Minor Arcana · Wands · Court card
King of Wands
vision carried by someone willing to be responsible for it
Element
Fire · will, work in progress, enterprise and drive
The card in tarot
What King of Wands means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A king sits on a throne carved with lions and salamanders, wearing a robe of salamanders, holding a flowering staff. A live salamander sits by his foot. He is turned slightly away, as if mid-decision.
In a reading
Vision someone is willing to be responsible for. Read as leadership of the entrepreneurial kind: the person who commits to a direction publicly and carries the consequences of it.
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
vision carried by someone willing to be responsible for it
Reversed
vision as pronouncement, unwilling to be argued with
Reversed, common readings are vision issued as decree, impatience with anyone slower, or a leader who has stopped listening.
The suit
King 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 court rank
What the King does
Across all four suits, the King is the suit held outwardly: authority, mastery and responsibility for others.
The King is the element turned into a position. What he governs, and how well, is the suit's final question.
The same rank in the other suits
Why King 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.