Learning to Love the King of Swords
When you’re learning to read tarot, the court cards can be the most inscrutable of the deck. Are they other people? Parts of our own personality? Archetypes, guides, traits to cultivate or avoid? The traditional hierarchy and overt representations of gender and identity don’t help. As a contextual reader, I’ve come to view the court cards as all of the above and more, depending on the situation and spread. But still, at times I struggle to remember their prismatic potential when their still faces turn over for me.
Take the King of Swords. Guide books will tell you he is a rational intellectual, someone data-driven, possibly rigid, and lacking connection to their emotions. I often find it hard to connect with these types in this here physical realm, and the card version similarly leaves me drawing a blank. Will it benefit me to be logical? Will I encounter a tall, rational man?
As I’ve grown into myself as a reader, I’ve released old gendered and physical descriptions tied to the courts entirely. Sometimes, I find the character traits apply, particularly with reversals, but usually those interpretations remain too shallow to bring real insights. Instead, I’ve come to think of the courts as the way we build, enact, cultivate, and express the elements in our lives. For swords, the air suit, this relates to our ideas, narratives, communications, and perceptions, which brings me back to a lesson I’ve learned from this once-dreaded air King.
I’m getting to know the Thoth deck, and draw one card from it in addition to my regular three each morning. Recently the King of Swords sat stoic, firm and center in the middle of my three card spread, and his complement (the Knight in Crowley’s language of Thoth) jumped out at me, too. This is the first time I’ve had such synchronicity since beginning this morning ritual a month or so ago. But still, since it involved perhaps the least evocative court card for me, I mostly shrugged it off. That afternoon, inspired by an unseasonably warm and sunny December day, I whisked my family off to the beach. Cliche as it may be, the beach encourages me to be fully present, to stretch my awareness as broad as the horizon, and to follow each drop of the sinking sun. There, I recalled a previous King of Swords. beach-day lesson that hit me like a wave, only to dissolve in the swirling sea of my thoughts and be forgotten. Awareness is a swords skill, making the King, (or elder, as I like to consider them), an expert in it. And the King’s clear-sightedness opens us not only to the present, but also to the subjectivity of our own perspective. My view is only one perspective among all the views along the shoreline. The King asks, can we be spacious enough to hold it all?
Knight (King) of Swords | Thoth
Humans only see about one percent of our visual field at any moment, filling in the rest through assumption and experience. This can bring dramatic surprises when our conjectures diverge from reality, as when you double-take on a dark shape in the corner, only to realize it’s the sweater on your chair. Our minds are so convincing, however, that you’re probably questioning this one percent number right now. (I got it from NOVA! And highly encourage the whole series about consciousness, which is full of insights into how our minds trick us into believing reality is our perceptions.) This lesson about how our visual field works contains within it a metaphor about our mental field too, in my thinking. Our perception of reality, our truth, represents a minuscule bit of the field, clear as it may seem. The rest is a blur filled in by our assumptions and patterns, and our mind’s trick is to convince us it’s all sharp, crystalline, and fully known.
I’ve long wondered why one bird flew above the Queen and two above the King. Following the traditional Court order, we go from ten around the Page, to four above the Knight, to the Queen’s one, and then the King’s two. I think it comes back to this notion of perception. The Queen’s lone bird symbolizes the ability to cultivate and get to know your own truth. In our world riddled by dogma and manipulative media, immersed in late stage capitalism (and patriarchy and white supremacy and…), to be well acquainted with what is really, undoubtedly true for you is no small feat. It is also not the end of the process, this culmination of our perception. Being in full relationship to our truth, the King is where we learn to responsibly express it. And a skillful King knows that truth is always perceptive and subjective. Next to mine is yours, flying right beside it.
Both the King and Queen of Swords have butterflies, the symbol of transformation, carved into their stone thrones. I’m taken with how butterflies work with air. We had a wounded monarch in our garden this summer who couldn’t much fly, but caught enough wind on her crumpled wings to haphazardly float from one flower to the next. Even healthy butterflies fly erratically, at the mercy of the wind, but harness its capricious nature to their own benefit. If we learn to release ourselves from the weight of old, well-worn stories, we too can harness air, becoming transformed in the process. The Court of Swords teaches us to become conscious of our perceptions and the way they shape our reality. From this place of awareness, we have agency to respond differently than our initial instincts. The defensiveness and rashness of the Page and Knight become the calm alertness of the Queen and King. Unlike the Queen, whose upright sword stands straight and centered, the King’s is set back, tilted slightly, a stance that’s a little more open, relaxed. It is the posture of someone unthreatened by what they see. Through the cultivation of our truth, and the examination of its relationship to ourselves, our reality, and the collective, we are – possibly – transformed, maybe even a little more free.
This card isn’t just about logic or reason or the trap of cognitive rigidity. Next time you draw the King, think of them as an invitation to get clear around what’s in focus for you and what might just be conjecture. Embrace your truth as one facet of the whole, and invite in the alternatives. There is nothing to fear in the expansion of our horizons, in the embrace of paradox and conflicting perspectives. This awareness enables us to be more skillful in communication, advocacy, and compromise – all the work of this King. Swords are a suit of science, reason, and truth. The ability to discern lies in this sharp realm, it’s how the Queen cut that rope that once bound her wrists. But discernment, truth, and reason are not the underlying root of swords – that, to me at least, is perception. Our perception is informed by the stories that groove deep ruts in our minds, the ones we fall back into without realizing it. These stories can wound us deeply, distorting our perceptions of reality into something that can harm ourselves and others. Our stories may sometimes contain a grain of truth, but rarely, if ever, the whole. The King of Swords is our encouragement to hold our truth as lightly as he holds his sword, tilting ever so slightly, open to the possibility of transformation.
