The Magician: I Will Be The One

“If you could choose any Major Arcana card to represent yourself, which one would it be?”

That was the question I was asked by a new friend, sitting in the Elephant Bean café in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where we both lived.

This friend was an artist who had been creating a deck of photographic tarot cards over several years. I knew that about two-thirds of the deck already existed but I felt certain that if my answer was one of the maybe seven or eight major cards that hadn’t been photographed yet then that card would be offered to me to model for. I wanted quite badly to be in that deck but I didn’t know which cards remained.

I could have asked. But instead I decided to focus on the question: which major card would most represent me? Fate could decide the rest.

I thought of The High Priestess, The Star, The Lovers, Temperence, The Empress, The Moon. All of them touched on parts of my life; how I experienced the world and tried to live. All of them were beautiful and what I might, then, have called feminine. There was another card there though, almost hidden by that tumble of colors and images. Gradually those grand archetypes cleared and I contemplated this less flashy one. Gilded in its own way, striking, singular – almost always represented as a man. The Magician.

Still sitting over coffee, still silent, I contemplated that Magician.

The one with all the tools of the elements: yes, I could see myself in that. For thirty years or more I had worked elemental magic – earth magic, air magic, fire magic, water magic. I travelled deep with earth, swam wild with water, breathed life into my spells for change and healing and – just occasionally – burnt everything away. As an adult I’d crafted elemental magic, but even in childhood I’d always understood myself as belonging to the elements.

I was a child who didn’t just want to observe, or hold onto the elements, I wanted to merge with them. I climbed trees and stayed up there for hours, trying to meld my body to theirs. I lay along their branches on windy days, to feel the rush of being wind-tossed. On playground swings I tranced into that arcing flight, watching the sky above me until it blurred, and I soared and swooped through it, bird-like.

In the school holidays we visited a high country river that I loved – the Howqua. We camped not far from its source, so it was mainly shallow and rapid, with occasional deeper pools where it curved. The water was icy on the hottest days. I lay in the shallows, gripping onto the river rocks and let the water pummel past me. As I chilled and chilled to its temperature I thought myself into fish shapes and the whirls of water; then I would let go and let the river spin and drag and rush me downstream, so cold I didn’t notice the bumps and scrapes of the rocks.

At night there would be campfires. Staring at those flames I’d shift form, inside –become a fleck, a spark, a flicker. A brief star that burned everything it had to light the darkness, just for a second. And at home, at night, under starlight or the moon I would leave my room by the window, and inch along the ledge at first floor height until I reached the outside staircase. I’d climb the over railing and then down the stairs, into the garden. There was a little place between some tall eucalypts where I went and lay on the earth, in the night. I’d dig my hands into the soil. Placing my mouth to that little dug hole in the earth I whispered “take me back”.

Even though I felt so alone in the human world, I also lived in the magical world, where the earth, wind, fire, and water knew and held me. The magic I sought as a child was to lose this human form and become one with the elements. Even grown up my body still holds the memories of this shape-shifting.

The tarot’s tools of the elements – the pentacle, sword, wand, and cup – form the minor arcana. These four symbols are present also in the number I card of the major arcana, The Magician. I think their appearance on The Magician card says that the tools – the elements – come to their hands. The tools are an extension of their hands, and their magic – and surely the Magician is owned by the tools as much as owns them. As I grew older I had my own elemental tools: my obsidian crystal ball, my pewter paper knife, my staff twisted with serpent-and-stars, my vine-wreathed chalice. Though always I’ve been a magician who picked up what was to hand – the beautiful rock on the path, the bursting seedpod, the dropped feather, the shell – and made magic there and then, in the forest, on the beach, in the park, perhaps reminded by my childhood accessing of the elements in their wild forms.

I think The Magician card presences all of the tarot. There’s the Magician themselves as the beginning of, and the first iteration of the Fool’s Journey, which is the whole of the major arcana, and four tools for the four suits, all of the minor. The Magician brings all the disparate parts of the tarot together, in one card. In one person. On the card that’s numbered one – the only card with that number, as the first cards in each suit are named Aces, not ones. They are a magic maker, a worker of fate. The elements or suits are there, but they’re the one making it happen. They are the start of the story – someone who begins things. The seed cracked open. When The Magician turns up in a reading I think it’s saying that we already have the tools we need, now it’s up to us to use them, to create our own fate.

In some ways every tarot reading does that – offers or reminds the seeker of the tools, the possibilities, and their own powers, and asks, “what will you do?” I’ve stood in the street hundreds of times with my table, tarot cards spread out across it, taking all comers and reading their fates as my trade. I’ve read for thousands of people: party goers who stood around my table showering coins down to each pick a card, serious enquirers with life choices to make. I’ve read for poets who wanted the next line for their poem, or last night’s dream interpreted, curious children, students, friends. I’ve read cards at markets and fairs, festivals and conferences, at home and online and in a room in the back of a shop. People paid me either a set fee or by donation – twenty cents or fifty dollars for a single card, I’ve received both. Those cards and this business of reading them have made my own fate as much as the fate of my clients.

All right, I’ll claim The Magician. The one who turns the cards and reveals the meaning. The trickster, sleight-of-hand, story teller, shyster, spinner of words and deals and fates and cards. I’ll take it. Golden in my Golden Dawn deck, emerging shadowy from the foregrounded sword-stone-chalice-spear in my Haindl deck – all right. Yes. Him. Her. Them. To describe my path, to represent me.

“The Magician,” I said.

“Interesting,” my friend said. “I haven’t photographed that card yet.”