Sota de Bastos

This dandy irritates. Is that a smirk on this Page of Wands' face? Tarot Universal Dali appears to pull this from a prior century's advertisement for foppish men's wear. Yet Rachel Pollack in Salvador Dali's Tarot (the preeminent authority on Tarot Universal Dali) seems pleased with the elegance and pleasure inherent in the card, the framing in bright lights, the gentleness with which the master handles the masculine Wands with both the page and queen.


Yet that smokiness in the lower right -- a woman? a butterfly? a bird? That ectoplasmic green growth and red life blood -- that is connected to the fire around the sota. There is much unformed around this page.


The Pages of the four suits of the minor arcana represent the "simplest state," in Pollack's words taken from her Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. In readings and divinations the page is the child, the childlike state, the beginnings, the young student.
And the wands are fire -- fire of imagination, fire of life, the core energy. Tarot Universal Dali shows the fiery leaves on the wand, fire's fuel. Wands are the spark, the ignition.
And Tarot Universal Dali honors that beginning, ignition, flash of a starting point by turning from the pattern of plucking images from past masterpieces and starting afresh. This card, among but a handful, is attributed directly to the artist Dali in Gala's Grail by Kora Silver -- another remarkable study of Tarot Universal Dali.
Comment: Embrace the child. Do not drape the genuine wonderment of the childishness of beginning with a cloak of sophistication. Embrace the efforts of this Sota de Bastos to cloak what is yet undeveloped within inside something larger, older. Not the foppish clothing but the light of life that surrounds us all. And then step beyond the bright light of imagination and make real what is now only an ember. Turn it to fire, inspiration, great and mature life.