Revelations Tarot -- Suit of Wands

[Onyx]

“The suit of wands is associated with the element of fire, intuition, magic, the powers of creation and matters of the soul. The characters in the suit are magicians, warriors, sages and opulent individuals. They embody the use of magic in daily life. With their staves or wands, they move to create or fight.” from the companion book

Laying out all the cards in the suit I love watching how the whole suit is seen as a progression. One thing that I love to look at is the progression of color. The predominate colors in the beginning are red, orange, and yellow. But as you move from the Ace to the 10 of Wands there is an addition of the color purple that starts subtly until the last card the 10 has a predominance of purple over all the other colors.

As you move down the Tree of Life it seems that the purple shows that the further down you are the more the color blue blends with the fiery reds and creates the purple. Though I am not sure that I can support this idea with the rest of the suits, Cups would come just below that of Wands and may show how the suits interact with each other.

The suit seems to break a bit with the RWS meanings. I know that there are many who say that the reversed is not just a negative aspect of the upright and I would agree. It seems as though the Creator of the deck has not only created two set of card images on each card but in the suit as a whole has in fact told two different stories.

The upright story is one of inspiration, success, teamwork, mastery, training and order. The Reversed story is of weakness, loneliness, chaos, fighting and failure. How to tell the whole of the human story of inspiration and success in one suit is difficult and though the genius of this deck is that there is literally two times the information on these cards than normal and it is still limited.

My philosophy on how this deck is a use for reversal is not that any single reversal is the end all of the reversed meaning. I would never impose that type of strict literalness on any deck or upright image, but rather it serves as a point to a different spot on the whole spectrum of meanings for that card just as the upright is but a point on another direction. The card will be a spectrum between oppositions. I also will look at the stories as upright and reversed separately but aware that at any point there can be a switch in a reading.

Allan