MINOR ARCANA · WANDS · FIRE
Three of Wands
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Established Strength
UPRIGHT
Expansion, foresight, early progress, ships coming in.
REVERSED
Obstacles to expansion, frustration, lack of foresight.
The card
The Three of Wands is the third card of Wands, the suit of Fire: will, energy and ambition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Established Strength and gave it Sun in Aries, the decan of 10°–20° Aries, which the Sun passes through each year from about 30 March to 9 April.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Three 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 calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliff's edge at ships passing over the sea. Three staves are planted in the ground, and he leans slightly on one of them. DIVINATORY MEANINGS He symbolizes established strength, enterprise, effort, trade, commerce, discovery; those are his ships, bearing his merchandise, which are sailing over the sea. The card also signifies able co-operation in business, as if the successful merchant prince were looking from his side towards yours with a view to help you. REVERSED The end of troubles, suspension or cessation of adversity, toil and disappointment.
FURTHER MEANINGS A very good card; collaboration will favour enterprise.
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: Three 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.