The Magician was not always a magician. In the Marseilles tarot he is the Le Bateleur, the “juggler,” a stage magician in a carnival act. This magician performs tricks and the rabbit disappears, whether into the void or below a trap door, it is the same. This magician is thus also a charlatan, or sometimes can be. He is magus and mountebank, perhaps oscillating between the two.
Modern magician Lionel Snell asks whether “the spiritual path [might] lead through the world of mountebanks and charlatans, rather than away from it?” Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, comes to mind here. As a youthful bateleur, the money-digging Smith was an accused trickster, but this also led him on a road to the Gold Plates and the grand mysteries of the Nauvoo theology. For millions of Mormons, he has been the modern magus sina qua non of their own spiritual path; for many others, he is a rank charlatan. Which is it? Can it be both?
The Magician of the Rider-Waiter-Smith deck is more esoteric but no less youthful. He is an adept at the top of his game, no longer an apprentice but still full of energy. The Force (Logos) is strong with him. He appears calm, having learned concentration without effort. Like a child, he plays but his play is skilful.
With one hand pointing towards the sky and the other to the earth, the Magician personifies the metaphysics of the Emerald Tablet:
“That which is above is like that which is below and that which is below is like to that which is above.”
On the table are his tools: a wand, a pentacle, a sword, and a cup — the four suits of the Minor Arcana. These represent the elements of fire, earth, air, and water, which Waite said, “lie like counters before the adept [which] he adapts as he wills.” The lemniscate hat of the Marseilles card has been abstracted into the symbol of infinity: the Magician is doing the work of the Alpha and the Omega and the Alpha again.
For Tomberg, the Magician incarnates the Church of John the Beloved, the Gnostic Christianity that hears the heartbeat of Jesus. Maybe. But just as the charlatan is also the mage — and vice versa — the Church of John needs the Church of Peter, for the Magician is not merely a mystic, he is also a worker, and work needs law and government, supply chains and factories.
Tomberg also sees in the Magician an analogy of the Father (as above) and the Son (so below), in which we are all transformed into the Son via the imitatione Christi. (Joseph Smith would have loved that.) The Magician’s work is a skilful intercession, pressing “the father who is in heaven [to] give good things to those who ask him” (Mt 7, 9-11). The Son does the things he has seen the Father do and so of course these spells work. And so they are not really intercessions and definitely not commands: they are Man — as God — doing His own will.
But just as there are mirages above as there are mirages below, so the Magician — who is, or once was, or is sometimes still, or may yet be a charlatan — must be on guard, as must his disciples. Tomberg gives him (or us, for we are all in the Magician’s image) this advice:
“[There are] methodological and moral conditions for the one who desires to progress. Carry them out strictly, before and after each flight into the region beyond the domain of work and effort. If you do this, you will be a sage and a mage. If you do not do this – you will be only a charlatan.”
Further Reading
John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844
Lionel Snell/Ramsey Dukes, “The Charlatan and The Magus”
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot
A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot