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Minor Arcana · Suit of Wands · Number card
Ten · Wands
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightHeavy burdenOvercommitmentSuccess as weight
↓ ReversedTangled demandsSetting it downHidden intrigue
What it means
↑ Upright
Bent under ten staves, he can barely see the town he is carrying them toward. Here is the weight of success: every task taken on because it could be, until the load hides the road. Set some of it down, and ask which staves are truly yours to carry and which could be handed to someone else.
↓ Reversed
The load is no lighter, only more tangled: contrary demands, difficulties pulling different ways, a little scheming at the edges. Turned over, it can also mark the moment the burden is finally put down. Either way, sort the bundle stave by stave, and think twice before agreeing to the next thing offered out of habit.
Ten is the full measure, and in Wands it is drive carried to its limit, every venture taken on now a load to bear. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a man bowed under an armful of ten staves, trudging toward a town with his face hidden behind the bundle. His goal is near, but he hugs the load so tightly that it blocks his view: success turned into burden, made heavier by the awkward way it is carried.
Upright
A card of many significances, and some of the readings cannot be harmonized. I set aside that which connects it with honor 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.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.