The Open Athenaeum

✶ The Study Deck

Ace of Wands

Wands, of the lesser arcana

Waite & Colman Smith, 1909 · described 1911

A hand issuing from a cloud grasps a stout wand or club.

the plate, in waite's words · the painted card will hang here in time

In divination

Creation, invention, enterprise, the powers which result in these; principle, beginning, source; birth, family, origin, and in a sense the virility which is behind them; the starting point of enterprises; according to another account, money, fortune, inheritance.

Reversed: Fall, decadence, ruin, perdition, to perish also a certain clouded joy.

The library's note

A hand issuing from a cloud grasps a stout wand, still green, opening the suit Waite calls one "of life and animation." Like the other three aces, it is the suit's plainest image, pure origin before any court or number complicates it. Waite's own gloss leans toward beginnings taken literally, "creation, invention, enterprise," "the starting point of enterprises," rather than the settled outcomes the suit reaches by its tens. Every wand from here to the King keeps its leaves; the life named in this first card never goes dormant.

a young page · the keeper's voice pass on the note is still to come

Doors Onward

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Waite, A. E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Card text quoted verbatim, his punctuation kept. (Public domain.)
  2. Card described at: http://sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktwaac.htm

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