The Open Athenaeum

✶ The Study Deck

Ace of Swords

Swords, of the lesser arcana

Waite & Colman Smith, 1909 · described 1911

A hand issues from a cloud, grasping a sword, the point of which is encircled by a crown.

the plate, in waite's words · the painted card will hang here in time

In divination

Triumph, the excessive degree in everything, conquest, triumph of force. It is a card of great force, in love as well as in hatred. The crown may carry a much higher significance than comes usually within the sphere of fortune-telling.

Reversed: The same, but the results are disastrous; another account says—conception, childbirth, augmentation, multiplicity.

The library's note

A hand from the cloud grasps a sword whose point wears a crown, the suit's plainest image made strange by that single detail. Waite reads the crowned blade as force at its most concentrated, "triumph, the excessive degree in everything," and adds that the crown itself "may carry a much higher significance than comes usually within the sphere of fortune-telling." Swords begins, unlike cups or wands, at an extremity rather than an origin, a suit Waite elsewhere flags outright as "not symbolical of beneficent forces in human affairs," opening on its own most intense note.

a young page · the keeper's voice pass on the note is still to come

Doors Onward

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Waite, A. E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Card text quoted verbatim, his punctuation kept. (Public domain.)
  2. Card described at: http://sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktswac.htm

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