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Minor Arcana · Suit of Swords · Number card
Nine · Swords
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightAnxietySleepless worryFear magnified
↓ ReversedReasonable fearShameDoubt
What it means
↑ Upright
Night, and a woman sitting up in bed with her face in her hands, nine swords ranged across the dark behind her. Despair and disappointment are the meanings here, and the picture shows how they swell at night, when every fear looks equally large. Write the worries down, sort what is happening from what is only dreaded, and let daylight and another person look at the list.
↓ Reversed
Some of the fear is reasonable, Waite allows, and some of it is shame or suspicion keeping you shut in with your thoughts. Worry kept secret has room to grow. Pick out the fear that has grounds and do one practical thing about it; the rest often loosens once it is out in the open.
Nine is near-completion, and in Swords it is thought carried almost to its end, where worry fills the night. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a woman woken in the dark, head bowed into her hands beneath nine swords laid level across a black wall. Her quilt is patterned with roses and astrological signs, and the bed is carved with a scene of one figure overpowering another. No sword touches her: the anguish is in the mind.
Upright
Death, failure, miscarriage, delay, deception, disappointment, despair.
Reversed
Imprisonment, suspicion, doubt, reasonable fear, shame.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.