The Six of Wands and Being Seen

Every Six in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck has other people in it. Lay the four of them side by side and you see it at once. In the Six of Cups, one child hands another a cup full of flowers. In the Six of Swords, a ferryman poles a woman and a child across the water. In the Six of Pentacles, a merchant weighs coins in a pair of scales and gives some to two people kneeling at his feet. In the Six of Wands, a rider moves through a crowd.

Each comes straight after a hard Five: the scuffle of the Five of Wands, the spilled cups of the Five of Cups, the bitter field of the Five of Swords, the snow of the Five of Pentacles. Many readers treat the Sixes as the suit catching its breath after that. We would add one thing. In every Six, the relief arrives through someone else. Something passes from one person to another: a gift, a crossing, a share of money, a welcome.

What fire adds

Wands is the suit of fire: will, ambition, the things you set out to do and do in public. So in this suit, what passes between people is recognition. The other Sixes are about being given something. The Six of Wands is about being seen.

That sounds like the easy one. We don't think it is. Plenty of people find it far easier to receive a cup of flowers, or a ride across the water, than to sit still while a crowd looks at them and says well done.

The rider and the footmen

A rider sits high on a white horse. A wreath of laurel rests on his head. In one hand he has a tall staff, and near its top a second wreath is tied, lifted above everyone like a green flag. The horse is draped in a long cloth, dressed for an occasion.

Lower in the picture are people on foot, seen mostly as heads and shoulders, close together. Five more staves rise from among them, upright, the same plain wood the rider carries. They are not watching from a balcony or a roadside. They are walking with him.

Waite's description is brief:

At his side. That is the Six in the card, the other people without whom there is no scene.

Waite also said the card could carry more than one story. On the surface, he wrote, it is a victor triumphing, "but it is also great news, such as might be carried in state by the King's courier; it is expectation crowned with its own desire, the crown of hope, and so forth." We like expectation crowned with its own desire more than any keyword for this card. It describes a hope carried for a long time that finally gets to wear its wreath, whether the rider won something or is only bringing the news.

And look at what is missing. No enemy kneels at the horse's feet. No treasure follows behind. The prize is a ring of leaves that will be dry in a week or two. Recognition, in this picture, is a moment and not a possession.

Letting the wreath stay on

Someone says it out loud, at work or in a family group chat or across a table: you did a really good job with that. Before the words have finished arriving, you are handing them back. Oh, it was nothing. I got lucky. Everyone else did the hard part. Later, on the walk home, you replay the sentence, a bit warm, a bit embarrassed, wishing you had let it stay.

The rider doesn't do that. He doesn't wave the wreath away or lean down to tell the crowd it was nothing. He sits up, crowned, and lets himself be looked at.

For a lot of people praise feels less like warmth than like exposure. A voice says that if anyone looks closely they will see the mistakes, the luck, the nights you nearly gave up, and decide you never deserved it. People call this feeling being an impostor, and it can visit some of the most careful and capable people in any room.

The first of Waite's reversed meanings fits it uncomfortably well: "Apprehension, fear, as of a victorious enemy at the gate". Turn the parade around and the same crowd at the gate becomes a threat. Whether it looks like welcome or danger can depend less on what happened than on how safe it feels to be seen.

Letting praise land doesn't mean believing you are flawless. It means allowing that someone saw something real. The wreath is for what you did, and it passes no verdict on everything you are. If you want to practice, try answering the next compliment with "thank you" and then stopping, and feel the urge to add but rise and fall away.

Walking in someone else's parade

Go back to the staves in the crowd. Read one way, these are the rider's companions, the ones who walked beside him through whatever came before this day. Read another, they are people with their own staves and their own work who have chosen, today, to walk in someone else's parade.

We find the second reading the braver one. Very little gets done alone, and celebrating someone else well is an art of its own. It means letting their moment be theirs without measuring it against yours, without the sting of why not me. Sometimes the sting comes anyway. You can feel it and still lift your staff. One way to lift it is to tell someone the actual thing they did well, not great job but the way they stayed calm on a difficult call, or the soup they brought over. Specific praise is easier to believe, for them and, in time, for you.

Wins with no crowd at all

Most achievements never get a parade. The Eight of Pentacles shows a craftsman at his bench, far from the town, hanging each finished coin on a post where no crowd gathers. Some of the things that cost us most are invisible from outside: a morning you got up when it was very hard, a phone call you finally made, a sharp reply you kept back.

Waite's meanings for Strength, the card of the woman and the lion, end with words you might expect to find on the Six of Wands instead: "also complete success and honours." Some honours are earned in public, on horseback. Others are earned with open hands, where nobody claps.

If nobody saw your hardest win, it was no less of a win. You may be the one person in a position to crown it. There is more on the Six of Wands, upright and reversed, on its card page.

The laurel will dry. The road runs on past the edge of the picture, and tomorrow the rider may be on foot again, carrying a staff like everyone else. Whatever you did, seen or unseen, it happened, and it was yours.