Four of Wands.
Finished well enough to decorate.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
Four staves in a row, a garland slung between them, tied with ribbon. Two figures underneath, arms up, holding flowers. Behind them a bridge, a wall, a red roof, and a knot of people who were there already.
Nobody hangs flowers on a job still in progress. Homecoming is the usual reading, and it holds, but four plain poles carry the whole thing and the crowd is looking at the garland. Whatever you have finished rests on four ordinary things, and you are the only one who knows what they cost.
Four things people go to on this card
- the garland
You went to the garland, flowers and fruit slung between the staves and tied at the tops with ribbon.
Ribbon is the detail. Nobody ties a bow on a pole they expect to move tomorrow, and the fruit in the garland is real fruit, which took a season. Something has reached the point where it can be shown.
Wands are work, so this is not a feeling arriving. It is a piece of doing that has got far enough for other people to see it, which is a real milestone and not the end of anything. If that is where you are, mark it before you move the poles.
What have you finished recently that you have not let anybody mark?
- the four staves
You went to the staves themselves, four of them upright and apart, holding up everything else in the picture.
Structure, not celebration. Four is the number of the thing that stands on its own, and everything joyful in the picture is hanging off it. Take the poles away and the garland is on the ground.
Ask what the four uprights actually are in your case. Money, a lease, two people who show up, a habit. The garland is what everyone sees; the poles are what has to be paid for, and one of yours is probably shorter than the others.
Name the four things holding this up. Are all four actually there?
- the two figures
It was the pair with the bouquets you noticed, arms up under the canopy, the smallest figures in the foreground.
They are raising flowers, not cups, and they are welcoming rather than being welcomed. This is arriving somewhere together rather than alone, which is the part most readings of the card skip.
Whatever is being marked here is not yours by yourself. That is worth saying out loud, because the person who did the work often forgets to name who was standing under the canopy. You are that person here, and the canopy has room for the name you have not said.
Who else is standing under this with you, and have you said so?
- the crowd
You went past the canopy to the people behind, a crowd at the wall and a castle with a red roof behind them.
A private relief and a public one are different things. Something has become known. There are witnesses, and a wall, and a house that was there before any of this and will be there after.
That changes what the thing costs. A finished thing with witnesses cannot be quietly abandoned, which is either the safety in this card or the trap in it, and you will know which by how you felt when they arrived.
Now that people know, what has become harder to walk away from?
Its ten degrees
The Golden Dawn gave the Four of Wands 20° to 30° of Aries, ruled by Venus, and Book T calls it the Lord of Perfected Work. The Sun is in it from 10 April to 20 April. The decan page for this card.
The wheel runs on from here. The decan before this one is Three of Wands, the Sun in Aries, 30 March to 10 April. The one after is Five of Pentacles, Mercury in Taurus, 20 April to 30 April. All thirty-six, in order.
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Four of Wands on Chesed, mercy, in Atziluth, the world of fire: every four is Chesed, in its own suit's world. It is the fourth place in the Tree of Life spread.
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.
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