Queen of Wands.
Warmth that lasts, and keeps something back.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
She sits squared to the front and takes up the whole seat. A sprouting staff in one hand, a sunflower in the other, lions on the throne. At her feet a black cat, sitting up, the only thing on the card looking at you.
Warmth that lasts. She is genuinely interested, in public, for years, and keeps one thing entirely to herself. You are warm to people in public, and the thing you keep back is not a failure of the warmth; it is what the cat is for.
Four things people go to on this card
- the cat
You went to the cat, black, sitting up at her feet, the only thing in the card looking straight out at you.
The part of a person that is not for public use. Everything else in this picture faces forward and is legible; the cat is a private animal with its own opinion, and it is sitting between you and her.
So the card is not simple warmth. She is warm and she is guarded, and the guard is small, black and awake. If people find you easy to talk to and hard to know, that is not a contradiction; it is this arrangement, and it works.
What in you is warm in public and entirely private underneath?
- the sunflower
It was the sunflower you touched, held upright in her left hand and turned to face out.
Attention that follows warmth without apology. A sunflower does one thing all day and is not embarrassed by it, and she is holding it up where everyone can see which way it faces.
She is the only court figure in the deck holding a flower. The staff is the office; the flower is the appetite. She has both up at once, which is the whole of her competence, and it is the part of her you could copy tomorrow.
What are you turned towards at the moment, and would you say it out loud?
- the lions
You went to the throne: lions on the arms, lions on the panel behind her, facing each other.
Lions do not move house. This is somebody who has been here a while and is not going anywhere, and the seat says so before she does. The Knight's fire is a burst. Hers is a hearth.
That is the difference worth taking from this card. If you need something sustained rather than started, this is the figure the deck offers, and she is sitting down. Nothing on the throne is in a hurry, and it has been that way for years.
Does this need starting, or does it need someone to sit with it for a year?
- her knees
Your eye went to how she is sitting, squared to the front, knees apart under the robe, taking up the whole seat.
Occupying a position rather than perching in one. Nobody sits like that in a chair they think they might have to leave, and nobody sits like that while waiting to be asked to.
There is a plain question in it. Are you sitting in your own life like this, or on the edge of it, and if the second, whose permission are you still waiting for? The card's answer is that nobody gave her any.
Are you sitting in this like it is yours, or on the edge of it?
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Queen of Wands on Binah, understanding, in Atziluth, the world of fire: the queens of all four suits sit there, one to a world. It is the third place in the Tree of Life spread.
Which zodiac signs does the Queen of Wands cover?
Twenty degrees of Pisces to twenty degrees of Aries: the last third of Pisces and the first two thirds of Aries, which the Sun crosses about 10 March to 10 April each year. Book T gives every queen thirty degrees across two signs like this, which is why a court card belongs to no single sign. The three decans inside it are Ten of Cups · Two of Wands · Three of Wands, so a birth in any of them carries the Queen 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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