Minor Arcana, the Swords
Three of Swords
The Three of Swords is the third card of the suit of swords, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 for A. E. Waite. A large red heart hangs in a grey sky, pierced by three swords, with a storm cloud behind it and rain slanting down across the whole card.
What Waite wrote it means (1910)
- Divinatory meanings
Removal, absence, delay, division, rupture, dispersion, and all that the design signifies naturally, being too simple and obvious to call for specific enumeration.
- Reversed
Mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1911), p. 248. Read it in the chapter
Three swords piercing a heart; cloud and rain behind.
What's in the picture
- The heart. A large heart, flat red with no shading, fills the middle of the card. Nothing holds it up. A heart with three blades through it is older than this card: it is on the Three of Swords of the Sola Busca, a deck engraved in Italy in the late 1400s. Photographs of that deck reached the British Museum in 1907, and Smith and Waite may well have seen them.
- The middle sword. One sword comes straight down from above. It enters at the dip in the top of the heart, and its point comes out at the bottom.
- The crossing swords. The other two come in at a slant from the upper left and the upper right. They cross inside the heart, so the one that enters on the left comes out on the right.
- The points. Below the heart the three points stick out, the middle one longest, the other two spread like the legs of a stand.
- The hilts. The hilts are steel blue, with round pommels and plain, straight crossguards. All three are buried up to the guard.
- The cloud. Behind the heart a grey storm cloud fills the top half of the card, its edge drawn in one curling line. The numeral III sits on the cloud at the top.
- The rain. Long thin lines slant down to the left, from the cloud to the bottom of the card. It is raining hard. No ground or figure is drawn anywhere on the card.
The card in brief
- In the deck
- Card 53 of 78
- Arcana
- Minor Arcana, Swords
- Number
- Three
- Element (Golden Dawn)
- Air
- Astrology (Golden Dawn)
- Saturn in Libra
- Title in Book T
- Lord of Sorrow
- 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)
Three White Radiating Angelic Hands, issuing from clouds, and holding three swords upright (as though the central sword had struck apart the two others, which were crossed in the preceding symbol): the central sword cuts asunder the rose of five petals, which in the previous symbol grew at the junction of the swords; its petals are falling, and no white rays issue from it.
Above and below the central sword are the symbols of ♄ and ♎︎.
Disruption, interruption, separation, quarrelling; sowing of discord and strife, mischief-making, sorrow and tears; yet mirth in Platonic pleasures; singing, faithfulness in promises, honesty in money transactions, selfish and dissipated, yet sometimes generous: deceitful in words and repetitions; the whole according to dignity.
Book T, “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”, The Equinox I.8 (London, 1912), pp. 182–183. See the source Papus (1892)
Realization of the enmity. Hatred.
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
- Waite: three swords piercing a heart; cloud and rain behind.Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III, Three of Swords
- The Sola Busca tarot was engraved in the late 15th century; the Rider deck's Three of Swords is one of its notable similarities to it.Wikipedia, Sola Busca tarot
- In 1907 photographs of all 78 Sola Busca cards were given to the British Museum, where Waite and Smith likely saw them.Wikipedia, Sola Busca tarot (to be checked against the British Museum's record)
- The Sola Busca Three of Swords shows a heart pierced by three swords.Wikimedia Commons, Sola Busca tarot card 66 (the Three 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.