Knight of Swords
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as fast, decisive action driven by conviction: charging toward a goal. Waite tied it to skill, bravery, and capacity.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as recklessness, aggression, or rushing in without thinking it through.
A question to sit with
Where is speed serving you, and where is it skipping steps? Who might you run over on the way?
The deeper reading
Readers see here the mind in full flight, focused on a single target.
What is drawn on the card
A knight charges at full gallop on a white horse, sword raised high. Trees bend in the wind and clouds tear across the sky behind him.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A knight riding in full course, as if scattering his enemies; Waite calls him a prototypical hero of romantic chivalry, almost Galahad.
- Suit
- Swords
- Element
- Air
- Domain
- Mind, conflict, truth, communication
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Knight of Swords is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.