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Minor Arcana · Suit of Swords · Number card
Six · Swords
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightMoving onCalmer waterA passage made
↓ ReversedSomething unsaidA confessionStuck ashore
What it means
↑ Upright
Smooth water, a light load, a ferryman equal to the work: Waite notes that the crossing is not beyond his strength. It points to leaving a hard place for a quieter one — a move, a change of course, a way out that is practical rather than dramatic. Take across only what you need, and let someone else do some of the steering.
↓ Reversed
Here the boat waits at the bank for something to be said. Reversed, the crossing becomes declaration, confession, making a thing public — one old account even calls it a proposal of love. Moving on may be held up by words you owe or are owed. Say what needs saying, plainly and to the right person.
Six brings recovery, and in Swords it is the mind moving away from trouble toward calmer ground. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a ferryman poling a flat boat toward a far shore, carrying a cloaked woman and a child, with six swords standing upright in the bow. The water is rough on one side of the boat and smooth on the other, commonly read as the passage from turbulence into quiet.
Upright
Journey by water, route, way, envoy, commissionary, expedient.
Reversed
Declaration, confession, publicity; one account says that it is a proposal of love.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.