Meaning
Smith's Magician stands behind a table in a garden of roses and lilies, one hand raising a wand towards the sky and the other pointing at the ground, a figure of eight on its side above his head and a snake for a belt biting its own tail. On the table lie a wand, a cup, a sword and a pentacle, the emblems of the four suits, which Waite says lie like counters before the adept to be used as he wills. Waite calls the card the divine motive in man.
The Golden Dawn gave the card Beth, a double letter glossed as house, and the planet Mercury, and titled it the Magus of Power; on its tree the Magician is path 12. The older French tradition began the letters with this card instead: for Lévi the Magician was Aleph, and the first letter went with the first trump.
We read the card as will brought to a point: attention, skill and the means to act, with the four suits as the raw material of a life. Waite's fortune-telling list for it runs from skill and diplomacy to self-confidence and will; we quote it in the table below as history, leave out its items on sickness and disaster, and read no warning into it.
In the birth cards
The Magician is the root of Greer's first constellation, with the Wheel of Fortune, 10, and the Sun, 19. It is the Soul card of everyone whose total is 10 or 19, on 11.1 percent of the days from 1900 to 2030. As a Personality card it needs a total of exactly 1, and no birth date from the year 1000 to 2999 can add up that low, so in practice the Magician is only ever the second card of a chain.
The chain 19-10-1 is the only one with three cards. Greer reads the Sun as Personality, the Magician as Soul and the Wheel between them as a Teacher card; the Tarot School and most calculators count all three as birth cards. Our chart follows Greer and labels the Wheel.
As a year card the Magician is rarer still: the yearly total would have to fall to 1. For a 15 June birthday it never comes up in the two centuries from 1900 to 2100.
History and names
In the Marseille decks the card is Le Bateleur, a street conjuror with cups and balls, the lowest of the numbered trumps. Court de Gébelin's plate of 1781 shows him at his table of tricks as I; Crowley's Thoth deck renamed him the Magus. The Milanese cards of the 1450s carry no number or title.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Golden Dawn title (Book T)
- “The Magus of Power” sourced
- Waite's fortune-telling list (1911), upright
- “Skill, diplomacy, address, subtlety; […]; self-confidence, will; the Querent, if male”, quoted as history, with its items on sickness and disaster left out; Waite called such meanings artificial and arbitrary sourced
- Greer's name for the constellation
- Will and Focused Consciousness (1987, 2021) sourced
- Our line for the birth-card chain
- 1: Will made real; 10-1: Turning chance into craft; 19-10-1: Will that shines through every turn our construction
- Thoth deck name
- The Magus, I sourced
- Letter in the French school
- Aleph, under Lévi's order disputed
How the schools read it
- Game decks (15th to 18th century)
- Le Bateleur, the street conjuror, with his cups and balls at a table; the lowest trump of the game.
- Golden Dawn, Book T
- Beth, the house, a double letter, and the planet Mercury; path 12. Book T titles it the Magus of Power.
- Waite and Smith (1909 to 1911)
- The divine motive in man: the will at work between above and below, with the four suits lying like counters before him.
- Mary K. Greer (1984 to 2021)
- The root of the constellation of 1, with the Wheel and the Sun. It is the Soul card of every total of 10 or 19, and the Personality card of a single 1, which no birth date from the year 1000 to 2999 gives.
- Lévi and the French school (1856)
- The first trump on the first letter: the Magician takes Aleph, where the Golden Dawn has the Fool.
- Crowley, Thoth deck (1944)
- Renamed the Magus; the letter and the planet are unchanged.
- EsoTerrier
- Read here as will brought to a point: attention, skill and the means to act, with the four suits as the raw material of a life.
Claims about it
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The Magician's letter and planet are the tarot's ancient correspondences.
disputedWhat the record shows: Beth and Mercury are the Golden Dawn's, about 1888. Lévi, in 1856, gave the Magician Aleph.
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A total of 19 gives three equal birth cards: the Sun, the Wheel and the Magician.
disputedWhat the record shows: Most calculators say so. Greer reads the Sun as Personality card, the Magician as Soul card and the Wheel as a Teacher card, and so do we.
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The Magician's old one-line meaning on our chart was our own wording.
falseWhat the record shows: Our old line followed a modern keyword list too closely. It was replaced in October 2026 by the sentence in the EsoTerrier row above.
