9 of Swords

  • Arcana Minor
  • Suit Swords
  • Figure on this site The sleepless seer
Historical evidence

In the earliest decks

Swords are one of the four suits of the Italian playing-card pack, from which the tarot deck grew in 15th-century northern Italy. The usual account is that playing cards reached Europe from Mamluk Egypt in the later 14th century. Mamluk packs used suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks, and Italian makers kept the first three and turned the polo sticks into batons.

In the Visconti-Sforza deck, made in Milan around the middle of the 15th century, a full pack had ten numbered cards and four court cards in each of the four suits. The Morgan Library notes that the swords there are straight and run diagonally across the card in a lattice pattern. Most numbered cards in early decks showed such pips, not scenes, so a ninth of swords of this period is nine swords arranged on the card and nothing more.

The first known tarot deck with a picture on every numbered card is the Sola Busca, engraved in the late 15th century, probably in Venice around 1491. Its cards carry Arabic numerals on the suit cards.

Historical evidence

The Rider-Waite-Smith card

The Rider-Waite-Smith Nine of Swords was painted by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 for A. E. Waite. It shows a woman seated on a couch in grief, with swords hanging above her, and Waite’s book describes the card as one of utter desolation. Older decks showed only the nine swords, as in the Visconti-Sforza pack, so the scene is a feature of Smith’s deck.

Smith’s numbered cards each carry a scene, as the Sola Busca cards of the late 15th century do. Photographs of the Sola Busca deck were given to the British Museum in 1907, and some scholars suggest she drew on it for certain cards.

Myth and literature · Context

Later meanings

Italian players of the 15th century used the suits only as parts of a card game. Meanings for them came later. French and English occultists of the 18th and 19th centuries tied the suit of swords to the spades of the ordinary French pack, as Etteilla and S. L. MacGregor Mathers did, and later writers tied it to the element of air, to the intellect and to sorrow or misfortune. These are attributions made by occultists long after the cards were designed.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the meaning used for readings here. Using the tarot to divine is a modern practice, and the Norse figure shown for each card is this site’s own association; the tarot began as an Italian card game. A short history is on the Tarot page.

Upright

Keywords: anguish, sleeplessness, catastrophic thinking, suffering disproportionate to the threat

The figure wakes at the worst hour, surrounded by swords that may or may not be as numerous or as sharp as they look in the dark. This card is real anguish: sleeplessness, dread, catastrophic thinking that runs ahead of the evidence and won't let you rest. It doesn't pretend the suffering is minor or nearly over. It just is what it is right now, and it's worth taking seriously rather than explaining away.

In general: Real anguish or dread is present right now, possibly disproportionate to the actual danger, but the suffering itself isn't fake. It deserves acknowledgment, not minimizing.

In love: Lying awake with worst-case fears about the relationship that feel completely real at 3am, whether or not they hold up in daylight.

In work: Anxiety about a work situation that's escalated past what the actual facts support, but doesn't feel any less real for that.

Reversed

Keywords: anxiety easing, perspective returning, dread loosening, daylight versus 3am

Morning eventually comes, even after the worst night, and the swords look different in daylight than they did at 3am. This card is the anxiety beginning to loosen its grip, not gone, but no longer running the whole show. If you're starting to see the actual size of the thing rather than the dread-sized version of it, that shift is real and worth trusting.

In general: The dread is starting to loosen its grip on the actual facts. Trust the daylight version a little more than the 3am one.

In love: The worst-case fear about the relationship starting to feel less totalizing, even if it hasn't fully resolved yet.

In work: Anxiety about a work problem beginning to recalibrate against the actual facts, rather than running purely on dread.

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