Queen of Swords

The Queen of Swords belongs to a suit with a long pedigree. Playing cards reached Europe from the Mamluk lands of Egypt, probably in the 14th century, and the earliest European mention is a Catalan rhyme dictionary of 1371. The Mamluk suits included cups, coins, swords and polo sticks. Europeans did not know polo, so the sticks became batons or cudgels. The Italian and Spanish packs kept these “Latin” suits, and tarot kept them too.

Queens are the unusual rank. The Mamluk court cards were a king and two deputies, and early European packs changed these to a king and two marshals. Italian and Iberian packs then replaced the marshals with a knight and a knave. Queens turned up now and then in packs from 1377, especially in German-speaking lands, but they were not a fixed part of the Italian pattern. Tarot is Italian in origin and has four court cards per suit, so the queen is a feature of tarot itself.

Tarot cards were first made for card games, not for divination. The best-known early illustrated example for this card is the Sola Busca deck, engraved in Italy in the late 15th century (a complete hand-coloured copy is dated to Venice, 1491). Its courts are Knave, Knight, Queen and King, and many are named; its Queen of Swords is labelled “Olinpia”, identified as Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, a woman the page describes as known as a sorceress. This is one deck, not a rule for all early decks.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for Arthur Edward Waite and published in 1909. Some scholars think Smith drew on the Sola Busca deck for the numbered cards of the minor arcana, since photographs of it reached the British Museum in 1907 and she probably saw them there. The sources found do not say whether the Sola Busca queen served as a model for her Queen of Swords.

In Waite’s 1911 book, as summarised on a sacred-texts mirror, the queen holds her sword upright in her hand with the hilt resting on the arm of her chair, and her other hand is extended. Waite describes her look as severe but chastened, suggesting someone who knows sorrow, and says she is not a figure of mercy and hardly a symbol of power despite the sword. Modern commentary also notes butterflies on her crown as a symbol of air, the element commonly given to all the swords.