Knight Study II: Swords

So, because it came up anyway in a daily reading I did for myself this morning, continuing the series inspired by Rowan Tarot and This Game of Thrones - talking about the Knights in the Thoth tarot.

Knight of Swords

Here again we have a knight that isn't quite comparable to the RWS king of the same suit. There are similarities, certainly: both are logical, calculating, ruthless when they need to be. Both are quite capable of being discerning, and both have a certain quality - in contrast to the prince/knight of the court - of being very controlled. The King however, is again more  'passive' for lack of a better term: he sits and he judges, sometimes over-harshly, over-critically. He seeks to manage and control. He is active, sure, but intellectually, by and large.

In contrast, the Thoth knight is all about movement, action. In contrast to the disk knight's horse, who stands firmly on earth, the one here leaps through the air. It is a golden horse, wise and filled with a higher kind of power, and it can run through the wind, through the ethers, through anywhere, really, that its master needs it to go. And the knight is clad in bright green, like the Fool: full of energy, vitality, possibility. His helmet has transparent wings, helicopter-like in design. This knight is supremely flexible, adaptable: he has a focus, a goal that he will pursue relentlessly, and with those wings he can fly, or he can hover, give the horse more speed, adjust his course as rapidly and often as he needs - anything. In fact, wrapped into the horse as he is, you can barely tell where the man ends and the beast begins: they are one with each other, sharing intention and instinct and drive.

This is not the Prince, recklessly riding forward. The king, logical and calculating, knows exactly what he wants to do, and how. He has his sword and dagger ready, his target selected with pin-point precision. He does nothing without a reason, without logic to back up his decision. But once he focuses on a goal...he PURSUES it indeed. There are swallows around him, golden like the horse: they are his too. They guide him, keep him on course, keep him from getting distracted or developing that kind of tunnel-vision that can stop you from seeing the bigger picture. See, the knight can play well with others when it suits him, share ideas and perspectives, though in the end he does prefer to lead. He is moving, always moving, but smartly, everything calculated carefully. The Queen IS, but the Knight DOES.

Unlike the King, the Knight takes his ability to harness the power of logic; the discipline and control he has mastered over himself; his ability to think critically, to judge, plan, and follow through ruthlessly, and he focuses them on a goal. And he achieves that goal, and moves onto the next and so on. At his best he is in fact the very image of precision: the well though out, action-oriented campaign.

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For the record, the card came up alongside of the Wheel of Fortune and 6 of Wands for me. I took the message to be one of, basically...sometimes things are hard, you don't feel well, you have problems going on and you just feel...overwhelmed with a kind of hopeless despair. And sometimes you have to realize that now is not the TIME for that, and instead focus, in this kind of logical and directed way, at successfully accomplishing the immediate tasks in front of you. So I went to a meeting with one of my presentation groups, participated lots in the planning, and we got quite a lot done. Then I made some good headway in outlining my memo that I must have done for Monday, and plan on doing some more research as soon as I finish posting this. So YES, appropriate message indeed. Thoth is one of the few decks I've ever worked with where I can pull cards multiple times a day and get a meaningful, USEFUL message just about every time....