The suit of Swords

Swords are the suit of air, the element of thought, speech and judgement. A sword divides: it cuts a question into its parts, separates truth from falsehood and decides between two things. The suit carries all the power of a clear mind and all the damage a mind can do, and Smith draws its skies accordingly, from the pale blue moonlit sky of the Two to the black night of the Nine and Ten.

In a reading Swords speak about decisions, arguments, communication, principles, anxiety and the stories we tell ourselves. They are often the hardest suit to receive, because so many of its cards show distress: a pierced heart, a figure bound and blindfolded, a sleeper sitting up in the dark. Because the suit is about the mind, the suffering it shows is often suffering of interpretation, the worry or conflict that thought creates and that thought can also undo.

The numbered cards trace an idea from its first clarity to its exhaustion. The Ace is a single upright sword crowned and wreathed, truth in its sharpest form. The Two refuses to choose, the Three takes a wound, the Four withdraws to rest. The Five wins a quarrel and loses the people, and the Six moves quietly across water to a new shore. The Seven acts by stealth, the Eight is trapped by its own perceptions, the Nine lies awake, and the Ten is the end of the story, a figure struck down beneath a sky that is just beginning to lighten. The courts are minds at work: the alert and watchful Page, the Knight who charges headlong, the Queen of honest discernment and the King who sits in judgement.