Ace of Wands

The Ace of Batons or Wands is a single large club, held in a hand in most patterns, and for most of the tarot's history that is all it was: the one card of a suit, in a game where suit cards ranked in order and carried no pictures.

That is the crucial fact about the minor arcana. In the fifteenth-century decks and in every standard printed pattern for four centuries after, the numbered cards are pips, arrangements of the suit sign, exactly like the numbered cards in an ordinary modern deck. They have no scenes. There is nothing to interpret in a picture, because there is no picture.

The fully illustrated minor arcana that most readers now take for granted is the work of Pamela Colman Smith in 1909. She had one significant precedent, the Sola Busca deck of the 1490s, an unusual Italian pack with illustrated pips, photographs of which had reached the British Museum shortly before she began; several of her compositions resemble its cards closely enough that the borrowing is generally accepted. Beyond that she was inventing.

For this suit the occult layer assigns fire and the will, and the Golden Dawn treated the Aces as the roots of the powers of the elements rather than as cards with ordinary meanings. In practice the Ace of Wands reads as an impulse that has not yet been acted on: energy, initiative, the beginning of an enterprise, an idea with heat in it. Its failure mode is the same energy dissipated, enthusiasm that never becomes a plan, or a start made so often that starting has become the activity.

The Aces occupy an odd position in modern practice, and the oddity comes from a collision between two systems.

In the game, an Ace is simply the low card of a suit, or in some tarot games the high one, depending on the suit and the local rules. It carries no special significance and there is nothing to interpret.

In the Golden Dawn system the Aces are something else entirely. They are placed at Kether, the first sephirah, and treated as the root of the powers of the element rather than as ordinary cards. An Ace on this account is not the smallest instance of its suit but its undifferentiated source: not a specific fire but fire before it is anything in particular. That is why occult descriptions of the Aces read so unlike descriptions of the numbered cards, and why they so often refuse to say what the card means in practical terms.

Practical cartomancy went a different way and reads the Aces as beginnings, gifts and openings, the suit's business arriving. This is a much older and more mundane tradition, closer to the cartomancers of the eighteenth century than to any lodge, and it is what most readers actually do at the table.

Both are in use, usually at once and without anyone noticing the seam. A reader who says the Ace of Wands is a new venture is doing eighteenth-century cartomancy; a reader who says it is the root of the powers of fire is doing 1890s Hermetic Kabbalah. The two do not contradict each other, but they are not the same statement and they came from different places, roughly a century apart.