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Minor Arcana · Suit of Swords · Number card
Seven · Swords
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightA quiet planStrategyGoing it alone
↓ ReversedGood counselLoose talkHeeding advice
What it means
↑ Upright
Five swords carried quietly away from the camp, two left standing in the ground: Waite admits the card is uncertain, poised between a bold attempt and a plan that may fail. It favors strategy and discretion, and warns against cutting corners or acting where nobody can check you. Ask whether the plan would survive being seen.
↓ Reversed
Turned over, the scheme meets other people's words: good advice, instruction — and also gossip and loose talk. Someone may be offering sound counsel that is easy to dismiss because it slows you down. Listen to it. And keep your own plans off the open table until they are ready, since a design talked about too freely is easily undone.
Seven sets a test, and in Swords the test is one of wit and honesty: cleverness that may or may not be fair. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a man tiptoeing away from a camp of bright tents, five swords bundled in his arms and two left standing in the ground behind, looking back over his shoulder. His careful step and backward glance are commonly read as stealth and strategy, a plan that depends on not being seen.
Upright
Design, attempt, wish, hope, confidence; also quarrelling, a plan that may fail, annoyance. The design is uncertain in its import, because the significations are widely at variance with each other.
Reversed
Good advice, counsel, instruction, slander, babbling.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.