Four of Wands · Wands · Fire

Four staves stand planted in the foreground, two left, two right, a wide gap between the pairs. Every tip is still budding green leaves. Red ribbons knot the outer two, and from them Pamela Colman Smith swags a heavy garland across the span: foliage, red roses, dark berries, one pale round fruit, dipping low in the middle. The wands become a gate you look through, under a flat, cloudless yellow sky.

Beyond it, two figures stand close together, wreaths in their hair, bouquets raised overhead. One wears white under a blue-green mantle, the other deep crimson. A grey battlemented wall runs behind them, a tower with a red conical roof over it. Low at the left, a small knot of people in red and green. Nothing here is being fought for. It has been won, and the picture is the acknowledgment.

Nobody has a hand on these four. They were planted, dressed, and left to hold.

The Golden Dawn gives this decan to Venus in Aries: fire that has stopped conquering and started hosting. Waite read it as country life and a domestic harvest-home, concord and repose, and for once he thought the meaning sat near the surface. Some see a wedding canopy in the garlanded frame; others a plain threshold, a house you are finally allowed into.

Upright, the tradition reads arrival: a stage completed, a welcome, a gladness with other people in it.

Reversed, the same dial turns private. The gate still stands, but the joy is rehearsed, or the homecoming stalls and the crowd waits at a wall nobody opens.

Whatever you have built, someone has to stand under it. That is what the garland is for.