Weekly Tarot: King of Wands

[An explanatory intro: I’m experimenting with incorporating my ongoing study of the Tarot into the stuff I’m producing for Patreon. This is the first in a series of brief weekly analytical posts I’ll be writing on individual cards. I’m clearly not getting as deep into them as someone more knowledgable in the full occult history and symbolism of the Tarot would be able to, but I think this is a useful exercise for myself and hopefully you might find it interesting. 

What I’m including in here is not authoritative, and like all Tarot interpretation, it’s highly subjective and particular to me. You may get different things out of the same card or have different understandings of what it means. That’s fine; I’m of the opinion that there’s really no wrong way to do Tarot. Or at least I’m not interested in arguing about what the right way is. 

I’m drawing the cards at random. I decided to do it that way rather than start with the beginning of the Major Arcana and proceed from there because it’s more interesting to me to not know beforehand what I’ll be writing about in any given week.

I often get asked about my deck, since I prefer to eschew the more conventional Rider-Waite deck (I just don’t vibe with the aesthetic). It’s the Ethereal Visions deck by artist Matt Hughes, and it’s available all over the place online for a pretty reasonable price.]

King of Wands

I tend to have way less of a feeling of personal connection to Court cards than I do with other cards in a suit. I’m not entirely sure why that is; I think it might be because Court cards represent aspects of personality so much more than they do individual situations, and that’s more difficult for me to process given that many of those aspects may not resonate for me (I tend to not interpret Court cards as representing literal people, it’s just a preference). So when I look at the King of Wands I feel much more of a “huh” kind of thing than I would most other cards in the Wands suit—a lot of Tarot interpretation for me comes down to the gut feeling I get when the card is first drawn, which I understand is a pretty common way to go about a reading. 

The occult symbolism and the associated meanings that go into Tarot decks based on the original Rider-Waite deck usually involve a kind of stereotypical gender essentialism that I’m not wild about—action and will are more masculine, emotion and intuition are more feminine, etc. But I think the arrangement of meanings and archetypes are still useful if I mentally separate them from the gender baggage, so King cards obviously represent actions in line with the elements of the suit. 

As I said last week when we covered the Two of Swords, the Wands suit is elementally connected to fire (note the salamander in the lower right corner), and is also connected to the Magician in the Major Arcana. Its connotations include active creativity, vitality, will, decisiveness, and charisma—and also clashes and conflict. The King is about leading boldly and assertively and making innovative choices, being willing to strike out into new territory and take others with you, or behaving in such a way that you inspire those actions in others. He’s also about being theatrical and attracting attention, and dominating whatever stage he happens to be on. 

As I do with all Court cards, when the King of Wands shows up in a reading I usually interpret it as a suggestion that these kinds of actions are especially important at this point in time, in oneself or in others. Usually the first thing I’ll go to is questioning whether those traits in myself might be usefully cultivated, or whether I might look for opportunities to take these kinds of actions and adopt these behaviors. Only when that doesn’t seem to feel quite right do I turn outward to consider whether I should think about how other people are acting and behaving. 

But the Wands Court cards, as I said, simply don’t resonate with me the way other cards in this suit do, or even Court cards in other suits (there was a while when I was going through a big conflict with my then-university and for whatever reason I was drawing the King of Swords a good bit; I also tend to get the Queen and Page of Pentagrams a fair amount and Pentagrams in general seem to be My Suit). So with the King of Wands I might be inclined to go to the possibility that I should look to these traits in others a bit faster than I would a Court card in a suit other than Wands. It’s not that none of those personality traits are present in me, or that I never behave in like with the King. It’s just that those things feel to me like more surface-level and transient, and less a part of the core of my being. I try to be bold, but I’m not. I think I’m capable of being charismatic but I experience a huge amount of self-doubt. I’m not especially decisive, and I’m not at all inclined to be a leader. 

So like I said, I frequently if not usually don’t feel any particularly intense kind of vibe with this card when I draw it. But I think it’s every bit as useful as any of the other cards in the deck, and naturally when I’m doing a reading for someone else, that sense of personal resonance isn’t nearly as important. What matters in that context is whether the card resonates for the person getting the reading. 

(Did you get something out of this? Please consider becoming a supporter; at the $1 tier and up you’ll get the full writeup of the Celtic Cross spread I’ll be doing once a month!)