swords
Suit: Swords Minor Arcana Element: Air
Also known as King of Pikes and King of Spears.
King of Swords: judgment, law and the authority to make consequential decisions. The card joins the air nature of Swords to its courtly role.
The card's place in the historical Minor Arcana sits beside its Golden Dawn correspondences and Waite's account of Pamela Colman Smith's image. Each reading keeps the source and deck that gave it shape.
8 sourced claims: 5 traditional , 3 modern
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
He sits in judgment, holding the unsheathed sign of his suit. He recalls, of course, the conventional Symbol of justice in the Trumps Major, and he may represent this virtue, but he is rather the power of life and death, in virtue of his office.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §2, The Lesser Arcana — King of Swords.
Prince of Swords · The Prince of the Chariot of the Winds
A crowned king sits upright with an unsheathed sword, butterflies and crescent moons decorating the high-backed throne.
A concise visual description of Pamela Colman Smith's 1910 design, checked against Waite's card entry and the public-domain scan.
Upright, Waite associates the King with judgment, command, law, authority and militant intelligence. Reversed, he can indicate cruelty, perversity, perfidy or harmful intention.
Waite treats these as historical divinatory allocations and explicitly warns that they vary by context and are not a universal symbolic canon.
Court cards are organised by rank, suit and elemental composition in Book T. They are listed separately because the source does not assign them to the numbered sephiroth in the way it assigns the pip cards.
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Prince of the Chariot of the Winds
Book T's formal title for this court card.
Air · Swords
Swords express the powers of Air: thought, judgment, conflict, communication and force consciously directed.
Prince / Vau · Air of Air
Book T uses King for the mounted figure now usually called Knight, Prince for the figure now usually called King, and Princess for the Page or Knave. The source's role is preserved here rather than silently modernised.
20° Capricorn to 20° Aquarius
The twelve King/Knight, Queen and Prince/King cards bridge zodiac signs; the four Princess/Page cards instead rule polar quadrants.
The mind generates and judges ideas carefully, but suspicion and over-caution can harden into malice.
A concise paraphrase of Book T's well- and ill-dignified characteristics.
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the fifty-six suit cards in a standard Tarot pack: four suits of ten pip cards and four court cards.
The Met documents this structure in surviving fifteenth-century Tarot: Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins, each numbered from one to ten with king, queen, knight and knave. Occult correspondences developed later.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Suit and element | Air | 1888 CE |