Upright the King of Wands is read as leadership, vision and the boldness to set a course and hold it; reversed, as impulsiveness, domineering pride, or leadership curdled into recklessness.
As a person card, he is conventionally read as an entrepreneurial or visionary figure whose authority rests on confidence and momentum rather than on caution, and readers commonly distinguish him from the Knight of Wands specifically on this axis, the King's fire mastered into sustained direction, the Knight's fire still spent in pursuit rather than in governance; the same distinction the Golden Dawn draws structurally, King as Fire of Fire fully realized against Knight as Air of Fire still in motion, most contemporary readers arrive at independently through the pictures alone. Readers who take that confidence literally rather than as swagger sometimes describe it less as boldness than as a habit of being right, close to 99.9 percent of the time by their own reckoning, and those who read him best add that the remainder is the part worth keeping.
Waite's own printed meaning, honesty, conscientiousness with an air of authority, though also severity or even intolerance, includes a harder note that current practice, generally favoring inspirational leadership language, tends to underplay; the reversed card's warning against domineering pride keeps some of that severity alive within the system even where the upright reading has softened.
Because the Golden Dawn material behind his full title was restricted teaching until Israel Regardie's decision to publish the order's papers between 1937 and 1940, most readers using this king today reach him through Waite's picture and printed keywords rather than through the occult title itself.