Five of Wands Tarot Card Meaning: The Creative Struggle
September 30, 2025The peaceful celebration of the Four of Wands is over, and now it's time to face the facts. The Five of Wands is where ideas, goals, and people compete.
This card isn't about battle that destroys; it's about the essential, often chaotic, friction that comes from working together and competing.
Five Wands: When Conflict Becomes a Spark
Creativity and the ability to compete in a healthy way are qualities that always come in handy. Healthy competition is when people with different views or skills compete with each other, leading to new ideas, better outcomes, and stronger results for everyone.
The major ideas behind the Five of Wands are:
- creative conflict — the inevitable tension that comes from bringing together people with diverse points of view, backgrounds, and ways of doing things
- finding your place — the hard part of figuring out where you fit in and getting your voice heard in a group
- minor problems and tests — no life-threatening emergencies, just a bunch of tiny problems that test your expertise, patience, and ability to work with others
In short, the Five of Wands says that not all conflict is bad. In fact, it can be inspiring.
The Image Shows It All: A Controlled Chaos Scene
The illustration of the Five of Wands card from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck is a perfect example of how to tell a tale with symbols. It looks like a straight-up fight at first, but if you look closer, you can see that it's a more complex scene of dynamic interplay.
A Group in Motion
Five people are standing on uneven ground, each holding a wand. They aren't standing in a straight line, but are actively engaged in interactions with each other. Their postures suggest movement, effort, and testing boundaries, rather than a desire to cause harm.
Wands Up, Not Striking
This is the most important detail. The wands are raised, but they are not being used as weapons to hit each other's bodies. The energy is directed upward, into the space between them. This shows that the argument mainly concerns ideas or skills, and physical fight is rather out of question.
Uneven Ground
The figures are not standing on level ground. The rocky, uneven surface beneath their feet symbolizes the difficult and unstable conditions of competition. Everyone is trying to find a way to succeed, convince others of their point of view, and defeat their opponents.
Different Kinds of Clothing
The figures are dressed in different outfits, showing that they come from different backgrounds or represent different points of view, goals, or ways of solving the same problem. This diversity is the cause of the dispute, but at the same time makes a rich, collaborative solution possible.
The table summarises the symbolism of the Five of Wands card from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
Symbolism of the 5 of Wands Card (RWS Deck)
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Five Figures | Multiple competing interests, perspectives, or approaches; 5 as a number of variety, change and also imitation. |
| Wands Not Striking | The conflict is about ideas; no intention of physical harm. |
| Uneven Ground | An unstable, challenging environment; a lack of common footing. |
| Varied Clothing | Different backgrounds, agendas, or methods. |
| Upward-Angled Wands | Energy directed toward growth, achievement, and testing limits. |
Career and Work: The Battlefield of Ideas
In the context of a professional career, Five of Wands can sometimes be quite productive energy.
How a Competitive Workplace Works
This card nicely shows the excitement of a startup where heated arguments lead to new ideas, or a sales staff that is healthily competing for the top spot. It might stand for brainstorming meetings, pitching competitions, or any other situation where ideas come together to make something better. The key is to focus the energy on a common goal.
When Competition Gets Bad
When this rivalry doesn't have clear rules or leaders, it might turn into office politics, fights over territory, or continual conflicts that make it hard to move forward. The goal is to find common ground and ensure that everyone knows what they want to achieve as a result of the conflict so that it stays productive.
Love and Relationships: The Dance of Differences
The Five of Wands signifies that you and your partner are in a phase of working through your disagreements.
Couples: The Arguments That Are Needed
This card can stand for those unavoidable arguments regarding money, life objectives, or everyday routines. These fights are about negotiating and reaching a new, long-term balance, unlike the destructive conflict of the Five of Swords. It's the process of bringing two people's lives together into a partnership, which will naturally cause some problems.
Singles: Tough Dating
For people who are dating, it might be like the modern dating scenario, where you have to juggle a lot of discussions, feel like you're competing for attention, or figure out what someone really wants. It helps you stay true to yourself and your beliefs in the middle of all the noise.
Health: Choosing an Approach
The Five of Wands often comes up while you're trying to figure out what to do with conflicting facts about your health.
Conflicting Advice
You may be torn between different diets, training programs, or medical opinions. This card tells you to be your own advocate and try out several methods to find out what works best for your body, instead of being confused by all the choices.
The Stress of Internal Conflict
The "battle" can also be inside your head, like when you have too many things to do at once that stress you out or when your mind is too busy and your body is tense. To calm the chaos inside, you need to make your daily life more structured and clear.
Spiritual Meaning: Confronting Different Beliefs
This card means a time of questioning and testing your beliefs on a spiritual level.
You may be struggling with diverse spiritual doctrines or having disputes that ultimately make your beliefs stronger. This spiritual "wrestling" helps you move past views you got from others and develop a faith that is completely your own.
The Shadow Side: When the Card Reverses
A reversed Five of Wands means that the healthy competition has turned into something bad.
Avoiding Conflict
The conflict could go underground, causing people to act passive-aggressively, give each other the silent treatment, or leave tensions unresolved that grow beneath a facade of fake unity. This avoidance stops anything from being really solved.
Fighting Dirty
Instead, the competition might turn into a nasty struggle where people would do whatever to win, even if it means lying, gossiping, or manipulating others (like the spirit of the Five of Swords). The productive friction is gone, and now there is a drive to dominate.
Meaning of the 5 of Wands Card in the Upright and Reversed Positions: The Nature of the Struggle
| Life Area | Upright (Productive Friction) | Reversed (Unneeded Conflict) |
|---|---|---|
| Career & Money | Healthy competition, brainstorming, skill-testing. | Office politics, toxic rivalry, lack of direction. |
| Love & Relationships | Working through differences, passionate debates. | Passive-aggression, nasty arguments, mind games. |
| Health & Wellness | Trying different approaches, finding what works. | Conflicting advice, stress-related symptoms, chaos. |
| Spirituality | Questioning beliefs, spiritual debates. | Crisis of faith, avoidance. |
To Sum Up
The Five of Wands warns us that growth doesn't always go smoothly. It is through the collision of ideas, fierce competition, and the challenges of collaboration that we innovate, strengthen our resolve, and build something more lasting than we could ever achieve alone. The goal is not to get rid of conflict, but to use its energy in a useful way.
Does what you have read sound familiar? Do similar patterns occur in your life? Get a free tarot reading at tarotonline.app to learn how to turn this competitive energy into a breakthrough.
