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Minor Arcana · Suit of Wands · Number card
Four · Wands
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightHomecomingCelebrationWork completed
↓ ReversedJoy unsharedIncreaseShow over substance
What it means
↑ Upright
A garland strung between four staves, a bridge to an old house, two figures raising flowers: homecoming and harvest in one picture. Read plainly, it is work brought to completion, a settled place, and peace worth marking. Celebrate with the people who helped, and let the house be a refuge before it is anything else.
↓ Reversed
Waite holds that the meaning hardly changes when the card turns: prosperity, increase, beauty still. What shifts is the footing. The celebration may be more decoration than ease, or the gladness kept to yourself and unshared. Enjoy what has grown, then look past the garland to the house: is the welcome there as real as the flowers?
Four brings stability, and in Wands that means an enterprise that has found its footing and can pause to celebrate. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows four staves holding up a garland of flowers and fruit, two women lifting bouquets in welcome, and beyond them an old manor reached across a moat. The four staves and garland are often compared to a wedding canopy or a harvest bower; the house is the settled home the work has made.
Upright
They are for once almost on the surface—country life, haven of refuge, a species of domestic harvest-home, repose, concord, harmony, prosperity, peace, and the perfected work of these.
Reversed
The meaning remains unaltered; it is prosperity, increase, felicity, beauty, embellishment.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.