The Nine of Swords always gets the oohs and ahs at the table — and you can see why. The image is a person sitting up in bed in the dead of night, in total anguish, swords hanging on the wall above. Of all the swords, this is the one that draws the most negative impressions, from readers and querents alike. So I want to cover it properly — and to do that, you have to tell the story of three cards together: the Eight, the Nine, and the Ten.
Swords are the mind: thoughts, communication, right thinking, truth. They're elemental air. The Eight, Nine, and Ten come at the end of the suit, and in the hermetic system they carry mutable air — Gemini. So these three are telling the story of mutable air.
The Eight: held by your own thoughts
I read the Eight of Swords as the past — being bound in your own beliefs and thought programs. People say the bindings are loose, that the figure could just wiggle free; I've never read it that way. (Did Pixie really tie them so loosely to suggest comfort? I don't see it.) To me the figure is held in position by older, established thoughts. The swords go down into the earth — into the material self, the body — while water, the intuition and the subconscious, moves around the edges. Eights are initiation: the moment you realize you're held in place by your own mind.
The Nine: culmination and awakening
Here the swords aren't driven into anything. They simply continue, ad infinitum — they're imaginary. Where eights are about the initiation and power of an element, nines are about culmination. So when I see the figure sitting up in bed, I think realization, awakening. And those are things you can't undo: short of amnesia, once you learn something that changes you, you're changed. Every idea about yourself, about others, about your work and your place in the world carries a consequence once it goes far enough. I don't read this only as anguish — the swords pierce nothing because this is the imaginary moment of awakening, where the mind has been challenged and you have changed.
The mind is built to establish an identity — to make a "you" out of the All, to ground it and bind you to the idea of yourself. But if you're on a journey, the awakening is bound to come.
The Ten: completion and a rising dawn
The story concludes with the Ten. Now the swords aren't only in your history — they pierce the figure straight up the spine. Tens are the end of a cycle; if nines are culmination, tens are completeness. The thought has permeated everything and changed him. Remember that in the hermetic world of the Golden Dawn — much of it hermetic, gnostic, or Rosicrucian — death is read as the end of a cycle, with something born from it. Arthur Edward Waite, who devised these cards and hired Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate them, was a member of the Golden Dawn. As the figure is wholly permeated and changed, that system would expect a rebirth — and what do we see beginning at the horizon? A golden dawn. The darkness recedes, and a rising dawn takes its place.
Why the swords feel so heavy
That's the story of the Eight, Nine, and Ten as I read them. The swords are so often seen as negative, and I understand it: the mind is also the home of the ego, and all three of these are isolation moments. No one else is experiencing what you're experiencing — that's precisely how the mind works. If you believe in an eternal soul, in the macrocosm reflected in the microcosm, in yourself as a spark of spirit, the one thing that separates us is the mind. It says, "I am my own thing; I'll blaze my own path and believe what I want." In traditions like Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and Rosicrucianism, and among Freemasons, the mind can look almost adversarial to the goal of climbing the ladder. But it is part of you — the differentiating part — and so it's something you experience entirely on your own. That's what it was made to do.
And if you're wondering where I draw these planetary correspondences: that's the system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where each card maps a planet to a zodiac sign. The signs are straightforward — the last three of a suit are always mutable, and mutable air is Gemini — but the planetary attributions I had to hand-write and learn the hard way.