Queen of Tarot

The ancient wisdom of the cards

The Magician Tarot Card Meaning and Art Tarot Genoves Deck

Designation

The Magician

About the Deck

Tarot Genoves Deck

A reproduction of an authentic Genovean Tarot exhibited at the Fournier Playing Card Museum.

Provenance

Genova, Italy. 1887.

Description

Before a table covered with the appliances of his art stands the figure of a juggler, one hand upraised holding a wand (in some packs, a cup), the other pointing downwards. He wears a cap of maintenance like that of the kings, whose wide brim forms a sort of aureole round his head. His body and arms form the shape of the Hebrew letter Aleph, to which this card corresponds. He symbolises Will.

Meaning of The Magician from the Tarot Genoves Deck

Upright

Will, Will-Power, Dexterity;

Reversed

Will applied to evil ends, Weakness of Will, Cunning, Knavishness.

According to Many Schools of Thought

A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings

The Magus, Magician, or juggler, the caster of the dice and mountebank, in the world of vulgar trickery. This is the colportage interpretation, and it has the same correspondence with the real symbolical meaning that the use of the Tarot in fortune-telling has with its mystic construction according to the secret science of symbolism. I should add that many independent students of the subject, following their own lights, have produced individual sequences of meaning in respect of the Trumps Major, and their lights are sometimes suggestive, but they are not the true lights. For example, Eliphas Levi says that the Magus signifies that unity which is the mother of numbers; others say that it is the Divine Unity; and one of the latest French commentators considers that in its general sense it is the will.

S. L. MacGregor Mathers's Divinatory Meanings

Upright

Will, Will-Power, Dexterity

Reversed

Will applied to evil ends, Weakness of Will, Cunning, Knavishness.

Papus's Divinatory Meanings

Male Inquirer.