Ten of Wands
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as carrying too much: duties that began as success and have become weight. Waite tied it to oppression and a load that is hard to set down.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as setting some of the load down, delegating, or a collapse that forces the issue.
A question to sit with
Which of these ten things is actually yours to carry? Which one could you hand off, drop, or finish today?
The deeper reading
Readers see here the will spent on obligation until the original fire is hard to see.
What is drawn on the card
A man bends forward under a bundle of ten heavy wands clutched against his chest, so they block his view. He trudges toward a house and town in the distance.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A man bowed under the weight of ten staves he carries toward a town ahead.
- 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
Ten 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.