Minor Arcana · Wands · Court card
Knight of Wands
moving fast toward something you have chosen
Element
Fire · will, work in progress, enterprise and drive
The card in tarot
What Knight of Wands means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
An armoured knight on a rearing horse, salamanders on his surcoat, plume streaming back. The horse is off the ground. The desert behind him is empty.
In a reading
Commitment at speed. The Knight is the suit's daring and its recklessness in one figure: he goes, and he does not check first. Read as travel, a bold move, or a person who is exhilarating and difficult to plan around.
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
moving fast toward something you have chosen
Reversed
speed without direction, or rushing a decision
Reversed, the usual readings are speed without direction, a move made to escape something, or starting a thing at the volume it cannot be finished at.
The suit
Knight 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 Knight does
Across all four suits, the Knight is the suit at full tilt, committed and not yet wise.
The Knight is the only court figure in motion. Each one moves at the speed its element moves at, from the Swords' charge to the Pentacles' plod.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Knight 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.