We’re into the Wands! I’m excited.
Day Fifteen. October 29th. Ace of Wands.
Definition: The traditional interpretation is creation, enterprise, and the virility behind them. Also, according to Waite, money and inheritance. It’s always about money and heritance isn’t it? If you have money, you can do things in the world. Sasha Graham says wands are about desire. I want to write about desire. I want to write about metaphysical power and how to wield it. But for Pamela, like the pentacles were about the challenges of money, I sense the wands will be about the challenges of desire.
Detail: What is the Elsewhere Tarot presenting?
A figure in a robe, at a table from which waves of power are spreading outward, driving back large, shadowy, menacing creatures with sharp claws and sharp beaks. The figure feels to me like the Magician from Pamela’s deck at his table outside. But Aces are about beginnings. How is this an Ace? It’s light into the darkness. In the beginning there was light. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that light was good. Then he separated the light from darkness.”
The shadow creatures though, what’s up with the five stars above that they’re connected to by a long tendril? They’re not just a threatening darkness. They’re cosmic in some way. They are a cosmic resistance to the figure’s metaphysical power.
Day: Hmm. How does this relate to me today? A world that’s inherently, metaphysically inimical. That’s bleak. I’ve had a recurring dream in my life, maybe a half dozen times I remember since I was a tween, of being in the house where I grew up and seeing through the picture window that the world is all tinted a sickly orange, like the orange lens effect they use in cop shows to tell you a flashback scene is happening in Mexico, or Miami, and realizing the outer world was actually Hell. Somehow through no action of mine, no particular sin, I was in Hell. Is that what the Elsewhere wands are about? Being in an inherently, cosmically, inimical world and finding a path of metaphysical power against it? It’s not exactly writing about desire, but I’ll take it. It’s not bad.
Discovery: So, Pamela’s Ace of Wands? A glowing hand from a cloud, like the glowing hand on the Ace of Swords, but this time holding a living wand with stems of green leaves on it and green leaves falling from it. And the landscape below is a castle on a far hill above a river, with a purple mountain range on the horizon. The landscape doesn’t seem as telling as the path and gate on the Ace of Pentacles.
Does the wand represent desire? It’s fairly phallic, with a knobbed head. It’s not a thin switch, or slim black-and-white stage magician’s wand. It’s more of a living and natural thing. Metaphysical power is natural. Desire is natural. I can see how this wand represents virility.
And I do get a feeling it has some relation to the landscape. Did it give rise to the hills? Give rise to the castle? Make the river flow? Maybe that’s reading too much into it. But I don’t get a sense that Pamela’s landscape is inimical, so if her wands are about some challenge it’s a different sphere of challenge than what the Elsewhere wands are concerned with.