Dodal, linked reproduction
Valet de Bâtons
Jean Dodal’s Marseille pack · Lyon, 1701–1715.
Read the BnF catalogue record ↗Standing with a staff, leaping with fire
The Page-to-Princess pairing makes a change of posture particularly clear.
Start with the pictures
Page of Wands
Pamela Colman Smith · 1922 printing, p. 177
Open the source scan page ↗Notice what changes
Dodal
Valet de Bâtons
A standing figure holds a thick upright club with both hands. The long implement occupies one side of the card beside the body.
Smith
Page of Wands
A standing figure looks up along a leafy staff held upright in both hands. Pointed hills appear in the otherwise open landscape.
Harris
Princess of Wands · Princess
A lightly clothed figure arcs through flame with one arm raised. A striped tiger curves alongside the body, and a decorated altar occupies the lower area.
Open Harris’s painting and reference page ↗Now read the authors
Waite’s explanation
Waite describes an act of proclamation and the arrival of unfamiliar news. He connects the page with an envoy or messenger, while his reversed list includes unstable or troubling announcements.
Crowley’s explanation
Crowley describes a leaping figure amid flame, carrying a solar wand near an altar with rams’ heads. He explains her earthy aspect as the material that feeds fire.
How does changing the body’s posture alter your sense of what the wand can do?
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.