Ace of Wands
The ace of wands in the tarot's Minor Arcana: a hand issuing from a cloud and grasping a stout wand in leaf. A. E. Waite read it as creation, invention, enterprise and beginnings.
Meaning
Waite describes the card: "A hand issuing from a cloud grasps a stout wand or club."
What does the Ace of Wands mean?
Waite's meanings are "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"; reversed, "fall, decadence, ruin, perdition, to perish also a certain clouded joy". His list of additional meanings adds "calamities of all kinds", and reversed, "A sign of birth".
In older decks
In Italian packs the suit is bastoni, clubs: the earliest suit marks, the British Museum's catalogue of 1876 records, were coppe, danari, bastoni and spade, "cups, money, clubs, and swords". Papus, who calls it the Ace of Sceptres, reads it as "Commencement of an Enterprise."
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsTwo of WandsThe two of wands in the tarot's Minor Arcana: a tall man on a battlemented roof holding a globe, looking out over sea and shore. A. E. Waite read it as riches and magnificence, or else suffering and sadness.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsMù 目The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing are filed.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Lesser Arcana; Some Additional Meanings of the Lesser Arcana
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Divining Tarot, second lesson: the minor arcana
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), General history: the marks of the suits
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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