Named Court Cards from Roman and Biblical Heroes

The court cards of every modern deck carry a name you already know: King, Queen, Knight, Page. But before 1909 the court cards of a tarot did not mean that. They meant a person. The Sola Busca court cards are the earliest surviving case of that: each one is a named figure drawn from Roman history, the pantheon or the Bible. That is the origin the rest of this series keeps returning to: the modern court card is a slot that a specific person used to fill.

This is the second part of a series tracing the illustrated minor arcana back to the Sola Busca. In The First Fully-Illustrated Pips: The Sola-Busca Deck we covered the numerals. This one covers the court cards and asks where their names come from, and what was lost when the names disappeared.

Four ranks, sixteen Sola Busca court cards

A complete Sola Busca carries sixteen court cards: four per suit, numbered eleven through fourteen. In a Marseille or Visconti-Sforza deck those four positions are generic. In the Sola Busca each one is a character with a Latin or Italian name.

The British Museum's four unpainted court cards show the range. The Knave of Coins is an unnamed young man in contemporary dress, pointing to a medallion at his feet and holding a bird. The Queen of Clubs is titled Palas, a queen of the pantheon. The Knight of Swords is Amone, a semi-naked rider on a horse wielding an enormous sword. The Knight of Coins is titled Sarafino, a rider holding a shield. Other named cards in the set include a King of Swords identified with Alexander and a Queen of Cups named Polisena. These are not archetypes. They are named, specific, and drawn from a body of classical and biblical reference that a fifteenth-century humanist reader would be expected to recognise (World of Playing Cards, "The Sola-Busca Tarot").

The queens are the clearest case of a named figure. Each is a specific woman, not an invented feminine principle attached to a suit. The deck is reaching for real or legendary women that its audience would have known, and using them as the queens. The Queen of Cups, named Polisena, is one of the most studied of the set, partly because her cup carries a small snake in the original engraving, a detail lost in later copies.

The kings carry names from the classical world as well. Alexander on a horse with a great sword is not a generic "fire king." He is the Macedonian conqueror, a name a fifteenth-century humanist would have known. The association is not accidental. The Sola Busca's kings are drawn from the same pool as its trumps: Roman generals, biblical rulers, mythic figures. The court card and the trump share a single source of characters. That is a point the modern deck does not make. In a Thoth or Rider-Waite reading the King of Swords and the Tower are unrelated in origin. In the Sola Busca they are two figures from the same classical library.

Why a humanist would do this

The instinct behind naming the court cards is the same one that runs through the trumps. The deck is a humanist object. It wants its audience to meet people they could name, not symbols they had to decode. A King in the Sola Busca is not "the masculine principle of the element of fire." He is a ruler, a general, a figure from a story the reader has heard. The naming is a form of recognition, not a form of abstraction.

That has a consequence for how the deck was used. A deck built on named figures is a deck for conversation and for display, where knowing who is who is part of the pleasure. It is closer to a set of historical illustrations than to a divinatory key. The meanings were not hidden in the cards waiting for an occultist to unlock them. They were in the shared culture of the people who played with it.

A reader of the period who saw the Queen of Cups named Polisena would not have thought "the receptive principle of water." They would have thought of a figure from the Trojan story, and of the tale that circulated with her name. The card's meaning was a person's story, not a symbol's property. That is a fundamentally different kind of reading from the one the modern deck invites, and it is the point of this whole series: the modern court card is an abstraction built on top of a person.

What the Golden Dawn changed

When the Golden Dawn came to build a tarot that carried a whole system, the named court cards were a problem. A person has a biography. A symbol has a function. The occultists wanted the court cards to be functions: the King as the mature, conscious mastery of a suit, the Queen as its receptive, nurturing side, the Knight as its impulsive movement, the Page as its learning, immature stage.

To make that work they had to strip the names off. The King of Wands was no longer a specific Roman or biblical king. He became the element of fire in its most fully developed expression. The names went away and the functions stayed. What the modern reader inherits is a court card that means a role, not a person. That is the real innovation of the nineteenth century, and it is the opposite move from the Sola Busca: where the Italian deck put a person in the card, the Golden Dawn put a principle in it.

It is worth naming what the modern system gained in the trade. A function can be combined with the other three court cards to describe a whole stage of a situation: the immature, the active, the receptive, the mastered. That is a genuinely useful reading structure, and the Sola Busca, with its named individuals, could not give it. The named king is a person; the functional king is a state of the suit. The Golden Dawn traded the person for the state, and the reading tradition we still use is built on that trade.

The Thoth deck keeps the Golden Dawn's move and then rewrites the functions with Crowley's own language. The Court Cards' Planetary and Decan Scheme The court cards in Thoth carry planetary and decan attributions that a Sola-Busca court card would never have held. The gap between the two is not a matter of better or worse. It is a matter of two different decisions about what a court card is for.

What a reader of Thoth should notice

When a court card comes up in a Thoth reading, the card you are holding is a principle wearing the clothing of a rank. The name "King" does a job the Sola Busca's named kings never had to do. They were specific people. You are reading a function.

That distinction matters in practice. When you are deciding whether the King of Wands in a spread is a helpful figure or a threat, the modern tradition asks you to judge the quality of fire in that position. The Sola Busca tradition would have asked you to judge the character of a specific man. The first question is about a state; the second is about a person. Most modern readers do the first without ever noticing that the second option existed.

That does not make the modern card less. It makes it different. The Sola Busca court card asks you to picture a person and draw on what you know of that person. The modern court card asks you to picture a quality of a suit and read what state that quality is in. Both are legitimate ways to use the position. They are just not the same use.

Knowing that the court card was once a named human being changes how you feel about the abstraction. The King of Swords is not a mysterious force. He is a slot that used to hold a general, a judge, a ruler with a name, and that a later tradition decided was better off nameless so that it could mean a quality instead. The Sola Busca gave the deck its named people. The Golden Dawn gave the reading its functions. You are holding both, in a different order than either of them intended.

In the final part of this series we step back from the Sola Busca alone and follow the fully illustrated minor arcana from that deck, through Waite and Smith, into the Thoth cards you actually read, so the line of descent is visible in one place.

The Sola Busca court cards did not survive as a reading tradition. What survived of them is the fact that the position could carry a named, human figure, and that fact is what made the whole later project possible. The modern deck kept the rank, dropped the name, and filled the freed slot with a function. You are reading that function. The name is still there, under it, in the one Italian deck that never lost it.