Ten of Wands Meaning in Tarot by Avia of Tarot Teachings

About Ten of Wands
Meaning in Tarot

The ten of wands feels a little anticlimactic after journeying through often heroic footsteps in the suit of wands.

I sometimes get the feeling of a little school kid getting cranky over a game of streetball. The one who threatens to go home with the bat if the other kids don’t play nice (which is a big deal, because that’s the only baseball bat in the entire neighborhood).

And that’s unfortunate because we’ve learned so much as in the journey through the rods. But the tell-tale signs of dejection linger in the body language found in the ten of wands card.

Some keywords accumulating in the ten of wands Tarot card meaning:

Retreat
Harvest
Defense
Burdened
Shielding
Collecting
Stockpiling
Crossroads
Overextended

Note the down-cast eyes of our figurehead. He can’t even see the horizon of his dreams. Indeed, the wands are blocking his vision; symbolic of allowing the throes of his passion to completely blind him from his path.

His back is turned, which suggests reflecting on past actions, or even a movement of retreat. However, he moves to the homestead. We could intuit this for ourselves to mean a time to regroup or collect ourselves and find our center within the whirlwind.

On the subject of collecting ourselves, the body language seen holding all the wands together is symbolic of harvest and/or girding the loins as we continue on our path. When those ten wands waggle before our sight in a reading, it may indicate a time to gather up our lessons and recollect ourselves for the next phase life offers us.

I’ve had this card indicate overextension in a querent too. This card hints we might be unwilling to give up our burdens and that unwillingness is causing us to hunch over, essentially crippling our ability to grow. This card may be a sign it might be time to hand over some aspects of our activities to the professionals so we can focus on our own areas of expertise.

The ten of wands is one of those cards having a chameleon quality. It’s mood changes with its surrounding players. Granted, all cards will change in meaning depending on the surrounding cards, but this one is especially transient. For example, I’ve recently had this card reveal a clients’ struggle in the US mortgage crisis. Although this card really has little to do with finances, the surrounding cards helped us get to the heart of the matter in her reading.

Some symbolic meaning gathered up in the ten of wands Tarot card:

House: Within houses, we live, die, play, cry, grow, hide, dream, the list goes on. As such, they are symbols of our deepest secrets and the tenderest parts of our hearts. House symbol meanings also deal with protection and the value that we feel we must guard against theft. When houses jump up to our vision in a reading it may be a sign that our security is threatened, or it may convey the opposite, and we should not be concerned with safety and we are already protected. In the ten of wands Tarot card meaning, the house may signify a time of retreat, isolation and regrouping.

symbolic garden and field meaning in Tarot

Plowed Fields: “As we sow, so shall we reap.” This is the prime symbol meaning behind the plowed fields we see in the cards. When these fields come in contact with our intuition in a reading, we should be mindful that what we do and how we do it is pivotal to our harvest. If we’re lazy and sloppy (rushing through as the Knight of Pentacles is want to do) with planting our seeds we will be disappointed with the results. However, if we invest the time to plant, nurture, and grow our rows, we will be rewarded with abundance. Plowed fields are also a symbol of time – it takes time to reap our rewards, we must allow for germination, and patience is required as we wait it out for the results we are expecting from our labors. You can just barely see the plowed fields in the ten of wands, click on the picture so you can see it up close, and pointed out.