MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Six of Swords
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Earned Success
UPRIGHT
Transition, moving on, calmer waters ahead.
REVERSED
Resistance to change, unfinished business, turbulence.
The card
The Six of Swords is the sixth card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Earned Success and gave it Mercury in Aquarius, the decan of 10°–20° Aquarius, which the Sun passes through each year from about 29 January to 8 February.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Six 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 ferryman carrying passengers in his punt to the further shore. The course is smooth, and seeing that the freight is light, it may be noted that the work is not beyond his strength. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Journey by water, route, way, envoy, commissionary, expedient. REVERSED Declaration, confession, publicity; one account says that it is a proposal of love.
FURTHER MEANINGS The voyage will be pleasant. REVERSED Unfavourable issue of 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: Six 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.