The Magician.
Everything to hand, nothing picked up.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
One arm up with a white wand, the other hand pointing at the ground. A lying-down eight over his head, a snake swallowing its tail for a belt. A cup, a coin, a sword and a wand on the table in front of him, roses and lilies above and below.
He is capable and his hands are full of the wrong thing. All four tools are on the table, in reach, unused. The question is not whether you have what this needs. You are standing next to it.
Four things people go to on this card
- his arms
You went to his arms. One is up, one points at the ground, and both are doing the same job.
He is the join between an idea and a place for it to land. Above and below, and one person in the middle doing the connecting, which is work and is not authorship.
Being the connection is a real position and it gets treated as a lesser one, usually by people who could not do it. If that is where you are in this, the card is not asking you to claim more. It is asking you to stop apologising for the part you have.
Where are you the connection rather than the source, and is anyone treating that as less?
- the table
The table stopped you: a cup, a coin, a sword and a wand, laid out.
Everything needed is in front of him and he has to choose. That is a specific kind of stuck and it has nothing to do with scarcity. The four are available. He has picked up a fifth thing instead.
So the honest question is which of the four you have been declining to use: the feeling, the money, the argument, or the appetite. One of them is missing from how you have been handling this, and you know which, because you have a reason ready for it.
Which of the four have you been avoiding using: the feeling, the money, the argument, or the appetite?
- the roses and lilies
The garden is where you landed. Red roses and white lilies, above him and below, both in leaf.
Desire and clarity in the same frame, and neither one is the answer. The roses are appetite. The lilies are the thing without appetite. Both are growing thickly and nobody has weeded either.
The card does not resolve them. It puts a competent person between the two with his arms out, which is the honest picture of anyone doing anything well. Whatever you want here is in the room with whatever you would do if you did not want it, and both are usable.
What do you want here, and what would you do if you did not want it?
- his belt
You went to the belt. It is a snake with its tail in its mouth, and its job is holding his robe shut.
A closed circuit, worn as clothing. It feeds itself and needs nothing lit each morning, and here it is not a carving on a chair or a symbol in a corner. It is what keeps his clothes on.
Which makes the competence in this card structural rather than a mood. Something in your practice has quietly become the thing the rest hangs off, and you would not notice it until it went. Find it now, while it is still boring.
What habit is currently holding the rest of your work together?
On the Tree of Life, The Magician is the twelfth path, Beth, from Kether to Binah, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.