By Sarah Taylor
Until you’ve found fire inside yourself …
You won’t reach the spring of life
— Mawlana Jalal Al-Din Al-Rumi
On September 30, just over a week ago, the Weekend Tarot Reading featured at its centre the Ace of Wands — known as the Ace of Staffs in the Xultun Tarot deck that I was using. The reading was a potent one: all Wands, a rush of energy — the kind that makes you vibrate as if you’ve turned into a tuning fork. Which, of course, you have.
Wands represent the creative energy that lies at the foundation of all existence. I see it as the field of potential from which everything else springs: feelings (Cups), thoughts (Swords), matter (Pentacles). The tarot deals with all four levels of creation, but it is the Wands that are the initiators.
Wands energy is the sensation that we get when we are turned on — and I use that phrase broadly as well as specifically. It ignites us; it is fire; it is heat, tingling, licking us into action. And, thus, we become tuning forks: we are tuned into the frequency of creation. We’ve hit the same wavelength with something, or someone, and that wavelength urges us to do something. Now!
How you feel it in your own body depends on the part of you it is spurring into action. When you’re with someone who makes your blood surge through your veins and your juices flow, it’s because Wands energy is asking you to meld and create something new — whether through alchemy or biology.
Artists might feel it as a tingling in their hands and arms which cannot be quieted until it is discharged in some artistic endeavour. Runners feel it in their limbs; performers feel it in the pits of their stomachs. I clearly remember the sensation of its coursing through me as a child, and when my mother — exasperated at the child-shaped dynamo pinging off the walls around her — asked me what it was that I wanted, all I could do was to match her exasperation with the cry, “I need to create!” That was the only way I knew how to articulate what I was feeling; I’m not sure I’ve managed to articulate it any better since.
As the first card of its suit, the Ace embodies this energy in its purest form. So pure, in fact, that we cannot experience it in its entirety. We are bound to human form, while the Ace is boundless. We can feel its approach, we can feel it brush against our psychic skins, we can feel it entering us — but we can only hold so much of it. The Ace is an archetype, and like all archetypes it is never fully knowable.