Three of Swords, the Rider-Waite-Smith card drawn by Pamela Colman Smith (1909)
Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Minor Arcana · Swords · Air

Three of Swords

UprightRemoval, absence, delay, division, rupture, dispersion, and all that the design signifies naturally, being too simple and obvious to call for specific enumeration.
ReversedMental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.

Read to know yourself, not to surrender yourself: relate to the card; never obey it. These are what two traditions wrote, not predictions.

Draw & reflect Open in the card viewer

In Waite's words: The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911)

Three swords piercing a heart; cloud and rain behind.

A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), public domain.

In the Golden Dawn's Book T (1912)

Lord of Sorrow

THREE White Radiating Angelic Hands, issuing from clouds, and holding three swords upright (as though the central sword had struck apart the two others, which were crossed in the preceding symbol): the central sword cuts asunder the rose of five petals, which in the previous symbol grew at the junction of the swords; its petals are falling, and no white rays issue from it.

Above and below the central sword are the symbols of Saturn and Libra.

Disruption, interruption, separation, quarrelling; sowing of discord and strife, mischief-making, sorrow and tears; yet mirth in Platonic pleasures; singing, faithfulness in promises, honesty in money transactions, selfish and dissipated, yet sometimes generous: deceitful in words and repetitions; the whole according to dignity.

Binah of ו (Unhappiness, sorrow, and tears).

Herein rule the Great Angels הריאל and הקמיה> as Lords of the Decan.

Correspondences

Decan: Saturn in Libra (the 2nd decanate of its sign).

Sephirah: Binah in Yetzirah (the Formative World).

Book T as printed in The Equinox I(8), 1912, public domain (notes in square brackets are Crowley's). The correspondences are this site's compilation from Book T. Open it in the Golden Dawn deck.

Images: Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), public domain. Texts: Waite (1911) and Book T (1912), public domain. Selection and arrangement CC-BY-SA-4.0 (PlayfulProcess). Data: github.com/PlayfulProcess/recursive-tarot.