The Open Athenaeum

✶ The Study Deck

Knight of Swords

Swords, of the lesser arcana

Waite & Colman Smith, 1909 · described 1911

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.

the plate, in waite's words · the painted card will hang here in time

In divination

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.

The library's note

Riding in full course as though scattering enemies before him, the Knight is, in Waite's own comparison, "almost Galahad, whose sword is swift and sure because he is clean of heart." He carries the suit's force forward as headlong action, skill and destruction named in the same breath across Waite's compiled reading, swords' conflict here given a rider rather than a static field to occupy.

a young page · the keeper's voice pass on the note is still to come

Doors Onward

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Waite, A. E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Card text quoted verbatim, his punctuation kept. (Public domain.)
  2. Card described at: http://sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktswkn.htm

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