AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the fourfold elemental world of the occult tarot that is symbolized by Fire, Water, Air and Earth, there is a fundamental separation of the elements into two divisions of two elements each that share the same polarity (positive or negative), the same mode of operation (active or passive) and the same key character type (assertive or reflective).

Accordingly, there is one gender (male or female) of the same persuasion that resides in each of these subsets. Archetypal masculinity is positive, active and assertive as befits Fire and Air, while archetypal femininity is negative, passive and reflective in the way of Water and Earth, with no aspersions cast on either one by these distinctions. The gender associations are a given and I won’t apologize for them despite modern efforts to downplay and eventually neutralize the dynamics of dualism. Call it binary thinking if you like, but the historical tarot was nothing but binary in its architecture.

When it comes to the court cards, the Thoth Tarot by Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris kept this four-way segmentation in place with female Princesses, male Princes (riding in chariots and less rambunctious than the old mounted Knights), female Queens, and jumped-up male uber-Knights (energetic yet mature stand-ins for the old Kings at the top of the Golden Dawn’s pecking order). There is an elaborate metaphysical allegory underlying this arrangement that I won’t go into here. However, the Waite-Smith Tarot is an almost entirely different animal.

Although Waite tried to clarify the situation in his text, Smith portrayed the figures of the Pages, Knights and Kings as male and the Queens as female. Waite described the Pages as children or youths of either sex, while the rest fell in line with gender singularity; it may be worth noting that Medieval pages or squires were understandably male since they were knights-in-training, which was most likely the model for Smith’s images. For his part, even though he had been a member of the Golden Dawn, Waite chose to revert to the hierarchy shown in older decks like the Tarot de Marseille. To muddy the waters further, he stated that his mounted Knights were older chronologically than his seated Kings, something that Crowley would probably have agreed with if he wasn’t so dismissive of anything to do with Waite. I can’t help but think this was one of Waite’s “blinds” for the uninitiated since it doesn’t seem to make any sense.

As a long-time user of the Thoth deck, I never had to wrestle with these permutations. But when I began occasionally reading with the RWS deck 14 years ago I felt the need to create a logical framework to help sort things out. I’ve written an essay or two about it, but I wanted to revisit the subject after reading the elemental properties for the court cards in Paul Fenton-Smith’s Tarot Master-Class.

Years ago I was struck by the notion that the Pages could be partitioned into male and female subdivisions using the suits: Division #1 with active/positive/assertive Wands and Swords for male children and youths, and Division #2 with passive/negative/reflective Cups and Pentacles for their female counterparts. While I was at it, I recognized that the same could be done to particularize the RWS Knights into two genders (for Game of Thrones enthusiasts, think Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth).

This would obviously come in handy when intentionally picking a Significator card, but it could also be used for making a preliminary call when a Page or Knight is pulled randomly. If the gender designation associated with the card’s suit doesn’t agree with the reality of the situation, an active or passive psychological interpretation could be substituted instead. (My thinking is that one is abrupt and spontaneous while the other is deliberate and contemplative.)

The next step up the ladder for the male Pages and Knights would lead directly to the four Kings regardless of suit, and on the female side it would arrive at the four Queens. This places the Queens at the top of the heap for anything to do with subtler priorities that aren’t “in-your-face,” with no obeisance owed to the Kings. (Rather than being the invisible “power behind the throne,” they would be seated front-and-center next to the Kings, who aren’t uniformly strong just as the Queens are not categorically weak.) I’m not going to get into cross-gender deliberations since that is not part of my philosophical worldview (except for Jungian psychological profiling) as it relates to tarot nor of my cultural and sociopolitical demographic. I will cross that bridge if and when I come to it in a reading since my premise should not be difficult to finesse in that direction.