MINOR ARCANA · WANDS · FIRE
Five of Wands
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Strife
UPRIGHT
Competition, strife, clashing egos.
REVERSED
Avoiding conflict, inner tension, resolution of disputes.
The card
The Five of Wands is the fifth card of Wands, the suit of Fire: will, energy and ambition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Strife and gave it Saturn in Leo, the decan of 0°–10° Leo, which the Sun passes through each year from about 22 July to 2 August.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Five of Wands, with the title and the zodiac decan from the Golden Dawn, as shown above.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
A posse of youths, who are brandishing staves, as if in sport or strife. It is mimic warfare, and hereto correspond the DIVINATORY MEANINGS Imitation, as, for example, sham fight, but also the strenuous competition and struggle of the search after riches and fortune. In this sense it connects with the battle of life. Hence some attributions say that it is a card of gold, gain, opulence. REVERSED Litigation, disputes, trickery, contradiction.
FURTHER MEANINGS Success in financial speculation. REVERSED Quarrels may be turned to advantage.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part III §§ 2 and 4. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The same card in the other suits
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Five of Bâtons (batons). The numbered cards carry no scene, only the suit's symbols arranged as on a playing card, so they are read from the number and the pattern.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Thoth Tarot · 12 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.