figures

The King and the Queen

the crowned pair, the royal figures

---

A rank rather than a person. Read the robe, the throne and what comes out of the mouth before you read the face.

---

Thirty-six works here carry a king, a queen or the pair, and the ones the archive has read fall into two kinds: the sovereign, read by his clothes and his crown, and the couple, read by what is about to happen to them.

Where the king is read, he is read by his clothes and his mouth rather than his face. The Apocalypse describes the rider of the nineteenth chapter twice over: “And he was clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood. And his name is called: THE WORD OF GOD”, and “And out of his mouth proceedeth a sharp two-edged sword, that with it he may strike the nations.” The painter of the sheet after the figures attributed to Flamel has drawn both, the flecked robe and the blade in the mouth, so the identification does not rest on a guess.

Hall's throned figure is the same kind of reading and it is unusually candid about its own liberties. “He sits upon a throne of flaming light and the flashes of the fire are subject to His will”, and then, of the robes: “In the Zohar His robes are said to be white, but they are here shown as red to signify that the garments of Divinity partake of the nature of cosmic activity.” That second sentence is worth more than the first. The plate departs from the text it is illustrating, and the caption says so in the same breath.

Waite's Emperor of 1909 is “a crowned monarch--commanding, stately, seated on a throne”, and Waite gives him two readings at once: “On the surface, as I have indicated, they stand for mundane royalty, uplifted on the seats of the mighty; but above this there is the suggestion of another presence. They signify also--and the male figure especially--the higher kingship, occupying the intellectual throne.” The Empress is the one queen the archive can read, and Waite reads her by her crown: “Her diadem is of twelve stars, gathered in a cluster”, and among the names she “has been correctly described as” is “the woman clothed with the sun”, whose crown of twelve stars the Apocalypse gives her. The pair without crowns is on two of his cards, and he says they are the same pair twice. On the Lovers they are “two human figures, male and female, unveiled before each other, as if Adam and Eve when they first occupied the paradise of the earthly body”, and the card “is in all simplicity the card of human love”; on the Devil they are chained by the neck to the block, “as if Adam and Eve after the Fall. Hereof is the chain and fatality of the material life.”

Maier's kings of 1618 are patients, and his couples are ingredients. The king of the thirty-first emblem swims in the sea, “Rex Diadema caput cui praegravat”, a king whose head is weighed down by his crown, shouting for rescue; King Duenech of the twenty-eighth, “Bile tumens rigidis moribus usus erat”, swollen with bile and harsh-tempered, sweats it out in a glass bath; the king of the forty-eighth drinks too much of a spring and is purged until “mox tincta est utraque mala rosis”, both his cheeks are tinged with roses. Each king is the metal at a stage of its treatment, and each comes out redder. The couples are the two things the work joins: the brother and sister of the fourth emblem, “ut sint foemina masque toro”, that there be woman and man in one bed; the man and woman inside the geometer's circle in the twenty-first; Isis gathering the pieces of Osiris in the forty-fourth. What the queen is doing in the alchemical pictures, Maier says plainly: she is the other half of the matter, and the marriage is the operation.

Crowned figures also come in pairs in the Splendor Solis copies, over the sun and the moon, beside Mercury. The archive holds those works and holds nothing that explains them, so this entry does not pretend otherwise.

1. The Apocalypse of Saint John, Douay Rheims, Challoner revision: Quoted from the Challoner revision, the English text the archive uses for the Apocalypse throughout.
2. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Hall's text and plate captions, 1928. Transcribed here, not yet read against a printed folio.
3. Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot: Waite commissioned the 1909 designs and wrote the key to them, so his account is the closest thing the deck has to an author's statement.
4. Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618: The mottoes and epigrams of the fifty emblems, Oppenheim 1618, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's own and is marked as such on every record. Maier's discourses, in which he explains each emblem at length, are not yet transcribed.

• The Crown
• The Angel and the Wing
• The Demon and the Monster
• The Serpent and the Dragon
• The Divine
• The Triangle and the Pyramid
• The Lion
• The Two Pillars
• The Heavens
• The Sun
• The Tree
• The Water
• The Hand
• The Pentagram
• Fire
• The Vessel
• Death and the Skull