What this deck does differently
The suit cards carry no title and no scene: 6 baton signs arranged symmetrically among foliage, with the numeral in the margin. Reading a picture on a Marseille pip is reading something the printer did not put there.
wands
Six
Six de Baton
Suit: Baton Minor Arcana Element: Fire
Also known as Six of Rods, Six of Staffs, Six of Staves, and Six of Batons.
Core interpretation
Six of Wands: achievement made visible and acknowledged by others. 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 Marseille deck
This deck publishes no meanings, and none are supplied for it here. Marseille packs were printed for play, and the divinatory readings attached to them by Etteilla and his successors came later and from outside — presenting those as this deck's own would date them a century too early.
This deck calls the card Six de Baton; it is filed here as Six of Wands.
This deck's book publishes no upright and reversed lists, so none are shown. Its account of the card is cited below rather than reproduced.
Lequart, Paris, Marseille — BnF, Estampes et photographie, BOITE FOL-KH-383.
The same card in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
Six of Wands
What the card shows
ModernA laurel-crowned rider carries a wand topped by another wreath while attendants accompany the public procession.
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 victory, important news, expectation fulfilled and hope crowned by success. Reversed, it can indicate fear, disloyalty, treachery or indefinite delay.
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 Sixes 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 Victory
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; Six 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
Tiphareth · Beauty
The Sixes bring the work into a clear, coherent accomplishment. What was contested in the Five has carried through to a result.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — General meanings of the small cards under the Sephiroth, p. 27
Jupiter 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; Six of Wands, pp. 28–46
Victory follows effort and can bring pleasure, sociability and confidence, together with a danger of pride.
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 Victory, Six 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