The Magician

‘One dream, one soul
One prize, one goal
One golden glance of what should be
(It’s a kind of magic)
One shaft of light that shows the way
No mortal man can win this day
(It’s a kind of magic)
The bell that rings inside your mind
Is challenging the doors of time
(It’s a kind of magic)
The waiting seems eternity
The day will dawn of sanity
(Is this a kind of magic?
It’s a kind of magic)
There can be only one
This rage that lasts a thousand years
Will soon be done
This flame that burns inside of me
I’m hearing secret harmonies
(It’s a kind of magic)’

‘It’s A Kind Of Magic’ by Queen (Taylor)

Welcome to my magic circle!

The Magician turns up a lot in my readings for myself and ones others do for me, and although it’s a positive card tbh it makes me feel called out 😂. Thanks, in part, I think, to ADHD, I’m bad at doing what the Magician asks us to – I am the Queen of Procrastination and Distraction, and I love a bit of self sabotage (apparently). I have so many unfinished projects 😞. It is a good reminder for me though not to be so riddled with self-doubt, and to trust in my own talents and abilities.

In the ‘classic’ Tarot imagery, the Magician is generally pictured with one hand raised above his head, pointing to the heavens, and one hand pointing down to the earth. A human lightning rod! These hand positions are generally taken to signify the old adage ‘as above, so below‘ or ‘as within, so without‘ (‘that I hold in my unconscious is how I will find my life‘). The Magician, then, is a conductor that connects the heaven to the earth, the subconscious to the conscious. He can help us turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, our dreams into reality, and make the seemingly impossible, possible. This message is reinforced by the lemniscate above his head, which symbolises the limitless power of ideas. Through the energy of the Magician we are able to bring divine inspiration down to earth; embed the spark of an idea into fertile soil to grow into something tangible. The skill of the Magician is to make known to people – to reveal to them, as if by magic – possibilities. But not just foolish dreams: ideas that can become a real and possible future.

The red roses (our physical bodies/action) and the white lilies (our inner journey) pictured on the card remind us that the key to success depends upon finding harmony between the inner and the outer, working on ourselves on both a spiritual and a physical level.

The Magician is generally shown with all the ‘tools’ of the Minor Arcana (a wand, a cup, a sword, a coin) on the table before him, because his energy is what gifts these tools to us. The aces are the spark of each suit (wands, cups, swords, pents), and the objects here can be thought of as the four domains of human experience – inspiration, emotion, thought, and action. He reminds us that these tools are always accessible to us, we need only reach out and take what we require. But we must remember that while inspiration, emotion, and thought are all his gifts to us, action – using those tools -won’t just happen. That bit isn’t ‘magic’. It requires work. This is the Magician’s real trick: he is telling us that however hard or strange or unlikely an idea is, it can be done. But that is as far as the Magician goes. Once you pick the tool off the table, it’s in your hands and you’ve got to develop it. All that the Magician promises is that it is possible.

His message reminds me strongly of this print in my (Fairy) Godmother’s downstairs toilet (lol) – you have to be ready in order to be lucky. Yes, the Magician is a lucky card, but he isn’t in and of himself a harbinger of miracles – he’s just telling us that we can make our own miracles.

The Power Is In Your Hands

I really like cards that focus on this theme – that the tools that we need to make our dreams into reality are already in our hands, and that it is up to us to make the ‘magic’ happen.

You’ll see that the fabulously creepy Hayworth Tarot is a firm favourite of mine, and the Magician card is no exception. Are the holes in the hands a nod to magic/sleight of hand, or are they to show that there is always a cost to creation, that there is much joy in the process of nursing a spark of inspiration into a flame, but some pain too? Who knows! The Tarot of Oneness does a great job of reminding us that it is OUR hands that hold this power, not the hands of some random other. And the Spacious Tarot neatly illustrates that the four tools of the Tarot are just waiting or us to reach out and apply them to our everyday lives.

‘Courage must come from the soul within,
The man must furnish the will to win,
So figure it out for yourself, my lad,
You were born with all that the great have had,
With your equipment they all began.
Get hold of yourself, and say: “I can”’

from ‘Equipment’ by Edgar Guest

The Trickster of the Tarot

The Magician is also sometimes portrayed as a trickster, a con-artist gifted in the art of smoke and mirrors, but lacking any actual substance. In the earliest Tarot cards, The Magician was instead the ‘juggler’, and was depicted as a mountebank or a street-performer. An old fashioned swindler hustling for money. It wasn’t until later that Paul Christian renamed the Juggler as the Magus, and changed him from a fairground hustler to a metaphysical miracle worker. Arguably there are still echoes of the Magician’s ‘former life’ in his current incarnation, as well as links between the two concepts. For example, the Magician is associated with the ancient Greek god Hermes, who was both a trickster god (and the patron god of thieves) and a god of wisdom.

Some times this card may represent someone who uses sleight of hand and distraction to make us believe something impossible has happened. BUT, I say: fake it ’til you make it! Sometimes acting like we believe in our dreams means that we end up… believing in our dreams! In Wild Card Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt argue that the Magician “harnesses the powers of the universe and manifests that energy how he pleases. You could call it a tricky, but really the Magician represents the privilege of confidence, whether that comes education, wealth, love, someone having your back, or special guidance… He has the ultimate superpower: of not being encumbered by self-limiting beliefs”. And Bakara Wintner reminds us that “the Magician asks us to contemplate the value of using tricks in service of the higher Self…  [In this sense he] toes the line between the true miracle-worker and the trickster” (in WTF Is Tarot).

Here are some of my favourite trickster Magicians, conjuring up their transformative magic. I love the depiction of the Magician as a child scientist in the 78 Tarot Ecological. This image really captures the childlike (and slightly chaotic!) joy of exploration and creation. Ana Tourian‘s Magician makes me think of Gandalf, which is never a bad thing! And again, Cynthia Conner‘s Magician looks so filled with joy at his own power and creativity. The guidebook explains, “This Magician surrounds himself with tomes and tools of his craft, but his power does not come from these. All the elements, and tools of his creation are held within him… pouring forth as he casts his spell! You are the magician, the creator of your own reality”.

I Believe In Miracles

In her exploration of the Magician card, Jessica Dore really unpacks what magic might look like in our modern lives. She takes her definition of magic from the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot: “all magic… is the putting into practice of this: that the subtle rules the dense”. She then argues that if magic is using the subtle to influence the dense, any process that involves using the invisible ‘subtle’ aspects of our experience (energy, emotions, thoughts) to influence the visible ‘dense’ ones (behaviour and physical reality) qualifies as magic:

“The act of taking something you may once have believed to hold little value – like grief, rage, despair, social anxiety – and using it to move toward something precious is a kind of modern-day alchemy. Therapists use terms like ‘radical acceptance’ and ‘post-traumatic growth’ to describe the work of taking adverse experiences and using them to grow… I’d say words like ‘miracles’ and ‘magic’ are a better fit”.

Jessica Dore, Tarot For Change

Catherine MacCoun writes that “when our unconscious will is stronger than our conscious intention… it is unmagical”. Jessica Dore further explains that “when we live without examining the whys and hows of our particular lives, we are living by laws of meaninglessness, not magic. From this perspective, becoming conscious is the first step to performing miracles”. 

I really like these two gorgeous black & white Magicians that tap into some of this energy. The guidebook for the Alleyman Tarot explains, “we all have multitudes within us, sometimes in ways we didn’t realise”.

Ana Tourian describes her Magician as someone who “grasps the heavens and yet is still rooted to Mother earth”. She explains that she decided not to draw the 4 ‘aces/tools’ of the Minor Arcana in her card because the Magician “himself holds all the elements within. Fire is at his core, the spiral energy he’s harnessed. Air is within his mental capacity and ability to maintain the perfect balance. Water flows as his emotions, turning deep below the surface. And last but not least, Earth grounds him, his roots providing a constant connection to that which nourishes the body and all living things”.

Magic Man

“In the Fool we say yes to the universe, and in The Magician the universe says yes back to us”

Bakara Wintner, WTF is Tarot

Finally, a few more of my favourite Magicians. The Mushroom Hunter’s Tarot cleverly mimics the original beats of the RWS, but… fungily. I really love the creator’s decision to represent the Magician himself with a Fly Agaric, the OG ‘magic mushroom’. Buckley draws on the use of the mushroom as a powerful (and spiritual) hallucinogenic amongst the indigenous peoples of Siberia, as well as its use in literature and pop culture as a symbol of fairies and gnomes etc.: “coming across a fly agaric in the wild brings you into a world of magic. It is a bridge between this world and that of our dreams”. It reminds me of Meg Jones Wall‘s writing on the Magician, “with the Magician we don’t just believe that magic is possible – we know it in our bones. Magic is ours to wield. The Magician invites excitement and possibility to bubble up within us” (in Finding The Fool).

I also think it’s super clever of Nawan Junhasiri to have chosen to represent her Magician as a scuba diver in her gorgeous ocean-themed deck. Through use of the tools available to him he is able to achieve the impossible, the seemingly magic – breathing underwater – and act as a bridge between the worlds of sea and land. And then I love the chaotic, truly magical energy of Gabi Angus-West‘s Magician in the Tarot Avatara.

“When considering whether something is a good idea, or has the fruitful potential, the Magician answers ‘fuck yes’”

Bakara Wintner, WTF is Tarot

.

.

.

.