6 of Swords

The Six of Swords belongs to a suit that came to Italy with playing cards themselves. Cards reached Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, whose suits included swords, cups, coins and polo sticks. The earliest European mentions date from the 1370s. In Italy the suits settled as cups, coins, batons and swords (spade).

In decks of this kind a numbered card is normally a pip card: the sword symbol repeated six times in an arrangement, with no scene. That is the form most early tarot decks gave the Six of Swords too, and it is the sense of a plain, countable card rather than a picture with a story.

The Sola Busca deck, made in Venice in the late 15th century (about 1490 to 1491), is the earliest known tarot deck in which every suit card is illustrated, including the numbered ones. It is one of the few older decks that put figures and scenes on pip cards, and it is the main older precedent for the illustrated numbered cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

In the 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for Arthur Edward Waite, the Six of Swords shows a ferryman poling a small boat with passengers across water, with six swords standing upright in the boat. Like every numbered card in that deck, it carries a scene instead of simple repeated symbols.

Waite and Smith probably knew photographs of the Sola Busca cards, which were given to the British Museum in 1907, and some scholars think Smith drew on that deck for her minor cards. The comparisons usually cited are other cards, such as the Ten of Swords and the Three of Swords, so this particular scene should be treated as Smith’s own arrangement unless a source shows otherwise.