Minor Arcana · Wands · Fire
Ace of Wands
Read to know yourself, not to surrender yourself: relate to the card; never obey it. These are what two traditions wrote, not predictions.
In Waite's words: The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911)
A hand issuing from a cloud grasps a stout wand or club.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), public domain.
In the Golden Dawn's Book T (1912)
Root of the Powers of Fire
A WHITE Radiating Angelic Hand, issuing from clouds, and grasping a heavy club, which has three branches in the colours, and with the sigils, of the scales. The Right-and Left-hand branches end respectively in three Flames, and the Centre one in four Flames: thus yielding Ten: the Number of the Sephiroth. Two-and-twenty leaping Flames, or Yodh, surround it, answering to the Paths; of these, three fall below the Right branch for Aleph, Men, and Shin, seven above the Central branch for the double letters; and between it and that of the Right twelve: six above and six below about the Left-hand branch. The whole is a great and flaming Torch. It symbolizes Force — strength, rush, vigour, energy, and it governs, according to its nature, various works and questions.
It implies Natural, as opposed to Invoked, Force.
Correspondences
Kether in Atziluth (the Archetypal World). The Ace is the root and seed of the whole suit, the pure power of Fire before it divides. It rules, with its court, one quadrant of the heavens.
Book T as printed in The Equinox I(8), 1912, public domain (notes in square brackets are Crowley's). The correspondences are this site's compilation from Book T. Open it in the Golden Dawn deck.