Knight of Swords: the full charge

Start with the picture: one rider at full speed, clouds and trees bent over

Waite describes the card in three sentences. The knight is riding in full course, as if scattering his enemies. In the design he is really a prototypical hero of romantic chivalry. He might almost be Galahad, whose sword is swift and sure because he is clean of heart.

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BaZiFlow original Knight of Swords

On the original Rider-Waite-Smith card the knight wears a helmet, his red cloak and plume stream out behind him, and his right hand holds a long sword high. The pale horse has its head low and its mane flung back; a few trees at lower left are bent by the wind, and the clouds are torn into long strips. There is no second person in the picture and no enemy being scattered. Read it from the top: the sword at the highest point, the horse in the middle, the landscape at the bottom, and all three layers lean the same way.

What Waite lists: skill in the first half, conflict in the second

Waite's divinatory meanings begin with skill, bravery, capacity, defence and address, then turn to enmity, wrath, war, destruction, opposition, resistance and ruin. He then adds a condition: there is a sense in which the card signifies death, but it carries this meaning only in its proximity to other cards of fatality.

Skill, bravery, capacity, defence, address, enmity, wrath, war, destruction, opposition, resistance, ruin.

Within one card, the first five words say how capable the rider is, and the last seven say how fierce the situation is. The list does not tell you which half will happen; it sets the two side by side. The sense of death is locked by Waite himself to the condition "in proximity to other cards of fatality", so it does not stand on a single card.

Galahad, the galloping horse and the bent trees: three details, three sources

Three details deserve a separate look. The first two connect to Waite's words, and the third belongs to the Rider-Waite-Smith picture only.

Reading "sure sword" as "clean motive" and "full speed" as "the direction of the drive" is a modern teaching borrowing. It turns the picture into questions you can put to yourself, and it is not in Waite's word list.

How to read it: write the missing opponent into the picture before you charge

The card comes with a ready shape: a charge, and no opponent. Carried to an everyday matter, it means adding three things before you act.

1. 1

   Fill in: write the opponent as one exact sentence

   There is no enemy in the picture, so put one there: copy the single sentence the other side just said, word for word. Not "that side", and not a person. If you cannot copy it out, you are about to answer an impression and not an argument.

2. 2

   Test the sword: why is it out?

   Waite says Galahad's sword is sure because his heart is clean. In teaching you can ask it this way: is this charge meant to move your own case forward, or only to win the energy of this one exchange? The answer decides where the point lands.

3. 3

   Pull up: one line, then return

   The second half of the list is opposition and ruin, and a charge without an end turns into a chase. Set a stopping point: answer that one point in a single sentence, then go back to your own case.

An example: a school debate team is practicing a free-debate round on the motion "Community libraries should extend their evening hours". You are on the opposing side, and the other speaker has just said, "Evening hours give people who work days somewhere to study." You want to charge in. Here are the four steps a thirty-second rebuttal can follow:

Reversed, and others on the road: imprudence, incapacity, extravagance

Waite gives the reversed Knight of Swords three words: imprudence, incapacity, extravagance. The additional meanings are other readers' wording: upright, a soldier, man of arms, satellite, stipendiary, with heroic action predicted for a soldier; reversed, a dispute with an "imbecile person", and for a woman a struggle with a rival who will be conquered. That is period wording, and it treats the card as a person.