Page of Wands

Within Waite's four-rank court, the Page is the fire suit's junior figure; the Golden Dawn's equivalent rank, the Princess of Wands, carries the elemental pairing Earth of Fire, will and enthusiasm given the most grounded and least active of the suit's four expressions, the fire suit's own energy just beginning to take a concrete, embodied form. Like the other three Princess ranks she carries no zodiacal decan of her own; Book T completes fire's share of the sixteen-card elemental matrix through her rather than through any decanic placement.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a youth in a tunic patterned with salamanders standing in a desert admiring a staff that has visibly sprouted new growth in his hand, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Valet de Batons is a static heraldic figure holding a plain staff with no desert, salamanders or sprouting growth at all; the desert setting is notable among the four Pages, the only one placed in an arid rather than a green, watery or windswept landscape, a contrast commentators generally read as underscoring fire's ability to generate life even where the ground itself offers none.

Crowley's Thoth card keeps the Golden Dawn name Princess of Wands, her full title the Princess of the Shining Flame, and renders her amid a burst of geometric flame rather than any desert scene, Harris's more purely emblematic equivalent of Smith's sprouting staff.

Upright the Page of Wands is read as curiosity, enthusiasm and free-spirited exploration, eagerness at its most unformed and least tested; reversed, as recklessness, a lack of direction, or hesitation that stalls the same enthusiasm before it starts.

As a court card he carries the deck's double reading, standing for a young or youthful person, or for an influence of fresh inspiration entering a situation; readers commonly treat him as the deck's most purely enthusiastic figure across all sixteen courts, since unlike the other three pages he faces no water, wind or settled ground to react to, only an open desert and his own sprouting staff.

Waite's own printed meaning, a dark young man, faithful, a lover, an envoy, a postman, generally news of some sort, is more concretely a messenger reading than the personality-trait reading of curiosity and free-spiritedness most contemporary practice now favors, another instance of the deck's general twentieth-century drift from event-cards toward character-cards.

Because the Princess ranks are structurally the least fixed of the court, carrying no decan and standing at the entry point of each suit's elemental matrix, some commentators read this page's characteristic hesitancy, enthusiasm without yet a plan, as built into the position itself rather than as any personal failing.