A beautiful woman, a duchess’s crown tied at her waist, rides a great camel. This image combines three distinct symbols: the Regal feminine (the woman with the duchess’s crown), the desert-ready beast of burden (the camel), and the journey or passage implied by the ride itself. The crown, secured not on her head but at her waist, suggests power held in abeyance or an attribute carried rather than worn; it is a badge of nobility in transit, not a throne. The camel, patient and enduring, is a vehicle through barren places — a creature of the between-worlds, tied to long crossings and hidden oases.

Position on the Tree of Life

This image belongs to Path 20, the twentieth letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Resh, corresponding to the Sun), which runs from Hod (Splendor, eighth Sephirah) to Netzach (Victory, seventh Sephirah). The Path connects the intellectual clarity of Hod to the emotional endurance of Netzach. The woman's ride is therefore a passage between these two Sephiroth: beauty and intellect in motion over a difficult terrain.

Astrological and planetary correspondence

Resh is the letter of the Sun, the source of light and life. The duchess’s crown, tied off-center, may hint at a solar corona that is not yet fixed in place; the camel beneath her is the slow progress of the sun across the sky. In astrological symbolism, the camel is a type of the ship of the desert, moving through a realm of dryness (the desert of the zodiac’s southern quarter). The woman’s beauty is the sunlight that makes the world visible.

Historical context

The image appears in the Tarot trumps and the 777 tables as a magical image for the twentieth path. Its form derives from the Golden Dawn’s attribution system, where each Hebrew letter receives a specific visual emblem alongside its sign, planet, and element. In earlier tarot, the Sun Trump shows a child on a horse or a wall; the Golden Dawn replaced that with the camel-riding woman, a figure from the Book of Concealed Mystery and from medieval bestiaries that allegorized the camel as a creature of both submission and endurance. Crowley describes the image in The Book of Thoth as “a beautiful woman riding a great camel” and interprets the camel as the vehicle of the Sun’s light through the night of the desert.

In the 777 tables

At Step 20, the image stands as the magical counterpart to the solar letter Resh. The adjacent paths show a range of other riders — a man on a pale horse (Path 18), a child on a two-headed dragon (Path 24), angels in a chariot of fire (Path 26) — each a distinct emblem for its letter’s sigil. The crowned woman on the camel is unique to this Path, holding in her posture the solar virtues of clarity and blessing, even while the beast beneath her steps steadily through the dry and the difficult.