- Element
- Fire
- Arcana
- Minor · Wands
- Attribution
- Air of Fire
- Feeling shows as
- Action and pursuit
- Stage
- The decider
King of Wands
as feelings
They have decided about you, and they expect to lead from here.
Why
The King of Wands is settled desire with authority behind it. It is a fire card, so what it reports is what they want and are moving toward rather than the whole of what they feel.
Upright and reversed
What it is like to hold this feeling.
A reversal is not the opposite of the upright card. It blocks it, delays it, turns it inward or takes it too far, and which of those depends on the kind of card it is.
Upright
The King of Wands is settled desire with authority behind it. The decision is made, the feeling is not in doubt, and this person will act on it directly rather than waiting to see what you do. There is vision in the card — they are thinking about where this goes and they have a view — and there is a habit of command that does not always pause to ask. For anyone who wanted certainty, it delivers. For anyone who wanted to be consulted, it is worth noticing early.
Reversed
Reversed, the authority has tipped into arrogance or has deserted them. Either the certainty has stopped listening, or a person used to being sure has met something they cannot lead their way through.
Reversed, a court card is most usefully read as the same temperament under pressure, or as that way of feeling in yourself rather than in somebody else. It is very rarely a bad person and very frequently an unbalanced one.
Why the suit decides the answer
Fire does not feel the way the other three do.
The same rank in two suits describes two genuinely different states. This is the largest single fact about any card in a feelings position — larger than the picture on it.
Fire does not feel so much as want. A Wands card in a feelings position is describing appetite, momentum and the pull toward — the part of caring that makes somebody act rather than the part that makes them tender.
You will know a Wands feeling by movement. It turns up, it initiates, it makes plans. What it is markedly worse at is sitting still with you when nothing is happening.
Fire mistakes intensity for depth, and it cools without meaning anything by it. A Wands feeling that has gone quiet has usually not turned into a decision; it has simply stopped burning at that particular spot.
Where the feeling is in its arc
The decider.
A King feels from a settled position. The state has been evaluated, accepted and organised into a policy, which is why Kings are steady and why they can be hard to reach. What a King feels has usually been decided some time ago and will not be revisited casually.
A court card describes how somebody feels rather than how much, which is why it is a poor source of reassurance and a good source of prediction
Air of Fire. Kings are the suit directed outward — the element organized, delegated and answerable to somebody, and here that faculty is applied to what they want and are moving toward. air and fire assist each other, so the feeling described is unusually coherent — nothing in it is working against anything else in it.
The same card, four situations
It does not mean the same thing for an ex as it does for a stranger.
Each reading below is built from two things that differ card to card: what the element does to a feeling, and how far along that feeling is.
Someone you have just met
For something that has only just started, Fire is the most flattering and least reliable of the four. The heat is genuine and it has had nothing to prove itself against. A King this early means a decision has already been taken. That is faster than it looks — Kings do not fall, they conclude — and it will not be revisited casually.
A relationship you are already in
Inside an established relationship, Wands is asking about desire rather than security. It reports whether somebody still moves toward you, which is a different question from whether they intend to stay. A King inside an established relationship describes a settled policy rather than a mood, which is why this rank is so stable and so hard to shift when it is wrong.
Someone who ended it, or who you ended it with
For a connection that has ended, Fire is the suit most likely to return and least likely to have thought about it. Wands reappear because the pull did, not because anything was resolved. A King after an ending has generally closed the file. What is felt may be entirely intact and the position on it has been decided.
A feeling neither of you has said out loud
When nothing has been said, a Wands card is usually the easiest of the four to read from outside, because Fire is bad at concealment. If the feeling is there, somebody is already doing something about it. A King says things when he has concluded them and not before. An unspoken feeling here has usually been fully reasoned and is waiting on an occasion.
The part most readings skip
What this card cannot tell you.
A feelings position is the one place a reader most wants to be told what they were hoping for, which is exactly why it is the easiest to misread.
- A card describes a quality of feeling. It does not identify a person, confirm that they are thinking about you at this moment, or guarantee what they will do next — and any reading that offers those things is selling certainty the deck does not contain.
- Feelings positions are the ones readers most want a particular answer from, which is exactly why they are the easiest to misread. If a card seems to confirm precisely what you hoped, that is the moment to check it against what has actually happened.
- One card is one input. A feeling that contradicts everything a person has done for six months is a card that needs the rest of the spread, not a card that has revealed a secret.
Keep going
A feeling is one position in a spread.
The full meaning of King of Wands — upright, reversed, love, career, money and the symbolism the painting carries — is on its own page. If you have not drawn a card yet, the reading below deals a real one.
