Ace of Wands

The picture

A hand comes out of a cloud on the right of the card and takes hold of a thick wooden staff. The staff has not been cut into a tool. It is a branch with the bark still on it, and it is in leaf.

Some of the leaves have come off and are falling through the air beside it.

Below, a green valley with a river running through it and a castle on a hill in the distance.

Upright

The first heat of an idea, before it has been asked to survive anything.

Aces are offers and not achievements, and this one is undiluted energy: an impulse, an attraction, the sudden arrival of something that seems worth doing. It turns up complete and completely untested at the same moment.

The leaves place it at the very beginning. Nothing has been pruned, shaped or seasoned. Whatever this becomes is going to require work the card says nothing whatever about.

The leaves are already coming off

Look at the air around the staff. Several leaves have detached and are falling, and the hand has only just closed on it.

That is the honest part of the Ace and it is easy to miss under the enthusiasm. The branch is alive, which is why it is exciting — and living wood sheds. The losses have begun before anything has been attempted, at the moment of grasping, in perfectly still air.

A fair reading of the card includes them. Whatever gets built out of this will be smaller than what is currently in the hand, and some of the reduction is already happening in the picture.

The castle in the distance is the other half of the picture. There is somewhere for this to go, it is built already, and it is a long way off across a valley with a river in it. The Ace does not draw the road.

Reversed

The spark that will not catch. Enthusiasm that arrives and dissipates, sometimes repeatedly, over the same idea, at intervals of about six weeks.

It can also catch and find nothing to burn. Energy with no direction available to spend itself on turns into restlessness rather than output, and restlessness is considerably harder to live with than a flat mood.

Of the four Aces this is the only one whose object is still alive. A cup is made, a coin is struck, a sword is forged — all three are finished things handed over complete. The wand is a piece of a tree with the bark on, and it will keep doing what wood does whether or not anyone has a plan for it.

In a reading

The advice reading: start now, and stop preparing. In an outcome position it indicates a beginning rather than a conclusion, which is not what most people bring to a reading and is occasionally what they need.

Treating an Ace as a promise sets up a disappointment the card never offered — Aces open doors and do not walk through them. And it is read as strictly creative or sexual, and fire is broader than that: any impulse toward action qualifies. With the Two of Wands the pair is impulse and plan, and the order they fall in tells you which one is missing.