Why Thoth renamed the tarot court cards (and RWS didn't)

Pull a King of Wands from a Rider-Waite-Smith deck and a King of Wands from a Marseille deck, and you're holding the same rank: the senior male court figure, four to a deck, sixteen court cards total. Pull the equivalent card from a Thoth deck and there is no King at all — the top rank is called the Knight. One level down, RWS's Knight becomes Thoth's Prince. RWS's Page becomes Thoth's Princess. Only the Queen keeps her name in both systems.

This isn't Aleister Crowley being contrarian. He inherited the renaming from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the secret society whose unpublished teaching documents underpin both RWS and Thoth. The Golden Dawn had already restructured the courts internally, years before either deck existed, because the traditional four ranks didn't map cleanly onto the four classical elements — and the Golden Dawn's entire tarot system is built on elemental correspondence.

Here's the logic. Each of the four court ranks is assigned its own elemental temperament: the Knight carries Fire (directed, outward energy), the Queen carries Water (receptive, sustaining energy), the Prince carries Air (mobile, communicative energy), and the Princess carries Earth (grounded, still-forming energy). That temperament then combines with the element of the card's own suit. A Knight of Cups becomes "Fire of Water" — assertive energy acting on an emotional domain. A Princess of Swords becomes "Earth of Air" — an idea that hasn't yet settled into firm conviction. Every one of the sixteen court cards gets its own distinct double-element formula this way, not just a generic personality sketch.

Waite made a different editorial choice. He kept the Golden Dawn's underlying elemental correspondences — a Knight of Wands on an RWS deck is still built on that same "Fire of Fire" logic, whether or not the booklet says so out loud — but he restored the older, historically familiar court names on the cards themselves: King, Queen, Knight, Page. It's the same order Tarot de Marseille has used for centuries (Roi, Reine, Cavalier, Valet), which meant RWS read as instantly recognizable to anyone who'd ever held a deck of cards, while quietly carrying the Golden Dawn's system underneath.

Crowley made the opposite choice. Working directly from the Golden Dawn's internal teaching papers with his own additions, he put the reorganized names — Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess — right on the cards, and built The Book of Thoth around explaining exactly why. There's no single "correct" version here: both decks are working from the same source material, one just shows its underlying architecture and the other doesn't.