swords
No image of this card
Lady Frieda Harris painted the deck between 1938 and 1943; it was first published in 1969, seven years after her death in 1962. The paintings remain in copyright until 2032 in the UK and EU and 2064 in the United States, so no card images or substitutes appear here.
See the deck at its publisher ↗The Lord of the Winds and the Breezes; the King of the Spirits of Air
Suit: Swords Minor Arcana Element: Air
Also known as Knight of Pikes and Knight of Spears.
Knight of Swords: intellect and action advancing with speed and little hesitation. 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 Book of Thoth remains in copyright. The catalogue therefore gives the deck's titles, ranks and numbering beside the Golden Dawn material it inherits, while citing Crowley by page without reproducing his text.
This deck's book publishes no upright and reversed lists, so none are shown. Its account of the card is cited below rather than reproduced.
The card is indexed as the Knight of Swords; Book T ranks it King, while the Thoth deck prints Knight. Its Golden Dawn place is King / Yod · Fire of Air. Book T titles it The Lord of the Winds and the Breezes; the King of the Spirits of Air.
Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, Thoth — Part Three: The Court Cards.
Knight of Swords
An armoured knight charges through wind and cloud with sword raised while trees bend beneath the force of movement.
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 Knight with skill, bravery, defence, wrath, war, resistance and destructive opposition. Reversed, it can indicate imprudence, incapacity or extravagance.
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 Lord of the Winds and the Breezes; the King of the Spirits of Air
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.
King / Yod · Fire 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° Taurus to 20° Gemini
The twelve King/Knight, Queen and Prince/King cards bridge zodiac signs; the four Princess/Page cards instead rule polar quadrants.
Thought acts with courage, skill and subtle force, with domination or deception when poorly directed.
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 |