Page of Swords
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as a curious, alert mind: someone eager to learn, ask questions, and speak up. Waite associated it with vigilance and watching.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as gossip, all talk and no action, or sharpness without wisdom.
A question to sit with
What question have you been afraid to ask? Who could you learn from by listening more than talking?
The deeper reading
Traditionally the young side of air: the mind newly awake to its own power.
What is drawn on the card
A young figure stands on uneven ground holding a sword upright, glancing over one shoulder. Wind sweeps the clouds and trees behind, and birds fly overhead.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A lithe, active figure holds a sword upright in both hands while walking swiftly over rugged land, the clouds collocated wildly about his way, looking this way and that as if an enemy might appear.
- 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
Page 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.