MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Nine of Swords
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Despair and Cruelty
UPRIGHT
Anxiety, worry, sleepless nights.
REVERSED
Hope returning, reaching out, facing fears.
The card
The Nine of Swords is the ninth card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Despair and Cruelty and gave it Mars in Gemini, the decan of 10°–20° Gemini, which the Sun passes through each year from about 31 May to 10 June.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Nine 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:
One seated on her couch in lamentation, with the swords over her. She is as one who knows no sorrow which is like unto hers. It is a card of utter desolation. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Death, failure, miscarriage, delay, deception, disappointment, despair. REVERSED Imprisonment, suspicion, doubt, reasonable fear, shame.
FURTHER MEANINGS An ecclesiastic, a priest; generally, a card of bad omen. REVERSED Good ground for suspicion against a doubtful person.
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: Nine 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 Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- 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.