Ace of Swords

The Ace of Swords belongs to the suit of swords (Italian spade), one of the four suits of the Italian-suited pack that tarot grew from in northern Italy in the fifteenth century. In Italian-suited decks the number cards are not scenes. The swords are drawn as abstract curved lines that form a shape something like a mandorla, and on odd-numbered cards a single fully drawn sword is set inside those lines. The ace, being odd, follows that pattern in the Tarot of Marseilles tradition.

The earliest surviving Marseilles-pattern cards date from 1639 (Philippe Vachier, Marseille); the name “Marseilles” itself was coined by Romain Merlin in 1856. One later Italian deck stands apart: the Sola Busca, engraved around 1490 and painted in 1491, probably in Venice, shows a picture on every card, including the number cards.

In the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for A. E. Waite, the ace is a picture instead of a sword among curved lines. Waite’s book describes a hand coming out of a cloud and gripping a sword, the point of which is encircled by a crown.

The image does not appear to come from the Sola Busca deck. Smith probably saw photographs of that deck at the British Museum, and the clearly documented borrowings are other cards, such as the Three of Swords and the Ten of Wands. A hand from clouds holding a sword that supports a crown was already described by the Golden Dawn in 1888, and the Rider-Waite card follows that tradition, though Smith’s drawings often differ a good deal from the older descriptions.