MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Seven of Swords
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Unstable Effort
UPRIGHT
Strategy, stealth, getting away with something.
REVERSED
Coming clean, conscience, being caught out.
The card
The Seven of Swords is the seventh card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Unstable Effort and gave it Moon in Aquarius, the decan of 20°–30° Aquarius, which the Sun passes through each year from about 8 to 18 February.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Seven 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 man in the act of carrying away five swords rapidly; the two others of the card remain stuck in the ground. A camp is close at hand. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Design, attempt, wish, hope, confidence; also quarrelling, a plan that may fail, annoyance. The design is uncertain in its import, because the significations are widely at variance with each other. REVERSED Good advice, counsel, instruction, slander, babbling.
FURTHER MEANINGS Dark girl; a good card; it promises a country life after a competence has been secured. REVERSED Good advice, probably neglected.
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
Its trumps
The High Priestess: its planet, Moon · The Star: its sign, Aquarius
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: Seven 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.