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".
See also
The Fool, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers.
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
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research