page of wands Bohemian Gothic

Thirteen

The 2nd edition seems to have made the Wands more clear. For example, the Wands Queen is now decidedly feminine and doesn't look like a transvestite.

Likewise, the new Page/Wands emphasizes the girl. The boy seems to be much more in the background than he was originally, the girl far more in the foreground. Hence, our Page/Wands matches up with the other Pages (Princesses?) of the deck in indicating that the Page of this suit is a little or young girl. The boy is part of her world and background, but is not, himself, the Page.

She is the star of the show with her communion dress, tall taper, and blood red prayer book. The feeling now is that the boy is almost playing for her, as one might play for someone marching down the aisle. She leaves him, the light, and the tree behind.

The tree, by the way, now has the feeling of being itself a great "wand" and our girl is the Page of Wands, standing there beneath is shade, at its roots, about to commit to it. Communion is about eating the Eucharist for the first time. This does two things, first, it welcomes the child into the community, but it also, in the minds of believers, makes the child part of a larger spirit, it connect them to the divine and the traditions of that divinity.

Though this little wand girl might look like she's about to commit to Christianity, I wonder if she's not really committing to some other spiritual path--this being the BG after all. Perhaps she's giving herself over to a pagan worship of trees? Or, as said in an earlier post, to the fiddle and fiddler, meaning the devil?

One thing is certain, there is no trusting any female in a wedding-like dress in this deck. We can never be quite sure if they're willingly marrying, or what they are marrying, or what they'll have become by the time they're done with the ceremony. This deck really makes us question those transitional moments in our lives, the ones with socialized rituals and dress, the ones where what we seem to be on the outside isn't what we are on the inside.