Minor Arcana · Swords · Number 7
Seven of Swords
going around rather than through, cleverly or not
Element
Air · thought, speech, conflict, truth and the cost of it
The card in tarot
What Seven of Swords means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A man walks away from a camp of tents carrying five swords awkwardly by the blades. Two remain planted in the ground behind him. He is looking back over his shoulder and smiling.
In a reading
Getting away with something, or trying to. Read as deception, strategy, working around a system, or taking on a job alone that needed other people. The two swords left behind are usually read as the flaw in the plan.
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
going around rather than through, cleverly or not
Reversed
the plan exposed, or thought better of
Reversed, common readings are being found out, returning what was taken, or coming clean before you are asked.
The suit
Seven 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 number
What the Seven does
Across all four suits, the Seven is a choice made alone, usually with imperfect information.
Every Seven shows one figure and no witnesses. The suit decides whether the solitude is defence, deceit, patience or fantasy.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Seven 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.