I give you The Queen of Swords and the traits thrust upon her.
- Widow
- Female Sadness
- Female Embarrassment
- Absence
- Sterility
- Mourning
- Privation
- Separation
- Barren
- Unreliability
- Narrow-mindedness
- Gossip
- Deceit
- Malice
- Artifice
- Prudery
- Frowns at the world
- Bigoted
Are you seeing a trend?
Presumably, every authority (barring Aleister Crowley) has based his or her interpretation of the Tarot on A.E. Waite’s definitions. I wonder what happened? Did he have mommy issues? We can clearly see by his pompadour that he was a bit off.
Who hurt poor Arthur? Why malign intellect when it is embodied by a woman? It seems that the most prominent authorities heretofore have done a great injustice to the Queen of Swords. Why was he afraid of this woman? That’s what I see when you put all those definitions together – fear – a threat to the status quo – a woman with the ability to bring down the good-ol’-boys club and the chutzpah to do it.
Given the time in which he lived and the pomposity he possessed I am not surprised by his definitions. What utterly gobsmacks me is that female authorities heretofore have followed suit. Why did Ms. Gray and Ms. Pollack not put the clamp down on such notions?
Perhaps we’ll never know and anything I give you on that subject would be pure speculation and conjecture.
I will, however, give you what Hajo Banzhaf says about the Queen of Swords and hope it gives you a more favorable way to think about the Queen of Swords and brings her into the 21st Century:
“The Queen of Swords represents the feminine form of the air element. She stands for intelligence, alertness, independence, an abundance of ideas, and a quick perceptive faculty. She is the expression of our ability to solve problems and achieve higher perception with the help of our mind, without dissipating our energies or letting ourselves be tormented by doubts. In contrast to the old understanding of this card, which only saw an evil woman in the Queen of Swords, at best a widow, this motif shows us that we are dealing with a woman (or the feminine aspect of a man) who has freed herself from dependency through the power of her mind. Only in a few cases should the shadow side of this card be considered, the ice princess who has a calculating coolness and almost insurmountable aloofness behind her charm.”
Thank you, Herr Banzhaf.
