Knight of Wands.
Going before anybody chose the moment.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A horse with its front legs off the ground, head down, nostrils open. The rider is in full plate under a tabard of salamanders, tails open, a red plume off his helmet, a short staff upright in one fist. Three pyramids, and nothing else.
Nobody chose this moment. The animal did, and the rider is going with it. Appetite in motion: the thing that starts because he came into the room, in a desert with nothing ahead. You have the appetite for this, and the card is not asking where you are taking it.
Four things people go to on this card
- the horse
You went to the horse, front legs off the ground, head down, nostrils open, going before he has finished sitting down.
A start that is already happening cannot now be timed. The animal picked the moment, and the rider's job has shrunk to staying on, which he is doing with one hand.
That is what makes the Knight of Wands both the most useful and the most expensive person in a room. Things move when he arrives. Not necessarily the right things, and if he is you this week, the people around you have already noticed the horse.
What is already moving that you have not decided about yet?
- his armour
It was the armour you noticed, full plate under the tabard, on a horse that is out of control.
Protection worn by someone who is not being careful. He has covered himself and then done the most exposed thing available, and the two facts are not in tension for him; the first is what allowed the second.
It is a real strategy and worth naming. Some people can only take risks because they have made themselves impossible to hurt first, and the price is that nothing much reaches them either. If that is you, the plate is doing its job too well.
What have you armoured so well that nothing gets through it, in either direction?
- the salamanders
You went to the tabard, salamanders again, and their tails are open, not in their mouths.
The Knight is not finished. The King's salamanders bite their own tails and make a circle. These do not. Everything about this figure is mid-motion, including the emblem stitched on his chest.
So the fire here has no circuit yet. It goes out, and it does not come back round. If you are relying on this for anything longer than a burst, the card is asking what it will run on next week, and it has not seen the answer.
This is running on a burst. What does it run on in three weeks?
- the pyramids
Your eye went to the desert behind him: the same three pyramids the Page stands in front of, and the same empty plain.
The middle of a long crossing, and there is nothing there. No town, no water, no destination in the frame, and the horse is going at full stretch towards the edge of the card.
That is the risk in this figure, drawn plainly. He has the speed and the horse and the armour, and the card does not know where he is going, because he has not said. If you are riding this, somebody will ask you soon.
Where is this actually going, and is that in the picture yet?
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Knight of Wands on Tiphareth, beauty, in Atziluth, the world of fire: the knights of all four suits sit there, one to a world. It is the sixth place in the Tree of Life spread.
Which zodiac signs does the Knight of Wands cover?
Twenty degrees of Cancer to twenty degrees of Leo: the last third of Cancer and the first two thirds of Leo, which the Sun crosses about 12 July to 12 August each year. Book T gives every knight thirty degrees across two signs like this, which is why a court card belongs to no single sign. The three decans inside it are Four of Cups · Five of Wands · Six of Wands, so a birth in any of them carries the Knight of Wands as well as its own card.
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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