AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve written about the 9 of Wands a couple of times before, usually in more detail. But I keep coming back to it because it’s one of several Golden-Dawn-named cards that doesn’t wear its title well. Aleister Crowley tried to fix most of them in his own way but – at least in my opinion – he didn’t always improve on the original. It’s enough to make me want to stick with the Tarot de Marseille!

As an astrologer I could never understand why the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn labeled the 9 of Wands “Lord of Great Strength” while also assigning it the counterintuitive symbolism of the Moon in Sagittarius. The Moon may be second only to the Sun in its prominence within a horoscope, but it is a passive, feminine, watery “planet” that is typically more yielding than stalwart (unless passive/aggressive manipulation can be considered a strength), and Sagittarius is not the most virile of Fire signs. As the old Maine punchline goes, “You can’t get there from here.”

I was reading once again that this card is an expression of Aleister Crowley’s magical formula “Change equals Stability; Stability equals Change.” While the Moon is certainly a harbinger of change, Sagittarius partakes of the “shifting sands” of Mutability and hardly offers a stable rock on which the Moon might make a stand. Both suggest malleability to me, with no firm foundation. At most, I could see the combination as the “Perfection of Resistance” in that it succeeds the 7 of Wands, which conveys “Courage in Adversity” (in other words, there is a hardening of resolve in the Nine). The intervening 8 of Wands implies “Live to fight another day,” and lying between the two it hints at a strategic retreat to a fallback position as the better part of valor because the combatant in the Seven is clearly outgunned. Thus, the hard-pressed individual in the 9 of Wands is making a last-ditch attempt at survival, so maybe “Tenacious Endurance” would be an even better title.

The 9 of Wands in the Waite-Smith Tarot abandons the on-board title and astrological symbolism altogether, presenting an image of a wounded warrior who has taken up a post before the walls of a fortress made of vertical staves and does not plan on going anywhere unless and until forced to do so (as the 10 of Wands seems to indicate he will be). This makes a stronger statement about the fortitude inherent in the card than all the Qabalistic assumptions that have been thrown at it. Although I much prefer the Thoth tarot in almost all cases, this is one instance where the RWS deck gets it right.

Crowley tried to put a convincing face on his furtherance of the “Strength” paradigm by citing the virtues of a mobile defense in upset conditions, although he does consider the pair to represent “the weakest of the planets in the most elusive of the signs” that relies on momentum as a substitute for muscle. I’m not enamored of this explanation for the dubious naming of the card: unless he is the next Muhammad Ali, a boxer who doesn’t plant his feet and square off with his rival isn’t likely to prevail. I believe it was Mike Tyson who once said about a notoriously “mobile” opponent, “He can run but he can’t hide!”

If I were to create my own occult tarot deck designed on the Golden Dawn’s model, I think I would rename the 7 of Wands the “Lord of Desperate Measures;” the 8 of Wands the “Lord of Strategic Withdrawal” and the 9 of Wands the “Lord of Stalwart Opposition.” There is a pleasing continuity in this progression that I feel is lacking in the cards of the Thoth deck, which is why I worked with the RWS tarot in fashioning my parable of confrontation, disengagement and redeployment. The link below places all three cards upon this allegorical “storyboard.”

https://parsifalswheeldivination.org/2018/07/25/the-sagittarian-conundrum/