Knight of Wands
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as bold, energetic action: setting out, moving fast, chasing what excites. Waite tied it to departure and change of residence.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as haste, recklessness, or energy that starts many things and finishes few.
A question to sit with
Where would a bold move help you, and where would a pause help more? What would you need to finish before you leap?
The deeper reading
Readers see here fire in motion: passion that acts first and reflects later.
What is drawn on the card
An armored knight on a rearing horse holds a wand aloft. His tunic is patterned with salamanders, and pyramids rise in the desert behind him.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A mailed rider on a journey with a short wand, passing mounds or pyramids; the horse's motion suggests haste.
- 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
Knight 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.