7 of Swords

The Seven of Swords belongs to a suit that tarot took from ordinary Italian playing cards. The Latin suits of coins, cups, swords and batons are described as adopted from cards that reached Europe from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s. Tarot, with its extra set of trump cards, appeared in northern Italy in the 15th century.

Early numbered cards of this kind were normally plain pips: the suit symbol repeated as many times as the number, with no scene. One popular tarot site describes the Visconti-Sforza Seven of Swords (made around 1450) as seven curved blades in a symmetrical interlaced pattern with no figure, and says the Tarot de Marseille kept the card non-scenic. That page is not scholarship and gives no firm references for the Marseille card, so treat the detail as approximate.

The first tarot deck known to illustrate every pip card is the Sola Busca, engraved around 1490 and hand-painted in 1491, probably in Venice, by an unknown artist. In 1907 photographs of all its 78 cards were given to the British Museum.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck was published in London by William Rider & Son in December 1909. A. E. Waite directed it and Pamela Colman Smith painted it. Unlike most earlier decks, its numbered Minor Arcana cards are small scenes, and some scholars think Smith took the idea from the Sola Busca photographs, which she and Waite probably saw at the British Museum.

For the Seven of Swords, Smith drew a man walking away with a bundle of swords, glancing back, with a camp close by. One tarot site calls this thief scene her own invention, unrelated to the older plain-pip version. That claim comes from a popular page rather than a scholarly source.