MINOR ARCANA · WANDS · FIRE
Ace of Wands
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
A spark of inspiration, new venture, creative potential.
REVERSED
Delays, lack of motivation, a false start.
The card
The Ace of Wands is the first card of Wands, the suit of Fire: will, energy and ambition.
As the ace it is the root of its element: the Golden Dawn called it the Root of the Powers of Fire.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Ace of Wands, with the title and the zodiac decan from the Golden Dawn, as shown above.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
A hand issuing from a cloud grasps a stout wand or club. DIVINATORY MEANINGS 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.
FURTHER MEANINGS Calamities of all kinds. REVERSED A sign of birth.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part III §§ 2 and 4. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The same card in the other suits
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Ace of Bâtons (batons). The numbered cards carry no scene, only the suit's symbols arranged as on a playing card, so they are read from the number and the pattern.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- Reading the Cards · 16 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.