Queen of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

The Queen of Disks is the Earth Mother. In each rendition she cradles the world, embodied in a coin. This is her child, and through her energy and eternal fertility it retains its form.

In Rider, the Queen is crowned with a long green headdress, and is dressed in red and white. She looks down upon the coin happily. Her throne is ornately carved with imagery of fruit, children, and the head of a Goat. These are all symbols of fecundity:ripe swelling fruit, the libidinous goat, and the children which are produced. The environment around her is verdant, and a bunny rabbit sits in the corner.

In Thoth, we find the Queen at a different stage of motherhood altogether. Her crown topped with great spiralling goat horns as she wears an armoured top and holds a crystal-tipped, spiral scepter. She cradles her disk close to her breast. Her throne is atop a palm tree, and a goat stands beside her. Here the Queen is Capricorn, the goat at the top of the mountain; she looks to the vast desert before her, spotted only with a few palms and a dry river. There is much work for her to do.

In Marseille, the Queen is in royal robes, crowned, and bears a scepter that looks like an ear of corn, or a fleur de lys. She is focused entirely on the disk she holds aloft. In it is the heart and seed of her world, the material reality that she inhabits. Qabalistically, she is the water of the Earth. She is mud, the great sign of civilization.

When we think of the Queen of Disks let us think of the great title of Mesopotamia: the Cradle of Civilization. What allowed civilization to flourish was mud. A close proximity to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and then the Nile for Egypt. The water of these rivers turned deathly desert to fertile mud, which allowed for agriculture to flourish. This is the nature of the Queen -she is the union of water and earth as fertile mud.

Mythologically, she is Gaia, Mother Earth, the great globe itself, a union of land and sea in herself, and the endless processes which maintain the world. In humanity, we can think of the hardworking women who raise what is around them. In Thoth, the Queen is a domineering mother who coldly looks at what is around her, and needs to exert her will to ascend to her lofty place. This is softened in Rider and Marseille, where it is the maternal love which cradles the world and keeps it growing.

When we pull this card, we can expect something to take care of. Just as the environment has lovingly given us life, we must give life to the environment. This may be directly a project, an investment in something that will grow and profit. This can also directly relate to a Capricorn in our lives.