Ace of Wands · Wands · Fire

Pamela Colman Smith gave the first Wand to a hand that never fully enters the picture. It pushes out of a grey scrolled cloud on the right, bare to the wrist, fist closed on a stout club of a branch held upright, thumb laid along the shaft, nail showing. Short white rays fan out behind the knuckles. The wood is hot orange-red and unfinished: hatched bark, knots, cut stubs, a knob of burl crowning it. Three green sprouts have broken out along the shaft, all of them above the fist, and eight loose leaves hang in the air, four to each side. The branch’s lower end stops in mid-air, pointing at ground it never reaches.

Nothing holds the wood up but the hand, and the hand has only just arrived.

The sky is bare paper, uncoloured. Far below, a green hill carries a small white castle on its crest, a pale blue river lies flat across the card’s foot, three round trees stand on the far bank, and a wine-mauve range closes the horizon.

An Ace is the suit’s root, the element before it has been spent. Fire here is will, appetite, vocation. Upright, the tradition reads a beginning with heat already behind it: an idea that wants hands on it, work that has said its own name. Waite files it under creation, invention, enterprise, the first stroke of a making.

Reversed, the heat finds nothing to burn. It gets read as a false start, a launch with no fuel, and as the spark kept indoors, where preparing stands in forever for the act. The image is blunt about what it is missing: a second hand.