9 of Swords
The 9 of Swords is the ninth numeral card of the Swords suit. It is associated with anguish, night anxiety and a mental suffering that is often larger in the imagination than in reality.
Last reviewed: 2026-07-22
Historical fact
Before 1909, the 9 of Swords showed nine swords arranged with no scene. Pamela Colman Smith's illustration created the image that became the reference: a figure sitting up in bed at night, face in hands in a gesture of anguish, nine swords hanging on the wall, and a panel on the bed decorated with duel-related symbols.
Interpretation — Rider-Waite-Smith / Golden Dawn
In Waite's tradition, the 9 of Swords is associated with anxiety, nightmares and mental suffering — a state of anguish often disproportionate to the actual situation, similar to the catastrophic thinking that occurs during a sleepless night. The common reading highlights that much of this suffering is internal, even when triggered by a real problem.
Interpretation — Thoth (Aleister Crowley)
In the Thoth deck, this card carries the title 'Cruelty,' associated with Mars in Gemini. Crowley's reading is harsher than Waite's: the depicted suffering takes on a tone of cruelty — whether self-inflicted, through one's own thoughts, or coming from an outside source — rather than the more introspective anxiety tone of the RWS reading.
Curiosities
- Art historians including Stuart R. Kaplan trace much of the visual inspiration for Pamela Colman Smith's Minor Arcana scenes to the Sola-Busca tarocchi, a 1491 Italian deck — the earliest known tarot to illustrate every numeral card with a narrative scene rather than plain suit symbols — which Smith is believed to have studied before designing the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
- The Golden Dawn assigned each of the 36 numeral Minor Arcana cards (2 through 10, across all four suits) to one of the 36 decans of the zodiac — a system dividing each sign into three 10-degree segments that originated in ancient Egyptian astronomy and was later adopted by Hellenistic astrology, as in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos.
This section presents one tradition's interpretation, not a verifiable fact.
Frequently asked questions
- Does the 9 of Swords mean something bad will actually happen?
- Not necessarily. The card is more about the state of anguish and anxiety itself — the mental suffering is often larger than the actual facts driving it.
- What is the difference between the RWS and Thoth readings of the 9 of Swords?
- The RWS reading emphasizes anxiety and nightmare as an internal state. The Thoth reading, under the title 'Cruelty,' gives the suffering a harsher tone, associated with Mars.
Sources
- Michael Dummett. The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (1980).
- Arthur Edward Waite. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).
- Aleister Crowley. The Book of Thoth (1944).
- Stuart R. Kaplan. The Encyclopedia of Tarot (1978).