MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Five of Swords
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Defeat
UPRIGHT
Conflict, hollow victory, winning at a cost.
REVERSED
Reconciliation, making amends, past resentment.
The card
The Five of Swords is the fifth card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Defeat and gave it Venus in Aquarius, the decan of 0°–10° Aquarius, which the Sun passes through each year from about 20 to 29 January.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Five 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 disdainful man looks after two retreating and dejected figures. Their swords lie upon the ground. He carries two others on his left shoulder, and a third sword is in his right hand, point to earth. He is the master in possession of the field. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Degradation, destruction, revocation, infamy, dishonour, loss, with the variants and analogues of these. REVERSED The same; burial and obsequies.
FURTHER MEANINGS An attack on the fortune of the Querent. REVERSED A sign of sorrow and mourning.
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: Five 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
- Liber E and the Magical Record · 15 min
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
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.