Many, many years ago, I wrote a post about significators. Reading back through that post, I frankly don’t love it—as is the case with most of the posts I’ve written on this blog. I’ve been blogging for somewhere around 9 years now, and that means there’s a glowing online record of all the things I have felt, thought, and been over the course of nearly a decade. I’m proud of this blog, but yeesh, I really don’t enjoy being confronted with past versions of myself (as, to be fair, I doubt anyone does). On the one hand, having the blog is great; it’s a personal journal and it lets me see how I’ve grown and changed over the years. On the other hand, having the blog means that I am constantly cringing as I read over things I wrote a decade ago. Moreover, it carries with it the deep and uncomfortable knowledge that years from now, I’ll cringe just at much at my present self as I currently do at the past version of me.

But that’s growth. It’s an exercise in humility, and I always need those. Being reminded of how much I’ve changed over time keeps me reflective and introspective, and it helps somewhat in curbing my tendency to think that I am always right about everything. As uncomfortable as it can be to look back at my past self, it’s also kind of nice—to see a version of me who was younger, had not yet learned many of the lessons I now have, but was still altogether a damn good kid who was trying his best in the world. I cringe, but at the same time, I’m proud of my past self and glad I made it to where I am now.

All of that is to say: I wrote a particular blog post many years ago.

The title of this post was “When Does a Knight Become a King?” In it, I wrote about the fact that I had (at that point) been using the Knight of Swords as my significator in Tarot readings, but that it no longer felt like it really fit. I had found myself gravitating more and more toward the King of Swords as my significator, and the post involved my musings about what it meant to transition from one to the other.

Now, eight years and twenty-five days later, I can definitively answer the question I asked in the title of that post. The Knight of Swords becomes the King of Swords once he has a Ph.D in philosophy.

There is no question that among the court cards, I am most like the King of Swords. I have the qualities of several other cards, because people are complicated; I have the idealism of the Knight of Cups, the arrogance of the King of Wands, and so on. But on the whole, the King of Swords is the most like me. He’s the analyst, the researcher, the one who takes a subject and spreads it out in fifteen different directions as he tells you about the history of cheesemaking and how that affected Dutch colonial aspirations in the early modern period. The King of Swords can’t help dissecting everything you put in front of him.

Most importantly of all, the King of Swords is a philosopher. One might even call him a philosopher king.

As personality goes, I have a great deal in common with the King of Swords, but the thing that really cinched it was when I completed my Ph.D. The doctorate was an initiation of sorts (a long, brutal, and harrowing one), and it has left a permanent mark on me. Even though I’m leaving the ivory tower, I will always be a doctor of philosophy. I will always be the person who went through seven years of graduate school and got a doctorate in Kantian theoretical philosophy between 1755 and 1789. On a deep, deep level, that is who I am and will be for the rest of my life. And so, I consider myself the King of Swords.

Looking back at my original post, I find it silly that I was thinking of myself as the King of Swords at the time. Yes, my personality fits the card, but there was something missing at the time, and I should have known that. I needed more experience, more authority, in order to really count as a King. (There’s the aforementioned arrogance.) At the time, of course, I didn’t know that I was going to pursue a Ph.D, so I couldn’t have known that was what I was missing. Nonetheless, I should have known there was something.

Anything can happen, but I doubt my significator will change again over the course of my life. At the very least, it won’t change any time soon. The doctorate has simply left too large and too permanent of a mark on me. It’s changed me in ways that I frankly could never have imagined it would, and I am now—and forever—the King of Swords. Or perhaps the Doctor of Swords would be a more appropriate title.