Five of Wands

The Five of Wands opens the Leo decans in the fire suit's zodiacal sequence, Saturn ruling the first ten degrees before Jupiter takes the Six of Wands at Leo's second decan and Mars the Seven at its third; Saturn governing a scene as chaotic as Smith's is another of Book T's counterintuitive pairings, and the Golden Dawn's logic treats Saturn here as friction and restriction expressed through competition rather than through any of the planet's more familiar cold or static readings.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, five youths swinging staffs at one another in what reads as closer to a disorganized scramble than to any real battle, none clearly winning, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Cinq de Batons is five batons crossed in a formal lattice, read by cartomancers from number and suit alone without any figures to be fighting at all. The ambiguity of whether the scene is genuine conflict or mock combat is frequently discussed by commentators, since nothing in the composition, no wound, no clear aggressor, settles the question either way.

The Golden Dawn and Thoth titles agree exactly, both Strife, one of the small handful of cards where Waite's occult source and Crowley's Thoth title do not diverge at all; Harris renders the five wands as a jagged, colliding geometric pattern under Saturn's glyph, keeping the sense of undirected friction without resolving, any more than Smith's picture does, whether the friction is destructive or merely noisy.

Upright the Five of Wands is read as conflict, competition and the tension of several wills pulling in different directions, not always with real enmity behind it; reversed, as conflict avoided, an easing of tension, or the same friction turned inward.

Older cartomancy read a bare five of wands as disruption of the four's settled ground, general discord without the specific reading of competitive scrambling among peers that Smith's picture supplies; her staged mock-skirmish, with no clear winner and no visible injury, is what allows the modern reading to sit closer to healthy rivalry than to real hostility, a gentler note than the matching Strife title from both the Golden Dawn and Crowley would suggest on its own.

Waite's own printed meaning, imitation, a sham fight, simulated warfare, also work of no great importance, is notably milder than the sense of real stakes many contemporary readers now assign the card, and his emphasis on the fight's unimportance has been one of the more durable parts of his text, surviving into current practice largely intact.

Reversed, the card is read two ways that pull against each other, conflict resolved or conflict merely suppressed and carried inward, and readers commonly rely on the surrounding cards to decide which; the ambiguity mirrors the upright card's own refusal to say whether five staffs raised together mean real danger or none at all.