The Magician and Beginning With What Is Already on Your Table

Many of us keep a quiet list of things we will start once conditions are right. When the house is calmer. When there is more time, or a better chair, or a clearer idea of the thing itself. The list holds the song you mean to write, the vegetable bed, the letter to an old friend. And the right conditions have a way of staying just out of reach, like a train that always seems to leave from the next platform over.

The tarot's first numbered card is a picture of someone who has stopped waiting for that train.

The picture

Pamela Colman Smith drew this card for Waite's deck in 1909. A young figure stands behind a plain table under a bright yellow sky. One arm is lifted, holding a slim white wand toward the heavens. The other hand points down at the earth. He wears a white robe under a red cloak, and around his waist is a belt shaped like a snake holding its own tail. Red roses hang in a garland above him, and roses and white lilies grow in the ground at his feet.

On the table lie four things: a cup, a sword, a coin marked with a star, and a wand. These are the four suits of the tarot, set out like tools on a workbench, or like groceries on a kitchen counter before anyone has decided what to cook.

Above his head floats a sideways figure eight. A. E. Waite described it with real tenderness:

Above his head is the mysterious sign of the Holy Spirit, the sign of life, like an endless cord, forming the figure 8 in a horizontal position.

Nothing rare on the table

What stands out, after a while, is how ordinary the table is. No cauldron, no glowing orb. A cup is for drinking. A sword cuts. A coin buys bread. Whatever power this figure has, the picture doesn't place it in owning special things. It places it in gathering common ones in one spot and paying attention to them.

In What The Fool Knows About Starting Over, the traveler carries a little bundle on a stick, everything he owns tied up and unseen. One way to see card number one is as the moment that bundle gets untied and spread out. What comes out is modest. It also turns out to be enough to begin with.

One hand up, one hand down

The gesture is the heart of the card. Many readers connect it with the old phrase "as above, so below": the raised hand draws something down from the sky, and the lowered hand sets it into the ground. Taken plainly, every beginning needs both hands. One holds the idea. The other points at the floor and asks a plainer question: where, exactly, will this happen? At which table? On which evening?

Plenty of us are fluent with one hand and shy with the other. Some live for years with the wand raised, full of plans that never touch the earth. Others keep pointing at the ground and forget to lift anything toward the light. The figure on the card does both at once. Waite gave him a "smile of confidence and shining eyes."

Skill is a practice

Waite's upright meanings for this card open plainly: "Skill, diplomacy, address, subtlety." Address is used in an older sense here, closer to deftness, the ease of someone who handles things well. These are not gifts that arrive all at once. Hands learn them by doing.

The Magician is often read as someone who has everything figured out. But look at how young he is. This is card one, not card twenty-one. He is a beginner standing behind his first table. The confidence on his face doesn't have to mean mastery. It may simply be the calm of someone who has decided to start.

Starting before you feel ready is not the same as being careless. For most real things, readiness is built during the work rather than before it. The Eight of Pentacles shows where this road can lead: a person at a bench, carving one coin after another. The Magician is the first evening at a bench like that, when everything is laid out and nothing has been made yet.

The trickster at the table

There is another side to this card, and skipping it would be dishonest. A magician also fools people. A table, a quick hand and a confident smile are exactly what a swindler needs too. The same line of Waite's that begins with skill also includes subtlety, and many modern readers see trickery in the card, especially when it appears upside down.

The trick most worth watching for is often a private one. It can sound like: I'll start properly on Monday. I just need one more thing first. I'm not the kind of person who does this. Each of those is a small sleight of hand, drawing attention away from the table where the real things are. The honest version of The Magician keeps both hands where they can be seen, including by the person holding the wand.

The honesty runs the other way too. The card doesn't promise that a plan will work. A beginning is not a guarantee, and it doesn't need to be one to be worth making.

Three small things for this week

Clear one table. Literally, if you can. Put on it only what the postponed thing needs: the sketchbook, the seed packets, the guitar. Leave it there all week, waiting for you.

Name your four tools. Without buying anything, write down one thing you already have for each suit: something you care about (cups), something you can think through clearly (swords), a spark of wanting or energy (wands), and something solid, like an hour, a skill or a little money (pentacles).

Make the first move tiny and real. Ten minutes, one paragraph, one phone call. The Ace of Wands is a single wand held out from a cloud, and Waite called that card "the starting point of enterprises." A single stick is enough to start a fire.

Roses and lilies

Around the table, roses and lilies grow side by side. Readers often take them as desire and clear thought, rooted in the same soil. Neither one is pulled up to make room for the other.

That may be the gentlest thing The Magician offers. You don't have to want less, or think harder, before you begin. You can bring both into the garden and let them grow together, around a table that already holds what you have.

The beginning was never somewhere else. It has been waiting on the table, within reach of your own two hands.

Read the full meaning of The Magician, or step back one card to The Fool, who carried all of this to the table in the first place.