Five of Wands
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as competition, squabbling, and the friction of many wills in one space. Waite described it as mimic warfare, a sham fight more than a real one.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as tension easing, conflict avoided, or a struggle that has moved inward.
A question to sit with
Is this a real conflict or a scramble where everyone is talking at once? What would change if one person agreed on the rules first?
The deeper reading
Traditionally the will tested against other wills. Readers see in it the energy that friction can sharpen.
What is drawn on the card
Five young men in mismatched clothes brandish long wands at one another. It reads as a game or a melee, with no one clearly winning and no one hurt.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A band of youths brandishing staves, as in sport or a mock fight.
- Suit
- Wands
- Element
- Fire
- Domain
- Will, passion, creativity, action
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Five of Wands is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.