King of Wands
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as a visionary leader who turns ideas into enterprises and inspires others to follow. Waite described him as ardent, honest, and noble.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as impulsiveness, impatience, or leadership that becomes overbearing.
A question to sit with
What vision are you responsible for keeping in front of people? How could you hand others real ownership of it?
The deeper reading
Readers see here fire mastered in the outer world: will directed toward a large purpose.
What is drawn on the card
A king sits on a throne decorated with lions and salamanders, holding a flowering wand. A small salamander rests at his feet.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A king raises a flowering wand and wears a cap of maintenance under his crown; a lion is emblazoned on the back of his throne. The 1909 scan is said to add salamanders (WEAK).
- 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
King 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.