Therefore the packets of three with the singleton may be classified as, first, commencement; second, opposition; third, balance. The first three indicate dawn, the second three noon, while evening is represented by the Seven, Eight, and Nine, and the Ten card shows bewilderment or night.
The court cards in the Tarots have four to each suit that are named King, Queen, Cavalier, and Knave, and they represent man, woman, child, and servant. The male figure denotes enterprise, the female characterises affection or love, the youth typifies conflict, strength, struggle, rivalry, or hatred, while the Knave means transition. The court cards also express pointedly the meanings of the suit that they represent. They betoken family life, with the King as father, the Queen as mother, the Cavalier as son, and the Knave as daughter, child, or servant.
The King of Rods or Staves is a dark, kind friend; his Queen represents an amiable, good, charitable, or friendly person. The Cavalier is dark and good; the Knave is a dark messenger or child.
The court cards of Money typify fair people who are friendly, kindly disposed, or indifferent; the King representing the male, the Queen the female. The Cavalier portends strangers, and the Knave messages or news. These figures of the Rods and Cups bear inverse value to the Swords and Money, for the latter do not belong to the family, but indicate outsiders, strangers, or the world in general.
The King of Cups is a fair man and frequently means a lawyer, a councillor or a clergyman. The Queen is a blonde friend, perhaps the best beloved, and the Cavalier is sometimes a fair-haired lover, while the Knave is an infant, a messenger, or a birth.
The Suit of Swords always is unlucky, and its King betokens a dark, bad man, an enemy or some one to be mistrusted. The Queen represents a brunette who is wicked and to be feared, a gossip, a treacherous character. The Cavalier is an enemy or a spy, and is dark; while the Knave is bad news, delay, or malice. The whole group indicates opposition raised outside of the home.
It will be seen that if each one of the seventy-eight cards belonging to the Tarots be given the meaning assigned to it in the foregoing rules, nearly every emotion, every incident, every characteristic of man is typified, and the combinations are as endless as are the chances of life. As the cards are dealt and fall together, one balances or controls the other, so that when their meaning is deciphered as a whole there is a most interesting picture of ordinary life.
The game is played by two persons, one who deals and one who reads the cards, or rather interprets with superior knowledge the meaning of the great Book of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus. It can readily be seen how the game could be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous, who induced credulous persons to believe that the leaves of the book revealed the future. This faith, indeed, was inherited through generations, who received it from Moses and many of the Hebrew prophets, as well as from the priests of the temple of Thoth and those of Mercury; so it is small wonder that the mysterious leaves were regarded with awe, and that their revelations are received with implicit obedience, since the orders of the gods could be transmitted through the rods of Moses and Aaron that became the pip leaves, and the message was exemplified through the emblematic figures on the walls. The pips translated the meaning of the Atouts, without which neither part or volume of the book could be fully understood. Therefore all fortune-telling with packs of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades and Clubs is nonsense, since these cards were invented for games or gambling and have nothing occult or prophetic about them.