AUTHOR’S NOTE: As promised, here is the second iteration of the court cards as numerological counterparts to the trump cards according to “transcendence” of the second digit in their numeration, this time covering the Kings (Thoth Knights).

“Transcendence” is Jame’s Ricklef’s word for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “decimal equivalency” that is also used by James Wanless in his Voyager Tarot study material. It provides an alternative to the more typical “Theosophical reduction” for equating two-digit cards to their single-digit analogues. While the summing of digits offers a more direct way to accomplish this, the veiled method of decimal equivalency (aka transcendence) creates more unlikely but still compelling pairs. It just takes a more refined type of “mental gymnastics” to make sense of them.

Four is the number of “law-and-order” while the Emperor is the exemplar of the “Father-knows-best” brand of patriarchal authority. The “4” is also present in the number of the fourteenth trump card, Temperance/Art, making it the counterpart of the Emperor on a “higher arc,” as the saying goes, since it wields the imperial power with considerably more precision and finesse. Bringing the leading-digit Magician into the definition of “14,” Temperance resembles the school-yard bully’s bellicose command: “You hold him while I hit him.”

As the fourteenth card in each suit, the Kings also partake of this delegation of the Emperor’s sovereignty. In the Golden Dawn’s tarot curriculum, the Kings were assigned the administration of “Potential Power,” which I take to mean “the enforcement of justice held in abeyance,” allowing for the bestowal of clemency. This staying of the King’s hand under the intelligent guidance of the Magician (“1” leading “4”) is echoed in the sense of fairness expressed by Temperance. From another angle there is the Pythagorean postulate that “The Ten is concealed in the Four” (1+2+3+4=10), which brings the feminine “power behind the throne” – the Priestess and the Empress – into the picture.

I’ve written in the past about the King/Knight of Wands being the “little brother” of the Emperor, and in the model presented here that premise can be extended to all of the Kings (and Thoth Knights). In historical terms they were the territorial regents of the centralized secular ruler. See the first link below for a more detailed explanation. Although it doesn’t follow the numerological architecture, the second attachment showing trump and court card “allies” is also instructive.

The Court Cards as “Decimal Equivalents”