Enochian chess was built by the Golden Dawn as a study instrument as much as a game, and the tarot is one of the systems laid into it. The correspondence is simple enough to memorize in a minute. The four armies carry the four suits: Fire is Wands, Water is Cups, Air is Swords, Earth is Pentacles. Within an army the pieces carry the court. The King is the Ace, the Queen is the Queen, the Bishop is the Prince, the Knight is the Knight, and the Rook is the Princess.
The mapping, piece by piece
- King as Ace. The Ace is the root of its suit, the element in its undivided form. That is exactly the King's position in an Enochian army: everything depends on him, and when he is taken the whole force freezes. An army without its Ace is an element without its root.
- Queen as Queen. The one piece whose name survives the translation unchanged. She leaps two squares in any direction and jumps whatever is in the way, short of range and impossible to block.
- Bishop as Prince. The Bishop slides on the diagonals and is bound to one color for the whole game, a piece of long reach along fixed lines.
- Knight as Knight. Also unchanged, and the only piece the game left almost untouched: the ordinary chess L-jump, changing color every move it makes.
- Rook as Princess. The Rook slides orthogonally and is the piece a Rook's pawn grows into, the ground-level worker of the suit.
The four pawns are not court cards. They carry Egyptian god-form attributions of their own, one for each major piece they belong to, and their business is to grow into the court rather than to represent it. For the pieces themselves in plain playing terms, see how the pieces move.
Why a suit is an army and not a hand
In a tarot reading the court cards arrive one at a time, drawn out of a deck. On an Enochian board an entire suit is present at once, standing in one corner, with its court arranged in a fixed order set by the game's setting. That changes what the symbols do. They stop being cards you receive and become positions you can watch relate to each other. The Prince of Cups is not a message this month, it is a Bishop on the Water army with a specific line of attack, currently blocked or currently open. When the Wands army is reduced to its Ace and one pawn, you are looking at a suit worn down to its root and one survivor, and the position says something a single card cannot.
The two alliances as a reading
The suits are also paired by the alliance structure, and the pairing follows the elements exactly. Earth and Water, Pentacles and Cups, fight as the receptive side. Air and Fire, Swords and Wands, fight as the active one. Each ally sits at the corner diagonally opposite, never adjacent. So the board is permanently divided into a receptive diagonal and an active diagonal, which is a reading in itself before anyone has moved. When a game ends with the active alliance holding the field, the outcome has an elemental grammar as well as a winner. See the diagonal alliance and the four elements.
The layer underneath the court
The court cards are one of several attribution systems the board carries. Every square also holds divinatory attributions of its own: a sign of the zodiac, a tarot trump, a Hebrew letter, a geomantic figure, an astrological house. Each square is drawn as a small pyramid seen from above so that its four faces can carry them. That is why the board looks the way it does, and why a finished game can be read as an oracle rather than merely scored. The trumps have their own article in the tarot trumps, and the worked example of reading a real final position lives on the divination page.
Reading a game with the court in mind
Practically, the court gives you a vocabulary for what happened. Note which suit's Ace fell first, since that is the element whose root gave way. Note whether the decisive work was done by Queens, Princes, Knights, or Princesses, because a game won by leaping Queens reads differently from one won by sliding Princesses grinding up a file. Note which suit was still moving at the end. None of this requires memorizing which trump sits on which square, and you should be careful of any source that hands you a per-square table. The layer is real; the specific attributions belong to the boards themselves. Start with Enochian chess and tarot, then reading the final position.
Play a suit to the end
Pick an army, learn its court, and play a free game paying attention to which cards are still standing when the field is held. The reading comes out of the position itself.
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Take the divinatory layer further in the divination guide, meet the trumps in the tarot trumps, or learn to read an ending in reading the final position.