Welcome to Tarot Thursdays! This week we will be exploring The Magician and how it can be used as a prompt or brainstorming in our writing.

Tarot is an interesting thing. It’s based upon symbolism and metaphors through imagery. With these images the subconscious mind is tapped into through the story provided. Not everyone gets the same thing from a piece of art. Each piece will influence each person in a slightly different way.

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Introduction of the Card

The Magician is card number 02 in the deck and the second card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot.

Let’s take a look at the following examples of this card below.

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Card Examples

Notice the similarities between them and take note of their differences. Do any of these move you more than the others? Take your time and allow these cards to tell you their story.

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My Analysis of These Cards

In each of these cards, we see a depiction of a wizard with everything he needs to perform his task. He is fully prepared and focused. He is ready to act.

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Themes of the Card

Each card has a set of keywords associated with it that serve as themes for its image. These keywords will vary somewhat depending on who you ask.

According to the Learning the Tarot website, the keywords associated with the card are:

• ACTION
• CONSCIOUS AWARENESS
• CONCENTRATION
• POWER

You can learn more about what this site has to say about this card here.

According to the Biddy Tarot website, the keywords associated with the card are:

• POWER
• SKILL
• CONCENTRATION
• ACTION
• RESOURCEFULLNESS

You can learn more about what this site has to say about this card here.

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What this Card Means to Me

I touched upon this a bit over on the Chaos Pen blog, but I think I ought to build upon this concept a little more in how this card introduces the concept of yin-yang into the Tarot in the form of male and female.

In Tarot the gender representation isn’t literal so much as symbolic. Male here is an active force while female is a receptive force, just as yang acts while yin responds. By viewing it as yin-yang rather than solely as male-female we can then pull in additional concepts such as dark-light, chaos-order, passive-aggressive, etc. and start exploring the concepts of balance and healing.

I think the reason we see it as male-female is because it’s visually easy to depict and understand, but we mustn’t lose sight of the deeper meaning here.

This card represents the active side within us all that exerts our will upon the world around us. We are all born with conscious awareness and we all have the power to make choices every moment of our lives. And we can choose for them to be either active or passive choices.

Seriously though, from the moment we’re born we were given the capacity to learn and choose. We have everything we need to do that from the moment of our first breath. Being born with this “man of action” within us is part of what makes us human.

The key phrase I choose for this card is: POWER OF ACTION.

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Music Playlist

In this spirit of all this, these are the songs I have picked out for this card.

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The Writing Exercise

This exercise is a free write. Permit yourself to write whatever comes to mind based upon the theme of this card. Choose a keyword or key phrase and run with it to see what you come up with.

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I would love it if you linked or pinged back what you wrote so I could see where you went with this.

Happy writing!

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Mythic Tarot by Liz Greene (Author), Juliet Sharman-Burke (Author), Tricia Newell (Illustrator) © 1989
Dragon Tarot by Terry Donaldson (Author), Peter Pracownik (Author) © 1996
Universal Tarot by Lo Scarabeo (Author), R. De Angelis (Illustrator), A. E. Waite (Designer) © 2001
Tarot of Dreams by Ciro Marchetti (Author), Lee Bursten (Author) © 2015