Minor Arcana · Swords · Number 6
Six of Swords
moving away from difficulty, with help
Element
Air · thought, speech, conflict, truth and the cost of it
The card in tarot
What Six of Swords means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A ferryman poles a punt away from the shore. A cloaked woman and a child sit in the bow with six swords standing upright in the boat. The water is choppy behind the boat and flat ahead of it.
In a reading
Leaving somewhere difficult. Read as transition, often a sad one: the swords come along, so nothing is being resolved, only moved. The flat water ahead is the card's promise, and it is modest.
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
moving away from difficulty, with help
Reversed
carrying the difficulty along; departure postponed
Reversed, readings turn on the crossing not happening: staying in the hard place, or carrying the trouble to the new shore intact.
The suit
Six 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 Six does
Across all four suits, the Six is recovery, exchange and movement away from the Five.
Six is the answer the deck gives to Five. In all four suits something is given, carried or crossed.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Six 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.