Dodal, linked reproduction
As de Bâtons
Jean Dodal’s Marseille pack · Lyon, 1701–1715.
Read the BnF catalogue record ↗A branch becomes a blaze
Start with the shape of the single wand: cut wood, new growth and flame offer different beginnings.
Start with the pictures
Ace of Wands
Pamela Colman Smith · 1922 printing, p. 197
Open the source scan page ↗Notice what changes
Dodal
As de Bâtons
A hand holds a thick green club with a cut upper end. Small red, blue and yellow shapes float around it. The uneven surface remains recognizably wooden.
Smith
Ace of Wands
A hand extends from a cloud and grips a sprouting staff. Loose leaves appear beside it, above a distant building and landscape.
Harris
Ace of Wands · 1
A central red-orange shaft is enveloped by tongues of flame. Bright jagged lines spread outward into a dark background; no hand holds the wand.
Open Harris’s painting and reference page ↗Now read the authors
Waite’s explanation
Waite gathers beginnings, invention, enterprise and origin around the emerging wand. These are possibilities in his divinatory account, rather than a single promised event.
Crowley’s explanation
Crowley describes Fire at its inception, before energy has taken the definite form of will. He identifies the flame shapes as Yods arranged according to the Tree of Life.
Does this beginning look like something growing, something offered or something released?
Write one thing you can point to in the image, one interpretation from a named author, and one inference of your own. Keeping the three separate gives you something useful to revisit.
Sources and image credits
The Dodal cards are one early-eighteenth-century Marseille witness. The black-and-white Smith plates come from the 1922 Rider reprint, whose title verso lists first publication in 1910. Colours in later editions can differ.
Foolmade supplies the linked Dodal reproductions. Its surrounding commentary is not the basis for our historical claims. These images are linked externally; the Smith illustration reuses the public-domain source scan with its full page context.
Harris’s paintings are linked on their host’s reference pages. Crowley’s text is the separately identified Thelemagick transcription of The Book of Thoth. Neither a modern reproduction nor a transcription replaces examination of the original artwork or edition.