Imaginalis

Minor Arcana, the Swords

Knight of Swords

The Knight of Swords was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 as the knight of the suit of swords in A. E. Waite's deck. A knight in armour charges to the left on a galloping white horse with his sword raised high, his red plume and cloak streaming behind him, while the wind tears at the clouds and bends the trees.

Knight of Swords: an armoured knight with a red plume and cloak charges on a white horse, sword raised, clouds and trees bent by the wind.123456789
Pamela Colman Smith, 1909. Pam-A printing, c. 1910. Scan: Wikimedia Commons. Full scan (JPEG)

What Waite wrote it means (1910)

Divinatory meanings

Skill, bravery, capacity, defence, address, enmity, wrath, war, destruction, opposition, resistance, ruin. There is therefore a sense in which the card signifies death, but it carries this meaning only in its proximity to other cards of fatality.

Reversed

Imprudence, incapacity, extravagance.

Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1911), p. 230. Read it in the chapter

He is riding in full course, as if scattering his enemies. In the design he is really a prototypical hero of romantic chivalry. He might almost be Galahad, whose sword is swift and sure because he is clean of heart.

Waite's description of the card, from the same book.

What's in the picture

  1. The raised sword. He holds the sword high in his right hand, the blade pointing up and forward, ahead of his body, his arm straight.
  2. The red plume. Long red feathers fly back from the top of his helmet, pulled straight out by the speed.
  3. His face. The visor is up, and his face looks straight ahead in the direction of the charge. His helmet is steel, with a round boss on the side.
  4. The red cloak. A red cloak streams behind him over the armour and the horse's back, with a large round plate of armour at his shoulder.
  5. The white horse. The horse gallops to the left with its front legs stretched out, mouth open and eyes wide. Its mane flies up like flames.
  6. The harness. The horse's breast strap is decorated with small yellow shapes like butterflies and red ones like birds, and a red heart hangs from the bridle.
  7. The torn clouds. Clouds stream across the sky in long ragged strips, all slanting the same way, behind the knight and above him. Small dark birds fly in the gap at the top right.
  8. The bent trees. On the left, thin dark trees lean hard in the wind, their tops pushed to one side.
  9. The ground. The horse's hooves barely touch a low mound of orange and yellow earth, and a strip of red ground runs off to the right. Waite: “He is riding in full course, as if scattering his enemies.”

The card in brief

In the deck
Card 62 of 78
Arcana
Minor Arcana, Swords
Number
Knight
Element (Golden Dawn)
Air
Title in Book T
The Lord of the Wind and the Breezes: the King of the Spirits of Air
Drawn by
Pamela Colman Smith
Planned by
Arthur Edward Waite
Published
London, William Rider & Son, 1909
Scan
Pam-A printing, c. 1910, Wikimedia Commons

In the old books

  • Book T (1912)

    A Winged Warrior with crowned Winged Helmet, mounted upon a brown steed. His general equipment is as that of the Knight of Wands, but he wears as a crest a winged six-pointed star, similar to those represented on the heads of Castor and Pollux the Dioscuri, the twins Gemini (a part of which constellation is included in his rule). He holds a drawn sword with the sigil of his scale upon its pommel. Beneath his horse's feet are dark-driving stratus clouds.

    He is active, clever, subtle, fierce, delicate, courageous, skilful, but inclined to domineer. Also to overvalue small things, unless well dignified.

    If ill dignified, deceitful, tyrannical and crafty.

    Book T, “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”, The Equinox I.8 (London, 1912), pp. 165–166. See the source

  • Papus (1892)

    A young, dark man, an enemy. He is also a spy.

    Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, tr. A. P. Morton (London, 1892), p. 313. See the source

Before 1909

The older cards and pictures behind this one will be shown here once their licences are checked.

The film

No film for this card yet.

Sources

  1. Waite: he is riding in full course, as if scattering his enemies.Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III, Knight of Swords

Around this card

Before and after it in the deck

The same number in the other suits

All the cards of the Swords, or the whole deck.

Print the whole 1909 deck at home: the printable deck.