King of Swords: Tarot Meaning and Fire of Air

What is in the picture

Pamela Colman Smith drew the King of Swords as a king facing forward on a throne carved with butterflies and a crescent, his sword tilted slightly in his right hand. Court cards had figures on them long before 1909, so this one is less of a departure than her pip cards, but the detail is still doing work. What a court card is holding, and whether its mount is moving or standing still, is most of the reading.

The King of Swords upright

The decision made on principle rather than on preference, including when the principle costs you.

Swords are the thinking suit, and the most uncomfortable of the four. They are about what is being said, decided or avoided rather than what is being felt. The question the card puts to you: what the fair rule here would be if it applied to everybody.

The King of Swords reversed

Harshness, or rules applied to people they were not written for.

Readers disagree about how reversals work, and the disagreement is not minor: the four common methods give four different answers for the same card. Any page that gives you one reversed meaning and does not mention this is simplifying.

The astrology on this card

Court cards are handled differently. The King of Swords is Fire of Air, meaning the suit's element coloured by a second one, and it is given a thirty-degree span straddling two signs: from 21 degrees of Taurus to 20 degrees of Gemini. The practical consequence is that a court card is read as a person, or as a way of behaving, rather than as an event. Gemini is the sign it mostly sits in, so Gemini as a rising sign is the closest single article to this card.

This is the part that almost no tarot page prints, and it is the part that makes the deck make sense. The seventy-eight cards are not seventy-eight separate ideas. They are four elements, ten numbers, four court ranks and twenty-two Majors, laid over the zodiac in a fixed order. Once you can see the structure you stop needing to memorise anything.

The suit of Swords

Swords are the thinking suit, and the most uncomfortable of the four. They are about what is being said, decided or avoided rather than what is being felt. Swords are the Air suit and they govern thought, words, conflict and truth. The suit's three signs are Libra, Aquarius, Gemini, in that order: cardinal, fixed, mutable. The Twos, Threes and Fours sit in the first of those, the Fives, Sixes and Sevens in the second, the Eights, Nines and Tens in the third. That is the whole system for the pip cards.

What the King of Swords is often confused with

Justice. Justice is the verdict itself. The King is the person handing it down.

Where these meanings come from

Worth knowing, because most pages present card meanings as though they were handed down from antiquity. Playing cards reached Europe in the fourteenth century and the earliest surviving tarot decks were painted in northern Italy in the fifteenth, as a card game. For roughly three hundred years that is all they were. Divination with them is first clearly documented in the late eighteenth century, in France.

The meanings in use today in English are almost entirely the Rider deck's. It was published in London in 1909: Arthur Edward Waite wrote the scheme, Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, and she was paid a flat fee and went uncredited on the box for most of a century. Her decision to give every pip card a scene rather than a plain arrangement of symbols is the single reason modern tarot works the way it does, because a picture can be read by somebody who has memorised nothing.

Both of them were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which is where the astrological attributions on this page come from. Those are a genuine system with internal logic, and they are a little over a century old rather than ancient. Saying so costs nothing and it is the difference between a page you can trust on the rest of the detail and a page you cannot.

Using the King of Swords in an actual reading

1. Read the position before the card. The same card in a "what is blocking this" position and a "what helps" position is not making the same statement.
2. Describe the picture out loud before reaching for a meaning. Pamela Colman Smith put the information in the image. What the figures are doing is usually the reading.
3. Check the suits around it. This card among four Swords is a different message from the same card among four Cups.
4. Ask what the card asks rather than what it predicts. Tarot is far better at describing a situation you are already in than at naming a date.

If you want something built from your own chart

The deck is the same deck for everybody who picks it up, which is both the appeal and the limit. A birth chart is not shared with anybody: it needs your date, your time and your place. If you do not know your birth time, this covers how to find it.