Nine of Wands

The image

A man stands in the foreground holding a wand upright with both hands and leaning on it slightly. His head is bound with a bandage and he glances sideways, wary, as if expecting another attack. Behind him eight more wands stand in an even row, like a fence or palisade. Beyond them a green hillside rises under a pale sky. He looks tired but solid; Waite remarked on his build, noting that he may prove a formidable antagonist, and described his expression as one of expectancy, as though awaiting an enemy.

History

Smith's wounded sentinel has no precedent in the older decks, where the Nine of Batons showed nine staves crossed in a regular pattern with one upright. The fortune-telling lists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Etteilla's to Mathers', attached meanings to the card with no picture to anchor them, and those meanings varied considerably. Waite's 1910 interpretation, written with the new picture before him, settled on the defender's strength and readiness. The bandage is one of many small, realistic touches that give Pamela Colman Smith's minors the quality of illustrated short stories, and it has shaped the card's modern meaning as much as any text.

Symbolism

The Golden Dawn called the card the Lord of Great Strength and attributed it to the Moon in Sagittarius, in Yesod, the sefirah of foundation. Crowley's version is simply Strength. The Moon's link with Yesod is traditional, and here it lends the fiery suit a note of inner reserves and of rhythms that wax and wane: strength that rises again after it has been drained. Nine, the last single digit, marks a near-completion (see number 9), the stage just before the overload of ten. The palisade shows defences built from experience — useful, but also capable of boxing a person in.

In a reading

Readers often place it on a continuum with the Seven of Wands, where the struggle is fresh, and the Ten of Wands, where it becomes a burden. Next to Strength it reinforces endurance; beside the Four of Swords it calls for rest; with the Six of Wands the long stand is finally rewarded. In an advice position it usually means: one more push, but guard your energy.

The card often comes up for people who have been through repeated difficulties, and readers use it to honour the endurance already shown rather than to demand more. Its message is less 'fight on' than 'you have survived this far, and you know more about your defences than you did at the start'.