In divination
A card of many significances, and some of the readings cannot be harmonized. I set aside that which connects it with honour and good faith. The chief meaning is oppression simply, but it is also fortune, gain, any kind of success, and then it is the oppression of these things. It is also a card of false-seeming, disguise, perfidy. The place which the figure is approaching may suffer from the rods that he carries. Success is stultified if the Nine of Swords follows, and if it is a question of a lawsuit, there will be certain loss.
Reversed: Contrarieties, difficulties, intrigues, and their analogies.
The library's note
The suit's pip sequence ends not in triumph but in load, a man bent under all ten staves he carries himself, no enemy or contest left in the frame, only the accumulated weight of what earlier cards built. Waite calls the readings for this card impossible to fully reconcile: oppression simply, but also "fortune, gain, any kind of success, and then it is the oppression of these things." Wands, a suit Waite ties to life and animation throughout, closes its numbered run on exhaustion rather than the vigor it opened with.