3 of Wands

The Three of Wands has no known story of its own in the early decks. Italian playing cards used four suits, cups, coins, swords and batons, and the tarot decks of the 15th century took them over. Playing cards probably reached Europe from Mamluk Egypt, whose decks had polo sticks, coins, swords and cups; the earliest European mention is from Catalonia in 1371. The batons are the descendants of those polo sticks.

In the early Italian and later Marseille-pattern decks, the numbered cards of the baton suit are plain pips with no scene. In the Tarot de Marseille the batons are straight and cross to form a lattice in the higher numbers, and on odd numbers a single upright baton runs through the middle. The three would therefore show three batons in a simple arrangement among leaf and scroll decoration. One site describing the Visconti-Sforza (Bembo workshop, about 1450) Three of Staves says it shows three staves in an ornamental arrangement without any figure, but it admits that its description is inferred from the suit pattern and should be treated with caution.

The first deck known to give every numbered card a scene is the Sola Busca, engraved around 1490 and painted in 1491, probably in Venice. Photographs of it reached the British Museum in 1907, and some scholars think they inspired Pamela Colman Smith.

Pamela Colman Smith drew the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909 for A. E. Waite; it was published by Rider in 1909-1910. Her Three of Wands is a scene: a robed man seen from behind stands on a height and looks out over the sea at ships, with three staves planted in the ground. This scene has no basis in the plain pip cards of the older Italian and Marseille decks.

The scene fixed the card’s modern image. T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land names a “Man with Three Staves”, which the Wikipedia article on the card notes is tied to the Fisher King only quite arbitrarily by Eliot himself.