MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Three of Swords
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Sorrow
UPRIGHT
Heartbreak, grief, painful truth.
REVERSED
Recovery, forgiveness, releasing pain.
The card
The Three of Swords is the third card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Sorrow and gave it Saturn in Libra, the decan of 10°–20° Libra, which the Sun passes through each year from about 3 to 13 October.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Three 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:
Three swords piercing a heart; cloud and rain behind. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Removal, absence, delay, division, rupture, dispersion, and all that the design signifies naturally, being too simple and obvious to call for specific enumeration. REVERSED Mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.
FURTHER MEANINGS For a woman, the flight of her lover. REVERSED A meeting with one whom the Querent has compromised; also a nun.
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: Three 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.