MINOR ARCANA · WANDS · FIRE
Four of Wands
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Perfected Work
UPRIGHT
Celebration, homecoming, a stable foundation.
REVERSED
Instability at home, cancelled celebrations, transition.
The card
The Four of Wands is the fourth card of Wands, the suit of Fire: will, energy and ambition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Perfected Work and gave it Venus in Aries, the decan of 20°–30° Aries, which the Sun passes through each year from about 9 to 20 April.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Four 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:
From the four great staves planted in the foreground there is a great garland suspended; two female figures uplift nose-gays; at their side is a bridge over a moat, leading to an old manorial house. DIVINATORY MEANINGS They are for once almost on the surface—country life, haven of refuge, a species of domestic harvest-home, repose, concord, harmony, prosperity, peace, and the perfected work of these. REVERSED The meaning remains unaltered; it is prosperity, increase, felicity, beauty, embellishment.
FURTHER MEANINGS Unexpected good fortune. REVERSED A married woman will have beautiful children.
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: Four 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 Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- Reading the Cards · 16 min
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.