Queen of Wands

Within Waite's four-rank court, the Queen of Wands is the fire suit's inward, nurturing mastery; the Golden Dawn's structure that the Thoth deck follows keeps her rank and largely her name, assigning the elemental pairing Water of Fire, will and confidence held and stabilized rather than fire's more active Knight or Prince expressions. Her full Golden Dawn title, the Queen of the Thrones of Flame, and her astrological span, the final ten degrees of Pisces through the first twenty of Aries, place her at the threshold where cardinal fire begins, framing Aries's onset rather than sitting inside any one sign.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a queen enthroned between carved lions and sunflowers, a wand in one hand and a sunflower in the other, a black cat seated at her feet, is considerably more particular in its symbolism than the Marseille Reine de Batons, a static heraldic figure holding the suit emblem with no throne carving, flowers or animal companion at all; the sunflower and the black cat are Rider-Waite-Smith additions with no older precedent in the pattern.

The Thoth deck is one of relatively few court cards where Crowley and Harris keep the exact name Queen of Wands rather than substituting a Golden Dawn title; Harris's rendering keeps the leonine and solar motifs Smith established but reworks them into her characteristic geometric idiom.

Upright the Queen of Wands is read as confidence, warmth and a magnetic, self-possessed independence; reversed, as jealousy, insecurity, or the same fire turned demanding and difficult to satisfy.

As a person card, she is conventionally read as someone at ease in herself and generous with her own energy, and readers commonly distinguish her from the King of Wands on the axis the Golden Dawn's structure formalizes, her Water of Fire a warmth that holds and stabilizes, his Fire of Fire a will directed outward into leadership and enterprise; where he sets a course for others, she is more often read as radiating a confidence others are drawn toward without needing to be led anywhere in particular.

Waite's own printed meaning, she is attractive, chaste, loving, honourable, though also, if the card is ill-dignified, jealous and even deceitful, keeps a moral vocabulary current practice has generally replaced with more purely psychological language, confidence and insecurity rather than virtue and its absence.

The black cat at her feet is one of the more frequently discussed single details among her symbolism, generally read as marking an intuitive, slightly untamed quality beneath her composure, a detail with no equivalent in either the Marseille card or the Golden Dawn's own textual description of the rank.