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Minor Arcana · Suit of Swords · Number card
Three · Swords
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightHeartbreakA painful truthSeparation
↓ ReversedGrief held inScattered thoughtsConfusion
What it means
↑ Upright
Three blades through a heart under rain — the plainest picture in the deck, and Waite says it needs no explaining. It points to grief, a parting, words that cut because they were true. Pain like this is not a mistake to be fixed. Let it be named and felt; say it aloud to one person you trust, and give the rain its time.
↓ Reversed
Sorrow that has not been faced comes out sideways, as distraction, error and a mind that cannot settle. You may be busy precisely so as not to feel it. Slow down long enough to say what was lost; clear thinking often comes back once the loss has a name.
Three is growth, and in Swords what grows is a painful truth that can no longer be kept out. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a red heart pierced by three swords against a gray sky of cloud and driving rain, with no figure anywhere. Because nobody is in it, the picture can be anyone's: the heart stands for feeling, the swords for the thoughts and words that wound it, and the rain for grief.
Upright
Removal, absence, delay, division, rupture, dispersion, and all that the design signifies naturally, being too simple and obvious to call for specific enumeration.
Reversed
Mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.