2 of Wands

The Wands suit goes by other names in older decks. Italian-suited cards call it batons (bastoni), and tarot cards used for games still follow that name. One account holds that the suit comes from the “string of coins” suit of Chinese money-suited cards, which Muslim card makers apparently took for polo sticks when the cards reached the Islamic world. Polo was little known in Europe, so the sticks became cudgels in Spain and batons in Italy.

There is no separate early history of the Two of Wands. In decks of the Marseille pattern, whose earliest surviving cards were made by Philippe Vachier in 1639, batons are drawn as straight rods, and in the higher numbers they cross to form a lattice. A card of this kind shows only the suit sign twice, with some floral ornament, and no scene.

The Sola Busca deck, engraved about 1490 and hand-painted about 1491 in northern Italy (probably Venice, though the artist is unknown and the dating is debated), is the earliest known tarot in which every numbered card carries a picture. Its illustrated numbered cards are the likely background to Pamela Colman Smith’s later scenes, but the sources used here do not say what its Two of Batons shows.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, Pamela Colman Smith drew a scene for every numbered card, where the Marseille pattern gave only repeated suit signs. The British Museum received photographs of the Sola Busca deck in 1907, and Waite and Smith probably saw them. Some scholars think the Sola Busca influenced the deck, though this is a scholarly suggestion and not a settled fact, and the sources used here point to the Ten of Wands, not the Two, as the clear example.

Waite’s own book describes the Two of Wands as a figure on a battlemented roof, looking out over sea and shore with a globe in one hand and a staff in the other. Some modern descriptions call him a wealthy merchant or noble surveying his land, or watching for ships, but that is a reading of the picture and not something Waite says.