The Magician Tarot Card Meaning and Art Ercole I d'Este Tarot Deck Fragment
Designation
About the Deck
Ercole I d'Este Tarot Deck Fragment
One of the earliest extant Tarot Decks, this deck features heraldic emblems of Ercole I d'Este and his wife, Leonora of Aragon.
Provenance
Italy, c. 1473
Tags
According to Many Schools of Thought
A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings
The Magus, Magician, or juggler, the caster of the dice and mountebank, in the world of vulgar trickery. This is the colportage interpretation, and it has the same correspondence with the real symbolical meaning that the use of the Tarot in fortune-telling has with its mystic construction according to the secret science of symbolism. I should add that many independent students of the subject, following their own lights, have produced individual sequences of meaning in respect of the Trumps Major, and their lights are sometimes suggestive, but they are not the true lights. For example, Eliphas Levi says that the Magus signifies that unity which is the mother of numbers; others say that it is the Divine Unity; and one of the latest French commentators considers that in its general sense it is the will.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers's Divinatory Meanings
Upright
Will, Will-Power, Dexterity
Reversed
Will applied to evil ends, Weakness of Will, Cunning, Knavishness.
Papus's Divinatory Meanings
Male Inquirer.