AUTHOR’S NOTE: Conventional wisdom regarding the level of competence exhibited by the members of the tarot court is that the Kings have mastered their element while the Pages are utterly inexperienced, with the Knights and Queens falling somewhere in the middle.

The progression is assumed to be linear, but I just came across the idea that the Pages are blissfully ignorant and may not appreciate the risks, the Knights are worse off because they know just enough to be dangerous to themselves and others, the Queens are gradually recovering from that deficiency and the Kings have plateaued at a sustainable level. (This was described as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a confidence-vs-competence curve.)

I’ve always viewed it as a straight-line progression rather than an undulating slope, but it did give me pause to think about it and develop a slightly different model. As I see it, each aspirant is closing in on the next level of mastery but has not quite reached it, so the situation is a work-in-progress.

Paraphrasing the old knowledge-vs-ignorance quotient, we could say that the Pages don’t have a clue how much there is to learn and may be overconfident; the Knights understand that they don’t know everything and therefore aren’t likely to overstep their bounds; the Queens are in a position to mentor the Knights while still topping off their own expertise; and the Kings are comfortable in their proficiency while constantly embracing further education.

Note that, as always, no gender-specificity should be assumed in the cards of the example below.

Afterthoughts: The upper and lower bars represent the limits of human experience, and the developing Ego represented by the cards has departed one waystation but has not yet arrived at the next. So the Pages (which I also equate with the Fool and the Aces) have risen out of primordial ignorance but still have some clinging to their feet, while the Kings have not fully emerged into the light of supernal wisdom. They are all still “on the Wheel,” so to speak. In that sense, the Knights are “jumped-up Pages” who were once squires, while the Queens are Kings on a different arc.