The Magician
The first trump of the tarot, numbered I: a conjurer at a table with a wand raised. A. E. Waite read it as skill, diplomacy and will.
Meaning
Waite's card shows a youthful figure in a magician's robe, one hand raising a wand towards heaven and the other pointing to the earth. The sign of infinity hangs above his head, a serpent swallowing its own tail makes his belt, and the emblems of the four suits lie on the table before him. Older decks called him the juggler or mountebank: Le Bateleur in French packs, Il Bagattello in an Italian one.
What does the Magician card mean?
In Waite's list the Magician means "skill, diplomacy, address, subtlety", and also "self-confidence, will"; reversed, "physician, Magus, mental disease, disgrace, disquiet".
In older decks
Papus made it the first card of his system and joined it to the first Hebrew letter, Aleph. A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles it Il Bagattello. Waite gave the older reading of the figure as "the caster of the dice and mountebank".
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe High PriestessTrump II of the tarot: a woman enthroned between two pillars. Older decks called her the Papess, the female pope.
- In Modern symbolsInfinity symbol (∞)∞ is the mathematical sign for infinity, a figure eight lying on its side. The English mathematician John Wallis introduced it in 1655, and why he chose the shape is disputed. It is also called the lemniscate, and outside mathematics it is carried on the Métis flag and by autistic and neurodiversity advocates.
See also
The Fool, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot.
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 Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- 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), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan and Bologna
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 27, 2026. How we research
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