Six of Wands

The Plate

There are two wreaths on this card, not one. The horseman wears a laurel crown, and a second laurel hangs from the stave he carries, tied there for display; whatever this victory was, it is being deliberately shown. He rides through a crowd of men on foot whose own staves rise around him like a moving fence, his horse covered to the neck in a green caparison. Waite (1911) names him "a laurelled horseman" and gives the card victory and great news — but the plate is more particular than the caption. The rider's face celebrates nothing. He looks ahead, past the crowd that carries his fame.

The Reading

Six restores order after the five's scrimmage: someone won, and the crowd that was lately all elbows has arranged itself into a procession. The card's promise is real — recognition, the message of success, the day the work is finally seen. Its fine print is in the geometry: the rider is lifted by a horse and framed by walkers, and both supports are borrowed. Public victory is a relation, not a possession; it exists in the space between the wreath and the people looking at it.

Reversed, that relation fails somewhere. The news is delayed, the credit lands on the wrong head, or — the harder reading — the wreath has come to matter more than what earned it, and the rider would circle the town forever to keep the cheering going.

In the School

Fire, the element of the wands in the astrology course's table, is the will; the sixes show each element in accord with its neighbors. Fire's accord is shared triumph — warmth at the scale of a crowd — and the school reads this card as will, witnessed.