Tarot card meanings · Swords
What does Queen of Swords mean in tarot?
In A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the Queen of Swords upright means “female sadness and embarrassment, absence, sterility, mourning, privation, separation”, and reversed “Malice, bigotry, artifice, prudery, bale, deceit”.
Upright
Female sadness and embarrassment, absence, sterility, mourning, privation, separation.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
Reversed
Malice, bigotry, artifice, prudery, bale, deceit.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
What does the picture show?
Her right hand raises the weapon vertically and the hilt rests on an arm of her royal chair; the left hand is extended, the arm raised; her countenance is severe but chastened; it suggests familiarity with sorrow. It does not represent mercy, and, her sword notwithstanding, she is scarcely a symbol of power.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
Where does the Queen of Swords fall in a reading?
Queen of Swords belongs to the suit of Swords. On this site you draw three cards, which take three of the places in the ten-card method Waite describes: “This covers him”, “This crosses him”, “This is before him”. The same card reads differently in each place, and the I Ching cast beside it may agree or disagree.
Ask one question. Draw three cards, and cast an I Ching hexagram beside them to see where East and West agree. Free.
Draw three cardsWaite's words are quoted as printed, and left out where they speak of money, law, illness or disaster. The pictures are the 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. For entertainment and self-reflection.