MINOR ARCANA · WANDS · FIRE
Knight of Wands
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Action, adventure, impulsive energy.
REVERSED
Recklessness, frustration, haste without aim.
The card
The Knight of Wands is one of the four court cards of Wands, the suit of Fire: will, energy and ambition.
In the Golden Dawn's scheme each court card is an element within its suit's element: the Knight of Wands is Air of Fire.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Prince of Wands. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the Knight.
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:
He is shewn as if upon a journey, armed with a short wand, and although mailed is not on a warlike errand. He is passing mounds or pyramids. The motion of the horse is a key to the character of its rider, and suggests the precipitate mood, or things connected therewith. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Departure, absence, flight, emigration. A dark young man, friendly. Change of residence. REVERSED Rupture, division, interruption, discord.
FURTHER MEANINGS A bad card; according to some readings, alienation. REVERSED For a woman, marriage, but probably frustrated.
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: Cavalier (the knight) of Bâtons (batons).
Learn more in the lessons
- Reading the Court Cards · 16 min
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 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.