Queen of Wands

The queen and her black cat

Start with her hands. In one, she holds a wand with leaves on it. In the other, she holds a sunflower. Now let your eyes move around the card. Lion heads end the arms of her throne. Two red lions stand on its tall back, and more sunflowers bloom behind her head. Almost everything around her points to fire and the sun.

Then look down. A small black cat sits at her feet, looking at you. Waite never mentions the cat in his guide to the deck. The Golden Dawn gave this queen a leopard. The cat comes from the artist, Pamela Colman Smith. You could try giving the cat as much attention as the queen.

The image

She sits facing you, in a yellow robe and a pale cloak. Her crown has green leaves in it, like the wand. The wand stands on the ground beside her. It is taller than she is, and small sprigs grow along it. The sunflower stands up by her shoulder, its face turned out toward you. Behind the throne the sky is pale blue. On the left, yellow peaks rise like pyramids. Waite's Knight of Wands is "passing mounds or pyramids", and the Page stands among the same shapes on his own card.

• Knight of Wands
• Page of Wands

The sunflower has an old story behind it. The Roman poet Ovid tells of Clytie, a young woman who loved the Sun god. He left her. For nine days she sat on the bare ground, turning her face to follow him across the sky. In the end she took root and became a flower that still turns toward the sun. Ovid's flower was small, "very like a violet". Later tellers made it a sunflower, and painters followed. Even Henry Riley, who translated Ovid in 1851, did both. In a footnote he said the flower could not be the sunflower. In his notes on the story, he called it a sunflower anyway.

In 1688 the painter Charles de La Fosse showed her weeping on a rock, in Clytie Changed into a Sunflower, which still hangs at the Grand Trianon in Versailles. The Sun drives his chariot away across the sky, and sunflowers already grow beside her.

So the queen may be holding Clytie's flower, the one that keeps its face on the sun. You could look at where the sunflower faces, and then at where the queen is looking.

You could also set her beside the King of Wands. He sits in profile, looking away. On the floor at his feet is a tiny black lizard, the salamander of his suit. She faces forward, and at her feet is the cat. So each of them has a small dark animal down by the step.

• King of Wands

The King, the Knight and the Page wear clothes covered in salamanders. Her robe is plain. She has the lions and the sunflowers instead.

Waite wrote very little about her. He said the wands are always in leaf. He also said her character is like the King's, "but is more magnetic".

Across traditions

In Book T the Golden Dawn describes a very different Queen of Wands. She has red-gold hair and sits above steady flames. Winged leopard heads decorate her armour and her crown. Her hands rest on a leopard lying at her side. Smith kept the cat family but changed almost everything else. The animal shrinks and turns black. It leaves her hands and sits on its own, in front of her. You could read that as a wild animal brought indoors, like fire tamed for the home. You could also read it the other way round. A house cat never quite belongs to anyone, and this one looks at you as if it has its own opinion.

Book T marks her with two alchemical signs, water of fire. In the Golden Dawn's system, each suit has an element, and each queen is the watery side of her suit. Water takes things in and holds them. So she is fire that has been taken in and held. Book T gives her "steady force applied to an object" and "great attractive power". It says all four queens have a force that is "steady and unshaken".

The Golden Dawn also gave each court card a stretch of the zodiac. Hers runs from the last decan of Pisces, a water sign, to the twentieth degree of Aries, a fire sign. In dates, that is roughly 10 March to 10 April. It crosses the March equinox, where the zodiac starts again at Aries. So she sits right where water turns into fire. Late in his life Carl Jung wrote a whole book about the old alchemists and their dream of joining opposites like these.

Now the lions. In Book T, the three fire signs all belong to the Wands. Leo, the lion, is one of them. The Golden Dawn also linked Leo to the card Strength, which shows a woman with a lion. Waite moved Strength to number VIII in his deck, "for reasons which satisfy myself". You could lay Strength beside this queen.

• StrengthTrump VIII

On one card, a woman closes a lion's jaws with her bare hands. On the other, the lions have become part of the chair she sits on. What might have happened in between?

Meeting her

Here is an experiment you could play with. Imagine the queen as a person with a mind of her own, sitting somewhere in your day. She has a cat, some lions and a stick that keeps sprouting. What does she make of you? What might she say about how you used your energy this week? If that doesn't lead anywhere, let it go and try something else.

You could try the same with the cat. It is small and black against all that yellow. It sits lower than anyone else on the card, so it sees the room from the floor. It looks straight out of the picture, at whoever is looking in. What does it see?

Try this

Sit like her for one minute. Put both feet on the floor. Hold something that grows in one hand, and something that turns toward light in the other. A pen and a cup are enough. Notice what your body does when it takes up that much space and holds still. Then look at the card again from the cat's height, from below the step. See what changes.

Questions to sit with

• What is the cat watching? What is the queen watching?
• Is she about to stand up, or has she only just sat down?
• Where in your life has something wild come indoors? Does it still belong to you?
• What in you turns toward the sun without being told to?
• If her fire is steady, what keeps it burning?

The film

No film for this card yet.