Page of Wands

The suit derives from the Italian 'Bastoni' (clubs, staves) and the French 'Bâtons' (batons). The court cards were the only Minor Arcana cards given individual identities in the playing-card tradition: 'Fante' (Italian) and 'Valet' (French), both meaning a young attendant or servant. In English the card became the 'Page', the lowest of the four court ranks. The Page of Wands is the youngest figure of the fire suit — the messenger or apprentice of flame.

In the Marseille tradition the Valet de Bâtons was a standing young man in fashionable Renaissance dress, holding a single baton upright. He was a court figure, not an allegorical one — his rank was indicated by his youth and his posture, and his suit by the baton in his hand. The image was scenic, unlike the numbered small cards, but the figure was a generic court attendant rather than a character with a story.

Pamela Colman Smith placed a young man in a flowing yellow tunic and red leggings standing alone in a barren landscape, holding a living wand upright as if it had just spoken to him. His gaze lifts toward the wand's leafy crown, and his sleeves and tunic billow as if in a wind. Behind him stretch flat plains under a yellow sky, with small pyramidal hills on the horizon.

The wand the Page holds is in leaf — the suit's fire is alive and growing in the figure's hand. The youth's lifted gaze is the first moment of vocation, the instant when an ambition or message announces itself. The barren landscape is the still-unformed field in which that ambition will have to work. As the lowest court figure the Page is the apprentice, the messenger, the beginner — the spark before it has learned how to burn.

The Marseille Valet is a young court attendant holding his baton, with no narrative. Smith's illustration gave him the moment of inspiration — the wand that has just spoken. In the Thoth deck Crowley renames the Page as the 'Princess of the Shining Flame, Rose of the Palace of Fire', attributing her to Earth of Fire — the material throne upon which the fire of the suit rests. The Thoth Princess is shown with a ram, a lion, and a flame, encompassing all three fire signs.

The suit of Wands corresponds to the element of Fire, and the Page — as the lowest court figure — represents the suit's spark entering a human form: the apprentice, the messenger, the beginner. The figure of the page or valet reflects the late-medieval court, where the lowest-ranking attendant carried messages and learned his trade in the household of a greater lord. As the first court card of the suit it marks the entry of the fire element into a person rather than an abstract force.