Minor Arcana · Swords · Court card
Knight of Swords
charging at the problem with the argument prepared
Element
Air · thought, speech, conflict, truth and the cost of it
The card in tarot
What Knight of Swords means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A knight charges at full gallop with his sword raised, cloak and plume streaming. The trees bend and the birds are being blown sideways. Nothing in front of him is drawn.
In a reading
Full commitment to an idea, at speed and without checking. Read as decisive action, or a person who argues brilliantly and arrives before the facts do. The wind is going the same way he is.
Upright and reversed
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Roughly half of readers never use them and read every card upright; those who do treat a reversed card as the same card under pressure rather than as its opposite.
Upright
charging at the problem with the argument prepared
Reversed
aggression outrunning the facts
Reversed, common readings are aggression without aim, an argument for its own sake, or a rush that has run out of road.
The suit
Knight of Swords is a Swords card
Swords are the suit people flinch at, and the suit that is most often useful. They cover decisions, arguments, clarity, anxiety, and the specific pain of knowing something you would rather not. Smith drew this suit hardest: the imagery includes the deck's bleakest pictures, and it also includes its clearest pictures of a mind at work.
A sword cuts in both directions and the suit is not a run of bad news. The double edge is the point: the same blade that wounds is the one that separates a real problem from a rehearsed one.
Swords is the suit of Air, and it is the suit that became Spades in an ordinary playing-card deck.
The other thirteen Swords
The court rank
What the Knight does
Across all four suits, the Knight is the suit at full tilt, committed and not yet wise.
The Knight is the only court figure in motion. Each one moves at the speed its element moves at, from the Swords' charge to the Pentacles' plod.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Knight of Swords is not a birth card
AsterNym’s birth card comes from adding up a birth date and reducing it, which can only ever land between 1 and 22. Those are the Major Arcana, so no Minor Arcana card is anyone’s birth card and this page does not offer one. The minors are in the draw pool, where any of the 78 can come up.