Page of Wands

The picture

A young figure stands alone on sand in a yellow tunic worked all over with black salamanders, a red plume in the hat. Both hands rest on a leafing staff planted upright in front of him, taller than he is.

He is looking at the top of it.

Behind, three small pyramids and an empty desert. Nothing else is in the card and nothing is happening in it.

Upright

Curiosity with no track record behind it.

Pages are beginnings that have taken human form, and this one is enthusiasm: the news that excites, the idea taken up the same afternoon, the willingness to try something without any information about whether it will work.

Everything here is still potential. Nothing has been asked of him, nothing has cost him anything, and the card is entirely unembarrassed about that.

He is reading the stick

His attention is on the top of the staff as though there were something written there.

There is not. It is a length of wood with three leaves on it, and he is studying it with the concentration of somebody receiving a message. That gesture is the card's charm and it is also the exact limit of what the card can promise.

What he is doing is the thing everybody does at the start: attributing meaning to an object that has not yet done anything. The idea is thrilling because it has no history. The stick is fascinating because nothing has been tried with it. Both will look different in six weeks, and the picture is generous enough not to say so.

The three pyramids behind him are the only built thing in the card and they are the oldest structures anyone had heard of. Set against a boy studying a stick for the first time, they do a quiet piece of work about how much has already been done by other people.

Reversed

Enthusiasm that will not survive the week. Beginning loudly and frequently, with the interest gone before anything was required of it, and a new one arriving before anybody has noticed the last one stop.

There is also the message that does not come, or comes garbled. News expected, delayed, and energy accumulating with nowhere to be spent.

As a person

Anyone at the start of something, at any age, in the specific condition of not yet knowing what it will cost. It is read as a literal young person, and sometimes that is right, but plenty of people arrive here at fifty after a change of direction.

The card is not critical of him. Not having done a thing before is a condition rather than a fault, and treating inexperience as immaturity is a misreading that does real damage in a spread.

In a reading

Asked what to do: follow the interest without demanding that it justify itself yet. Justification is a later card's business and asking for it now generally kills the thing.

In an obstacle position it names a pattern of starting — the shelf of abandoned beginnings, each of which was genuinely exciting on the day. With the Knight the same energy acquires a horse. With the Ace, two beginnings, one impersonal and one with a face.