The Knights
If the Pages can be seen as the “children” of the tarot, then the Knights are the unruly and moody teenagers: A little wiser, a little stronger, and a little more feisty and boisterous. The Pages are often explained as the child-like archetypes in the tarot, an energy that is somewhat shy and innocent, but the Knights are the ones who charge into the situation. Like many people in that curiously strange liminal space between childhood and adulthood, the Knights are brash and headstrong. They are the ones who are first out of the gate, the ones who hit the ground running, who shoot first and ask questions later. They won’t yet have the gift of additional wisdom and experience that is usually hard won with age. In the meantime, their more youthful energy still underpins and drives their intentions.
The two archetypes that really embody this so very well are perhaps the archetypes for our modern age of social media, Instagram and TikTok: The Knight of Swords and the Knight of Wands. Both cards feature our hapless figures, charging off against some unseen and unknown target, heedless of what ever may come their way. Maybe they’re both just tilting at windmills. Maybe that dragon they thought they were going to get turned out to be a little bit bigger, meaner and more powerful than they realized.
The Knight of Swords is the quintessential knight. They person of action. The doer. But who or what are they charging? The direction of the trees suggests they are charging into the wind — maybe this rushing assault isn’t what this person should be doing. And look at the eyes of the horse: Maybe it’s just me, but it almost looks like even the knight’s supposedly loyal steed isn’t fully convinced this is a good idea either. We can almost imagine what must be going through this horse’s head at this very moment: “Are you fucking crazy!?”
I say that the Knight of Swords is one of the archetypes for our modern age because let’s face it: We’ve all been this Knight more times than we’d care to admit, haven’t we? On social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, the nature of the medium lends itself to short, quick sound bites and “hot takes”. We’re scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through our newsfeeds and timelines, taking in the firehose of information blasted our way from our friends, families and social networks. Who has the time to read more into the context of what someone says? They said something which looks racist or homophobic, or misogynist, or transphobic, or aphobic! Time to saddle up and get our Keyboard Warrior on.
Out of this, we have such modern phenomena as Cancel Culture, and Twitter Mobs, and all of the memes surrounding “ratio”. Drilling further down are such infamous aspects of social media such as “wokeness” and the now venerable term, “SJW”. Natalie Wynn (also known as ContraPoints, a YouTuber who is a frequent epicentre of social media controversy) made an excellent video on Cancel Culture, and how it so effectively reduces someone’s words (regardless of their intent, tone or how flippant they’re being) to one-dimensional essentialist statements easily prone to hyperbole, which adds to them being reduced to one-dimensional essentialist stereotypes and caricatures. Fitting then that, as of this writing, Wynn has once again recently been subjected to considerable controversy and cancelling over a tweet expressing her lack of understanding for Gen-Z queer people…that of all things also takes apparent aim at aspec people. A lot of the discourse over that tweet really is to me a microcosm of how a lot of online discourse in the queer and ace/aro community is often influenced by the energy of the Knight of Sword…and not in a good way. But while sometimes it’s important to not dive into the meleé, sometimes we might find ourselves in a place where jumping into the fray is important. Sometimes it’s important to go on the offensive.
Going on the offensive in our current world can sometimes mean actually taking our snarky responses and hot takes and shoving them in the faces of random strangers on the Internet in front of a live studio audience. It means actually being that Keyboard Warrior, brandishing our words like bladed weapons and swinging furiously. And sometimes, that’s definitely a good thing. Here, we can see how our Knight of Swords energy can be channeled into something constructive and focused. On October 26th, 2021 the BBC published an infamous article that, on the face of it, outlined what it said was the “issue” of “some” trans women pressuring cisgendered Lesbian women into sex. A lot of people saw through the ruse for what it was: a trans panic-fuelled fluff piece intended to capitalize on transphobia, pushed by radical feminists with a bigoted agenda. Many, many people across the world and across the UK, and across many social media platforms mobilized extensively to combat this piece, writing complaint letters to the BBC and taking to social media to outline the deeply flawed and problematic methodology behind its writing and research.
A little closer to home, during the midpoint and tail end of Ace Week 2021, people frequently took to their keyboards to battle against the waves of aphobia and exclusionary radical feminists attacking activists like Yasmin Benoit and groups like Girlguiding over their visibility campaigns for asexuality and the ace and aspec communities. While no radical feminist exclusionists likely changed their minds that asexuals somehow all have to be anti-sexual prudes with no right to own or express their sexuality as they see fit…the message was at least thrust out there, for the wider world to see, that asexuals, aromantics, and the spectrums we inhabit are not only real and valid, but powerful ways of expressing and owning our own sexual identities: That asexuality itself is not just being prudish about sex: it is about being free to say no to sexual attraction — regardless of what we wear, or who we date or sleep with.
There is flip side to that of course: the tarot, after all, centres balance in its narrative. The other side that we need to be mindful of is that we can easily end up in a place where we are charging at something that maybe we shouldn’t be charging at. Without being deeply mindful of context, we can verbally run down and trample over friends and potential allies just as easily as we can verbally go after bigots and Neo Nazis, over things as minor as misunderstandings of language, or misinterpretations of tone or intention. This opens the door wide open to lateral aggression. We see in cases where in online spaces, queer and ace people can aggressively go after each other just as hard as they would any bigot or Neo Nazi, all over reasons that pale in comparison to the wider issue of discrimination and hate against non-normative and non-white communities.
The Knight of Wands embodies a similar energy, but channeled in a different form. If the Knight of Swords answers aphobia with a barrage of angry, incendiary Tweets or Facebook replies, the Knight of Wands would answer it with a fiery avant-guarde literary piece, perhaps like a decentered hermit crab essay published in a major literary journal, calling out the offended parties in the most artistically playful and cutting way possible. The Wands are all about passion and drive in creativity and expression. So when the knight sees an opportunity to try to set the world ablaze with their art, as a response to the hate and injustice in the world, they take it, and run with it. In many ways, I think of my own Knight of Wands moment when I started working on this very same Medium blog, as well as writing my hermit crab essays about my feelings and experiences being biromantic and on the asexual spectrum as a demisexual; how my experiences with exclusion and the seemingly eternal self-gaslighting question of “…am I queer/ace enough” propelled my writing.
As a possible other channel for the energy encountered in the Knight of Swords, perhaps this gives us new avenues to express our emotions surrounding our relationship to our inner asexual or aromantic nature. Perhaps your experiences with exclusion, oppression, or discrimination as an assexual or aromantic (especially if you are at the intersection of other “axes of oppression”, like disability, race, economic class, or mental health) can be the spark which fuels a new passion for art and creativity.
The other side to all of this vitality, drive, and action is contemplation and reflection, which is where we meet the Knight of Pentacles and the Knight of Cups, in many ways embodying a more grown-up and mature form of the Page of Pentacles and the Page of Cups.
The Knight of Pentacles is the hard worker: holding a pentacle instead of a sword, they are very much of the earth and firmly planted in the ground. (Notice how this knight’s horse have all four feet clearly on the ground, as opposed to all of the other knights.) The tilled and ploughed field in the background makes a reference to how farming is very much an exercise of hard work and even harder patience. If the Knight of Swords and the Knight of Wands are the high school kids who dominate on the playing field or the debate room, the Knight of Pentacles is high schooler in the movies working that stereotypical low-income retail or service job, with big dreams of escaping their small town.
What are you tangibly working towards in your own ace or aro journey? The means to afford a safer space to live, or perhaps the means to build a safer community for you and other ace, aro and queer people in your area or sphere. Maybe it’s that artistic project — a book? A painting? A collection of essays or prose? — that received the spark of life from the Knight of Wands. Either way, the Knight of Pentacles is a sign to stay the course. To keep on persisting and keep on working. As with the farmed field in the background, the work will always go on, but it will get done, and as it gets done, real and tangible results will happen that cannot be denied. Do the work. But don’t think of it as work: Think of it as a true investment in the future.
From this, we go into the oddball of the Knights: The Knight of Cups — the moody artist who always sits at the back of the class, wistfully staring out the window of the classroom or quietly sketching in their notebook as the teacher drones on. That’s when you realize they’d been sketching pictures of *you* in their notebook all of this time. (And no, I have no personal experience of this — I’ve just seen too many 80s and 90s-era teen drams, it seems.)
I’ve often heard many tropes and clichés applied to this card and the energy they both embody and express: they’re the emo teens you’d go to school with, perpetually moping about their feelings and emotions. They’re the folks who wear their hearts on their sleeves. They’re the knight in shining armour, Romeo Montague, the Prince Charming clones from half-a-dozen fairytales and Disney movies. It’s a tired, overplayed persona. And yet, it’s still something that continues to endure; it’s an image that we see come up again and again in our media and in our culture. What relevance could an amatonormative, patriarchal obsolete archetype have for people who identify as anything except cisheteronormative and allosexual?
I started hugging myself shortly after I moved back to Toronto from my EFL teaching job in Korea. My partner at the time had lived in another city, a gruelling five hour bus ride away. I didn’t have a friend network, outside of one person who was busy fighting demons of their own; despite my best efforts, a lot of my friendships had shrivelled with time, and my living connections were a continent and an ocean away. It was then that I’d started to understand what it really means to experience touch starvation.
I don’t remember exactly how it started; maybe it was just a spontaneous muscle impulse sent to my arms from somewhere inside the folded jumble of my brain, or maybe it was from an errant Google search entered by fingers unguided by conscious thought. But at one moment, I was sitting in front of a email window the “To:” field blank, completely at a loss for who I could reach out to, or what I would even say to them. And then the next, I felt an unfamiliar, but still reassuring warmth spread over my sides and front. My arms had wrapped themselves around my side and shoulder. I was hugging myself.
I wouldn’t lie and say that it was a magical antidote to touch starvation, but it was a physical act imbued with powerful magical energy. It was an action that lit a spark inside my body. That act gave such repeated concepts like “self love” and “self care” actual life and existence, instead of remaining theoretical. I say all this because, this was a moment where my body acted on, and in love. Where love wasn’t just a feeling or a word, but an action, made in response to genuine, real need.
And to me, that is the core of what the Knight of Cups is. It’s just as much being Issac in Heartstopper as it is being Nick. It’s just as much making that step to reach out and hold yourself, as it is reaching out to hold someone else.
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