5 of Swords

The suit of swords comes from the Latin-suited playing cards of southern Europe, the family that also includes Italian and Spanish packs. The five of swords is a numbered card, and in the Italian-suited tradition numbered cards were not illustrated scenes. They were pips: a count of swords, sometimes with decoration.

In the Tarot de Marseille pattern, the sword pips are drawn as curved abstract lines that form a shape something like a mandorla. The odd-numbered cards, the five among them, add one fully drawn sword inside that design. The earliest surviving Marseille-pattern cards were made by Philippe Vachier in 1639, and other well-known makers include Jean Dodal in Lyon (about 1701 to 1715) and Nicolas Conver (about 1760). So the Marseille five of swords is a pattern of curves and one sword, with no figures and no story.

The exception among early decks is the Sola Busca, engraved in northern Italy around 1490 and painted by hand, probably in Venice around 1491. It is the earliest known tarot in which every suit card carries a picture, and it uses Arabic numerals on the pips. The artist is not known. Its suits are cups, coins, batons and swords.

The familiar scene of the five of swords comes from the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew for A. E. Waite, published in 1909. A man stands in the foreground holding swords, two more lie on the ground, and two figures walk away under a stormy sky. Older Marseille-style cards showed only the sword pattern, so the figures and the setting are a new kind of picture for this card.

Smith may have had a model for the idea of illustrating every pip. Black-and-white photographs of all 78 Sola Busca cards were given to the British Museum in 1907, and Waite and Smith probably saw them there. Some scholars think she drew on that deck for the minor arcana, and examples usually named are the three of swords and the ten of wands.