Nine of Swords
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as anxiety and sleepless worry: the fears that grow loudest at night. Waite named it despair and suspicion.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as hope returning, reaching out for help, or seeing the worry in proportion.
A question to sit with
What thought keeps you up at night? Would it look the same if you said it out loud to someone you trust?
The deeper reading
Traditionally the mind turned against itself in the dark.
What is drawn on the card
A woman sits up in bed with her face in her hands. Nine swords hang in a row on the black wall, and her quilt is patterned with roses and astrological signs.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): One seated on her couch in lamentation, with the swords over her; a card of utter desolation.
- 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
Nine 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.