MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Knight of Swords
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Ambition, haste, charging ahead.
REVERSED
Recklessness, burnout, scattered thoughts.
The card
The Knight 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 Knight of Swords is Air of Air.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Prince of Swords. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the Knight.
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 is riding in full course, as if scattering his enemies. In the design he is really a prototypical hero of romantic chivalry. He might almost be Galahad, whose sword is swift and sure because he is clean of heart. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Skill, bravery, capacity, defence, address, enmity, wrath, war, destruction, opposition, resistance, ruin. There is therefore a sense in which the card signifies death, but it carries this meaning only in its proximity to other cards of fatality. REVERSED Imprudence, incapacity, extravagance.
FURTHER MEANINGS A soldier, man of arms, satellite, stipendiary; heroic action predicted for soldier. REVERSED Dispute with an imbecile person; for a woman, struggle with a rival, who will be conquered.
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: Cavalier (the knight) of Épées (swords).
Learn more in the lessons
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- Reading the Court Cards · 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.