MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Ten of Swords
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Ruin
UPRIGHT
Painful ending, rock bottom, nowhere to go but up.
REVERSED
Recovery, regeneration, resisting an inevitable end.
The card
The Ten of Swords is the tenth card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Ruin and gave it Sun in Gemini, the decan of 20°–30° Gemini, which the Sun passes through each year from about 10 to 21 June.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Ten 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 prostrate figure, pierced by all the swords belonging to the card. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Whatsoever is intimated by the design; also pain, affliction, tears, sadness, desolation. It is not especially a card of violent death. REVERSED Advantage, profit, success, favour, but none of these are permanent; also power and authority.
FURTHER MEANINGS Followed by Ace and King, imprisonment; for girl or wife, treason on the part of friends. REVERSED Victory and consequent fortune for a soldier in war.
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: Ten 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 Thoth Tarot · 12 min
- Liber E and the Magical Record · 15 min
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 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.