MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Ace of Swords
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Breakthrough, clarity, truth cutting through.
REVERSED
Confusion, chaos, misused power of the mind.
The card
The Ace of Swords is the first card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
As the ace it is the root of its element: the Golden Dawn called it the Root of the Powers of Air.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Ace of Swords, with the title and the zodiac decan from the Golden Dawn, as shown above.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
A hand issues from a cloud, grasping a sword, the point of which is encircled by a crown. DIVINATORY MEANINGS 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.
FURTHER MEANINGS Great prosperity or great misery. REVERSED Marriage broken off, for a woman, through her own imprudence.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part III §§ 2 and 4. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The same card in the other suits
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Ace of Épées (swords). The numbered cards carry no scene, only the suit's symbols arranged as on a playing card, so they are read from the number and the pattern.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- Reading the Cards · 16 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.