MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
King of Swords
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Intellectual authority, truth, fair judgement.
REVERSED
Abuse of power, manipulation, cold judgement.
The card
The King of Swords is one of the four court cards of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
In the Golden Dawn's scheme each court card is an element within its suit's element: the King of Swords is Fire of Air.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Knight of Swords. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the King.
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:
He sits in judgment, holding the unsheathed sign of his suit. He recalls, of course, the conventional Symbol of Justice in the Trumps Major, and he may represent this virtue, but he is rather the power of life and death, in virtue of his office. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Whatsoever arises out of the idea of judgment and all its connexions—power, command, authority, militant intelligence, law, offices of the crown, and so forth. REVERSED Cruelty, perversity, barbarity, perfidy, evil intention.
FURTHER MEANINGS A lawyer, senator, doctor. REVERSED A bad man; also a caution to put an end to a ruinous lawsuit.
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: Roi (the king) of Épées (swords).
Learn more in the lessons
- Reading the Court Cards · 16 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.