Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
A red-cloaked man rides into town on his elaborately mantled horse, his chest pushed out in a gesture of pride and authority. He holds a wand firmly in his right hand, which is joined by five other wands being held by people in a crowd behind him. His wand is garlanded with a red-ribboned laurel wreath, and he wears a second laurel wreath on his head.
The colours in the picture are vibrant: red, yellow, green, brown, with a cobalt-blue sky in the background. This brightness is extended to the feel of the card, and its obvious reference to celebration and harmony.
The preponderance of reds and greens in the Six of Wands draws my eye to the wreaths and the red ribbon, one of its tails caught in an air current as the horse moves through the crowd. In ancient Greece, both laurel wreaths and red ribbons were given to athletic victors — and yet the main figure is certainly not dressed as an athlete. There is a lot of finery, from the spectators’ headgear to the horse’s green caparison with ruffled collar. There is no armour to indicate a battle, either. Perhaps the parade comes some time after the event it celebrates.
Nevertheless, this card is not exclusively focused on the physical. There might be references to real procession, but the Six of Wands is also about graduation in a less concrete sense.
We graduate when move through one phase and reach the boundary to the next one. We graduate when we achieve something that we have worked towards, and that achievement enables us to shift up a level in whatever we are doing. (We hope that by graduating from university, for example, we gain access to better job prospects.) We also graduate when we assume the mantle of responsibility. We become initiates.
Something else strikes me when I look at the card: the horse has no mane. In fact, it is the only horse ridden by a figure in the Rider-Waite deck that doesn’t have one. Its grey head is illustrated with the barest minimum of lines. Given the detail in the rest of the picture — the flourishes, creases and cross-hatchings — it feels slightly like a caricature.