Two of Wands
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as standing at the edge of what you have built and looking past it. Readers associate it with planning, ambition, and the choice between staying secure and setting out.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as fear of the unknown or plans that never leave the drawing board. It can also point to staying in a safe place that has grown too small.
A question to sit with
If the plan in your head became a written plan, what would its first three steps be? Which part of it are you avoiding looking at?
The deeper reading
Readers see here the restlessness of a will that has secured its ground and now senses a larger horizon.
What is drawn on the card
A man in a red cap stands on castle battlements holding a small globe in one hand and a wand in the other. A second wand is fixed to the wall beside him, which bears a cross of roses and lilies, and he looks out over land and sea.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A tall man on a battlemented roof looks out over sea and shore, a globe in his right hand and a staff in his left resting on the battlement; a second staff is fixed in a ring; a rose, a cross and a lily are on the left side.
- 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
Two 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.