Six of Wands

The picture

A rider on a white horse moves left to right along a green hillside. He wears a laurel wreath and a red cloak, and the staff in his hand has a second laurel wreath tied to it with a red ribbon.

The horse is covered by a green caparison worked with red squares, and it has been fitted properly.

Behind him, at the edge of the frame and mostly out of it, are the tops of two or three other heads and their staves. None of those people is wearing a wreath.

Upright

Recognition arriving in public, with enough witnesses to make it count.

The Six of Wands is victory that other people have seen. That is the precise claim, and it is narrower than success: not that the thing worked, but that the working has been acknowledged, which is a separate event and frequently a much later one.

The two wreaths are worth separating. One is on his head, which is the honour. One is tied to the staff, which is the announcement. He is both wearing it and carrying it, and the second is doing more work than the first.

Somebody dressed the horse

The caparison is not a saddle blanket. It is a fitted cloth in the colours of the occasion, cut for this animal and decorated.

Which means the procession was arranged in advance. Somebody knew this was happening, had the cloth made or brought out, and put it on the horse before the rider mounted. The recognition in this card did not break out spontaneously as he came over the hill.

That is not a criticism and the card is not being sardonic. It is simply the truth about acknowledgement: it has to be organised by somebody, usually somebody who is not the person being acknowledged, and the figures who did the organising are the ones cropped at the edge of the frame without wreaths.

Reversed

The parade without the crowd. Work that succeeded and went unremarked, or credit that arrived at the wrong desk and stayed there.

Recognition can also land and fail to fix the thing it was expected to fix. The applause happens, everybody means it, and the particular emptiness it was supposed to fill is exactly where it was. This is the more common reversal and much the harder one to discuss with anyone.

What it is not

Arrogance. The card is about acknowledgement rather than self-regard, and reading it as vanity punishes a reader for having done well, which is an odd service to provide.

It also gets taken for final victory. Six is the middle of the suit, and the Seven is next.

In a reading

The effort is seen, in an outcome position. As advice it can mean take the credit instead of deflecting it, which some people find genuinely difficult and should probably practise.

With the Seven the order tells the story: recognition brings people who want the position. With the Five the contest has resolved, and the resolution is why there is a horse.