Minor Arcana, the Wands

Ace of Wands

The Ace of Wands opens the suit of wands in the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew in 1909 for Arthur Edward Waite. A hand comes out of a grey cloud and grips a rough wooden staff that is still putting out leaves, high above a small castle on a hill and a winding blue river.

What Waite wrote it means (1910)

Divinatory meanings: Creation, invention, enterprise, the powers which result in these; principle, beginning, source; birth, family, origin, and in a sense the virility which is behind them; the starting point of enterprises; according to another account, money, fortune, inheritance.
Reversed: Fall, decadence, ruin, perdition, to perish; also a certain clouded joy.

Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1911), p. 196. Read it in the chapter

A hand issuing from a cloud grasps a stout wand or club.

Waite's description of the card, from the same book.

What's in the picture

The hand. A white hand reaches out of the cloud and closes round the staff, with the thumb pointing up along the wood. Short white rays shine out all around the fist. Waite wrote only that it "grasps a stout wand or club".
The cloud. It rolls in from the right edge in grey coils and curls. The arm stays hidden inside it, and only the hand comes out into the light.
The staff. It is a raw branch with a heavy round head, like a club. The wood is a hot orange-red, and a dark knot near the top looks like an eye.
The shoots. Three fresh shoots grow out of the dry wood: a sprig at the very top and one on each side further down. Each carries a few small green leaves.
The falling leaves. Eight loose leaves hang in the air, four on each side of the staff. They have the same shape as the leaves still on the shoots, as if they had just been shaken off.
The castle. Far below on the left, a pale building with jagged towers stands on top of a green hill. It is the only building in the picture, and it is tiny next to the hand.
The river. A blue river winds across the foot of the card, past a few round trees, under a low line of purple hills. The whole landscape is a thin strip; the hand and the staff take up the rest.

The card in brief

In the deck: Card 23 of 78
Arcana: Minor Arcana, Wands
Number: Ace
Element (Golden Dawn): Fire
Title in Book T: Root of the Powers of Fire
Drawn by: Pamela Colman Smith
Planned by: Arthur Edward Waite
Published: London, William Rider & Son, 1909
Scan: Pam-A printing, c. 1910, Wikimedia Commons

In the old books

Book T (1912)
A White Radiating Angelic Hand, issuing from clouds, and grasping a heavy club, which has three branches in the colours, and with the sigils, of the scales. The Right- and Left-hand branches end respectively in three Flames, and the Centre one in four Flames: thus yielding Ten: the Number of the Sephiroth. Two-and-twenty leaping Flames, or Yodh, surround it, answering to the Paths; of these, three fall below the Right branch for Aleph, Mem, and Shin, seven above the Central branch for the double letters; and between it and that on the Right twelve: six above and six below about the Left-hand branch. The whole is a great and flaming Torch. It symbolizes Force—strength, rush, vigour, energy, and it governs, according to its nature, various works and questions.
It implies Natural, as opposed to Invoked, Force.
Book T, “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”, The Equinox I.8 (London, 1912), pp. 153–154. See the source
Papus (1892)
Commencement of an Enterprise.
Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, tr. A. P. Morton (London, 1892), p. 311. See the source