Minor Arcana · Wands · Number 5
Five of Wands
competition and friction, mostly the productive kind
Element
Fire · will, work in progress, enterprise and drive
The card in tarot
What Five of Wands means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
Five young men swing staves at each other on open ground. Nobody is armoured, nobody is bleeding, and the staves are not really connecting. It looks more like a scramble than a battle.
In a reading
Friction between people who are not enemies. Competition, crossed purposes, five voices in a meeting all talking. The card is usually read as tiring rather than dangerous, and sometimes as necessary: this is what a group looks like before it agrees.
What this card does not mean
It is not a card of violence or of an enemy. The picture is deliberately unbloody.
Upright and reversed
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Roughly half of readers never use them and read every card upright; those who do treat a reversed card as the same card under pressure rather than as its opposite.
Upright
competition and friction, mostly the productive kind
Reversed
conflict avoided rather than resolved, or picked pointlessly
Reversed, the fight goes underground: conflict avoided rather than settled, or an argument being had by people who will not say what it is about.
The suit
Five of Wands is a Wands card
Wands are the suit of things being attempted. They cover ambition, creative heat, the argument you are willing to have and the project that is not finished yet. Where the Cups ask how you feel about something, the Wands ask whether you are going to do it. The suit is busy: more of its cards show people mid-action than in any other suit.
Fire is not the same as anger, and a run of Wands is not a promise that the thing succeeds. The suit describes energy going somewhere, not the outcome of the journey.
Wands is the suit of Fire, and it is the suit that became Clubs in an ordinary playing-card deck.
The other thirteen Wands
The number
What the Five does
Across all four suits, the Five is loss, friction and the moment the pattern breaks.
Five sits at the midpoint of the pip cards and every Five is difficult. The deck puts its rupture in the middle of each suit rather than at the end.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Five of Wands is not a birth card
AsterNym’s birth card comes from adding up a birth date and reducing it, which can only ever land between 1 and 22. Those are the Major Arcana, so no Minor Arcana card is anyone’s birth card and this page does not offer one. The minors are in the draw pool, where any of the 78 can come up.