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Minor Arcana · Suit of Swords · Number card
Five · Swords
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightA hollow victoryA costly winHumiliation
↓ ReversedLaid to restLingering resentmentMaking amends
What it means
↑ Upright
One man gathers up the swords while two others walk away beaten, and the loss and dishonor of the card fall on both sides of that field. If you are the one holding it, weigh what the win has cost in trust. If you are one of those walking away, leaving a contest that was not fair is no disgrace.
↓ Reversed
Defeat seen from the graveside: Waite adds burial and mourning. A quarrel can end and still not be laid to rest, kept alive by replaying it or by waiting for an apology. Decide what this contest deserves now — amends offered, a loss accepted — and then let the matter be buried.
Five is strain, and in Swords it is conflict turned into a contest won at others' expense. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a man glancing back with a sly smile, three swords in his hands and two more on the ground, while two defeated figures trudge toward the water under a torn, windy sky. Waite calls him the master in possession of the field; the ragged clouds are commonly read as hostility left hanging after the fight.
Upright
Degradation, destruction, revocation, infamy, dishonor, loss, with the variants and analogues of these.
Reversed
The same; burial and obsequies.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.