MINOR ARCANA · WANDS · FIRE
Ten of Wands
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Oppression
UPRIGHT
Burden, over-commitment, carrying too much.
REVERSED
Laying burdens down, delegating, collapse under strain.
The card
The Ten of Wands is the tenth card of Wands, the suit of Fire: will, energy and ambition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Oppression and gave it Saturn in Sagittarius, the decan of 20°–30° Sagittarius, which the Sun passes through each year from about 12 to 21 December.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Ten 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 man oppressed by the weight of the ten staves which he is carrying. DIVINATORY MEANINGS A card of many significances, and some of the readings cannot be harmonized. I set aside that which connects it with honour and good faith. The chief meaning is oppression simply, but it is also fortune, gain, any kind of success, and then it is the oppression of these things. It is also a card of false-seeming, disguise, perfidy. The place which the figure is approaching may suffer from the rods that he carries. Success is stultified if the Nine of Swords follows, and if it is a question of a lawsuit, there will be certain loss. REVERSED Contrarieties, difficulties, intrigues, and their analogies.
FURTHER MEANINGS Difficulties and contradictions, if near a good card.
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: Ten 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.