thoth board. Good suggestion.
 

Fulgour

wizzle said:
My question is not.. what do the pages mean to you/me/your aunt harriet. It's why is a page/princess a throne for an ace? See? Different. Not a Pixie type question.
I never thought :) of asking my Aunt Harriet.
Of course she rips Crowley to teeny shreds...
 

Teheuti

The Egyptian name of Isis, Auset, means throne. It is through her (sitting in the lap of Isis) that the Pharaoh received his divinity.

See http://www.egypt-tehuti.org/articles/isis-seat.html
for an excellent discussion of this principle.

In the GD, the Princesses carried the power of rulership. See the pregnant Princess of Disks as an example.

Mary
 

wizzle

Thank you so much for the link Mary. That makes a great deal of sense to me and I was not aware that Isis was a throne.

In terms of rulership, the GD princesses are armed but semi-nude which seemed odd to me until related that to the ancient images of divinity. I'm reading a great book by Crosson on Saint Paul and he repeatedly stresses that in the statues which showed the emperors as divine, the figure was either nude or semi-nude.

I do have to question, however, whether nudity means the same thing to us in a modern context. Freedom, perhaps, but I think we've lost the connection to the divine via the nude.
 

Teheuti

wizzle said:
In terms of rulership, the GD princesses are armed but semi-nude which seemed odd to me until related that to the ancient images of divinity. <snip>
I do have to question, however, whether nudity means the same thing to us in a modern context. Freedom, perhaps, but I think we've lost the connection to the divine via the nude.
Personally I think that nudity means whatever a querent thinks it means. However, in general, I see it as being open and completely revealed. This can be scary because society doesn't usually support that, but it also seems to me to be far closer to divinity than does the usual "cover-up" in which humans are involved. ;-)

Mary
 

wizzle

Teheuti said:
Personally I think that nudity means whatever a querent thinks it means. However, in general, I see it as being open and completely revealed. This can be scary because society doesn't usually support that, but it also seems to me to be far closer to divinity than does the usual "cover-up" in which humans are involved. ;-)

Mary
Ah, but were the nude gods ever completely revealed?

While I agree that nudity is whatever it means, I do think clothing has a symbolism beyond that in ancient times. Certainly in the context of a deck like RWS we see the hierarchy of dress as much as anything else. Consider a card like the 6 of pents as an example. I'd say that the ancient model was more like nude, rags, toga whereas we have far more gradations.