Queen of Wands

The picture

A queen sits facing straight out of the card, on a stone throne with lion heads carved into the arms. Behind her rises an orange panel worked with two red lions face to face and a row of sunflowers.

She wears a yellow gown and a gold crown over a circlet of green leaves. Her right hand holds a leafing staff planted upright; her left holds a sunflower, turned outward.

At her feet, dead centre, a black cat sits and looks directly at the viewer.

Behind her to the left, yellow desert.

Upright

Warmth that draws people without ever asking them to come.

The Queen of Wands is charisma without visible effort. Sunflowers turn to follow the light; she is surrounded by them and by lions, and she is not doing anything to earn either. What she has is not authority but pull, and she did not organise it.

The staff in her hand is the same living wood as everything else in the suit, and she is the only figure holding one who is completely still.

The cat is looking at you too

She faces out. The cat faces out. They are the only two things in the card with their eyes on the viewer, and the cat is placed directly below her, black against the yellow, unmissable.

That doubling is the card's second half. She is entirely at ease being looked at — crown, sunflower, throne, all of it arranged front-on with no self-consciousness anywhere. And there is something at her feet that is equally comfortable, equally direct, and not in the least dependent on being liked.

Cats do not perform. Whatever she is offering, the animal at the base of the picture is proof that she does not need it taken, and that self-sufficiency is what makes the warmth safe to approach. Warmth that needs you is not warmth.

Reversed

The warmth turned defensive. Confidence propped up by attention rather than producing it, needing to be topped up, and topping up more frequently than it used to.

Generosity can also start keeping score. Still given freely to look at, no longer freely in fact, with a running total kept somewhere the recipient cannot see and would be startled to find.

As a person

Somebody whose presence is the point. Not necessarily loud — the card is frequently read as extroversion and it is about presence, which many quiet people have and a good many loud ones do not.

An older tradition read jealousy into this queen. That belongs to the reversed card, and importing it upright makes a generous figure suspect for no reason the picture supports.

In a reading

Where a spread asks what to do: take up the space instead of shrinking to fit the room, which is uncomfortable counsel and usually correct when this card is the one giving it.

With the King the pair divides pull from direction. Among cups the warmth becomes explicitly emotional and rather less self-sufficient.