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Minor Arcana · Suit of Wands · Number card
Five · Wands
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightCompetitionMock battleClashing ideas
↓ ReversedReal disputeFoul playConflict avoided
What it means
↑ Upright
Five youths swing their staves at one another, yet nobody is hurt: a mock battle, the sparring that comes with any crowded field. Competition, clashing ideas and the ordinary scramble for a place are what it shows. Treat it as practice rather than war — say your piece, hold your ground, and keep the game a game.
↓ Reversed
Sparring stops being play: rivalry hardens into dispute, words contradict one another, someone bends the rules to win. Reversed, the card can also mean the opposite reflex: conflict dodged until it festers. Name the disagreement plainly, find out what is actually at stake, and refuse to answer trickery with more of it.
Five is the point of strain, and in Wands the strain is rivalry: too many drives competing for one space. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows five young men, each dressed differently, brandishing staves in a tangle, as if in sport or strife. The staves cross but strike nothing; the mixed clothing is often read as five separate wills, each pushing its own idea with no shared aim.
Upright
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.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.