The Suit of Swords

What Swords govern

Swords are the mind at work: analysis, argument, decision, and the damage each can do. This is the bluntest suit in the deck, and the one most often misread as simply unlucky. A Swords card usually describes something being understood, said or decided - not something happening to you.

The shadow of the suit

Air cuts in both directions. The suit holds the deck's hardest images - the Three, the Nine, the Ten - and they tend to be about thought turned against itself: rumination, catastrophising, a conclusion reached at three in the morning and mistaken for a fact.

The signs it carries

Swords correspond to the air signs — Libra, Aquarius and Gemini. The suit's Two through Ten map onto the decans of those three signs, which is how a sword card can be placed against a date as well as a theme.

Ace to Ten in Swords

The Ace is clarity arriving, usually unwelcome. The Two is a decision refused, blindfolded and balanced. The Three is the deck's plainest image of grief and the Four is the recovery that has to follow it. The Five is a victory that costs the winner something, the Six a passage away from trouble rather than towards anything. The Seven takes what it can carry, the Eight is a restraint that is looser than it looks, the Nine is three in the morning, and the Ten is the bottom - which in this suit is traditionally where it stops getting worse.

How this suit gets misread

Swords are the most fatalistically read suit in the deck, and the reading is usually too literal. The Nine is not prophecy; it is anxiety, and the tradition is fairly clear that the swords are on the wall rather than in the figure. The Eight is bound loosely with her feet free. Read as mental states rather than as events, the suit becomes far more useful and considerably less alarming.

Reading the court

The Swords court runs sharp, articulate and detached. Page, Knight, Queen and King each take Air and handle it differently — the Knight at full tilt, the Queen holding it, the King directing it outward.

All fourteen Swords cards

Ace of Swords Two of Swords Three of Swords Four of Swords Five of Swords Six of Swords Seven of Swords Eight of Swords Nine of Swords Ten of Swords Page of Swords Knight of Swords Queen of Swords King of Swords

The Swords decans

The Two through Ten of Swords map onto the nine decans of Libra, Aquarius, Gemini — each a ten-degree slice of the zodiac with its own planetary ruler, its own stretch of the calendar, and the Golden Dawn title the pip inherits from it.