What the card shows
A posse of youths, who are brandishing staves, as if in sport or strife. It is mimic warfare, and hereto correspond the
wands
Five
Five of Wands
Suit: Wands Minor Arcana Element: Fire
Also known as Five of Rods, Five of Staffs, Five of Staves, and Five of Batons.
Core interpretation
Five of Wands: energy meeting competition and testing itself through friction. The card joins the fire nature of Wands to its place in the numbered sequence.
The card's place in the historical Minor Arcana sits beside its Golden Dawn correspondences and Waite's account of Pamela Colman Smith's image. Each reading keeps the source and deck that gave it shape.
8 sourced claims: 5 traditional , 3 modern
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
Divinatory meaning
- 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 and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §2, The Lesser Arcana — Five of Wands.
The same card in the Thoth deck
Five of Wands · Strife
What the card shows
ModernFive youths brandish crossing staves in an ambiguous scene that resembles both sport and conflict.
A concise visual description of Pamela Colman Smith's 1910 design, checked against Waite's card entry and the public-domain scan.
Divinatory meaning
ModernUpright, Waite associates the card with competition, struggle and the battle for fortune or gain. Reversed, it can indicate litigation, disputes, contradiction or trickery.
Waite treats these as historical divinatory allocations and explicitly warns that they vary by context and are not a universal symbolic canon.
Tree of Life number
In the Golden Dawn system, all four Fives share a numerical relationship with one Hermetic Sephirah.
Golden Dawn correspondences 5 sourced claims
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Lord of Strife
Book T's formal decan-card title.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Titles of the decan cards, pp. 4–5; Five of Wands, pp. 28–46
Fire · Wands
Wands express the powers of Fire: initiative, animation, desire, enterprise and force set in motion.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Titles and descriptions of the four suits, pp. 3–23
Geburah · Severity
The Fives bring resistance. The suit's growing force meets conflict, obstruction and the test of whether it can continue under strain.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — General meanings of the small cards under the Sephiroth, p. 27
Saturn in Leo
Book T assigns each pip card from Two through Ten to one ten-degree decan of the zodiac.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Of the Thirty-Six Decans, pp. 23–27; Five of Wands, pp. 28–46
Force meets force as competition, boldness and conflict; dignity determines whether it becomes generous exertion or cruelty.
A concise paraphrase of Book T. Its dignity method modifies every decan card through the cards surrounding it.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Lord of Strife, Five of Wands, pp. 28–46
History and variants 1 sourced claim
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the fifty-six suit cards in a standard Tarot pack: four suits of ten pip cards and four court cards.
The Met documents this structure in surviving fifteenth-century Tarot: Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins, each numbered from one to ten with king, queen, knight and knave. Occult correspondences developed later.
Sources (1)
- Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards , Metropolitan Museum of Art online article, 2016 — paragraphs 2–4