Swords · minor arcana
Four of Swords
One of the fourteen swords. Drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the deck first published in London in December 1909.
What is drawn on it
The effigy of a knight in the attitude of prayer, at full length upon his tomb.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, Part III, § 2, where the meanings below follow it in the same paragraph.
What Waite says it means
These are the divinatory meanings printed in 1911, quoted as he wrote them. They are reported here as what one named book says, not as a claim that a card means anything or predicts anything.
- Upright
- Vigilance, retreat, solitude, hermit's repose, exile, tomb and coffin. It is these last that have suggested the design.
- Reversed
- Wise administration, circumspection, economy, avarice, precaution, testament.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, London, 1911, Part III, § 2. Out of copyright.
Its suit
Swords is one of the four suits of the minor arcana. The Golden Dawn attributed it to air, and in the tradition Waite worked in it is taken to cover thought, conflict and the trouble thinking brings. Its counterpart in an ordinary playing-card pack is spades: the two packs share an ancestor, rather than one descending from the other.
The swords
Read on
Card face: Pamela Colman Smith, from the first printing published by William Rider & Son. Public domain. Source file. Full list on the credits page.
