Ace of Spades: the secret, and the emblem of Richmond's Order

Meaning

Every Ace is a wish in Richmond's tables, and the Spade's wish is kept close: “A secret wish. A secret resolution. A secret knowledge.” Under one planet he adds, “With mystics it represents the Order of the Magi”, and later in the book he calls it “the secret emblem, representative of the secret order”; on his plate of day cards the Ace of Spades is drawn with an emblem and the letters O O M.

The reading of this card as death and rebirth comes from tarot and fortune-telling, not from this tradition, and our own texts dropped it in October 2026. We read the Ace of Spades as a private aim and hidden depths: people who keep their deepest purposes to themselves, often hard-working and drawn to what lies beneath the surface, and who are served by openness with those close to them.

In the spreads

In the Life Spread the Ace of Spades is the last card of the Mercury row, at its left-hand end under the Neptune column, after the Three of Diamonds, its Moon card. Its path runs along the Venus row below: the Seven of Hearts, the Seven of Diamonds, the Five of Spades, the Jack of Hearts and on.

It gives to the Seven of Hearts, the natural-order card of its place and also its Mercury card, and receives from the Two of Clubs. Its seven birthdays, from 13 January to 1 July, have no cusp and include no Leo date, so it is never its own ruling card.

Life path and karma cards

Read from the Life Spread: the card before the Ace of Spades, then the ten after it, the order running on from the crown line back to the top right. The names of the places are Camp's, used descriptively.

Birthdays and ruling cards

The ruling card is the card of the life path in the place of the Sun sign's ruling planet; Leo takes the birth card itself and Scorpio two cards.

For every sign, as the tradition's modern rulers give them: Aries (Mars): Five of Spades; Taurus (Venus): Seven of Diamonds; Gemini (Mercury): Seven of Hearts; Cancer (the Moon): Three of Diamonds; Leo (the Sun): Ace of Spades; Virgo (Mercury): Seven of Hearts; Libra (Venus): Seven of Diamonds; Scorpio (Mars and Pluto): Five of Spades and King of Hearts; Sagittarius (Jupiter): Jack of Hearts; Capricorn (Saturn): Nine of Clubs; Aquarius (Uranus): Nine of Spades; Pisces (Neptune): Two of Hearts.

Correspondences

Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.

Suit in Richmond (1893, p. 28)

The emblem of winter and the fourth quarter: the spade, “an instrument of labor”, and the acorn that “becomes a new tree in time”; quoted with its item on mortality left out sourced

The suit's season and planets in Richmond (pp. 27 to 28, 41)

Winter; Uranus, ruling “from a point of labor”, and Saturn, whose reading we leave out. Facts about his book, not about anyone born under the card sourced

Number in Richmond (pp. 42 to 45)

Aces: a wish or aspiration; every Ace in his tables is a wish sourced

Richmond's table for the card (p. 154)

The secret under every planet: “A secret wish. A secret resolution. A secret knowledge.” and “With mystics it represents the Order of the Magi” sourced

Our keyword line (2026)

A private aim and hidden depths. our construction

Our theme for the suit

Work, Will, Routine, Inner Strength our construction

A suit element or a single planet

None in Richmond or any founding text; the sets other sites give disagree, and ours was dropped in October 2026 disputed

How the schools read it

Olney H. Richmond (1893)

An emblem of solar value 40 and spirit value 44, read through its suit, labour, and its number, a wish: one meaning under each of the seven planets, most of them events (p. 154).

Randall and Campbell, Lein, Camp (1947 onward)

Read the birth card as character rather than events. Camp's line adds the life path, the karma cards and the yearly spreads used on this page, and gives the card a nickname, which we do not use.

EsoTerrier

Read here as a private aim and hidden depths, served by openness with those close at hand.

Claims about it

• The Ace of Spades is a card of death and rebirth.

  false

  What the record shows: In this tradition the Ace of Spades is Richmond's card of a secret and the emblem of his Order (“With mystics it represents the Order of the Magi”, p. 155). The other reading belongs to other systems.

• The cards show past lives and mark old souls, and the Spades are the suit of old souls.

  unverified

  What the record shows: Nothing of this is in Richmond. In Camp's system “karma” names a relation between two spreads; reincarnation is a belief, not part of the arithmetic.

• Each suit has an element and a ruling planet.

  disputed

  What the record shows: No founding text gives the suits elements, and the sources that do disagree with each other. Richmond gives each suit a season and two planets (pp. 27 to 28, 41), which we report as his. We dropped the attributes in October 2026.

• Each card has a traditional nickname.

  disputed

  What the record shows: The nicknames are Camp's coinages, or Randall and Campbell's, not Richmond's; taken as a set they mark a text as derived from his. We use none of them.

Elsewhere on EsoTerrier

• Seven of Hearts its first karma card, the card it gives to
• Two of Clubs its second karma card, the card that gives to it
• Three of Diamonds its Moon card, the card before it in the Life Spread
• Natal Chart where the Sun sign that picks the ruling card is worked out