Your Chosen Card – Three of Swords Upright Rider Waite Deck
When upright, the Three of Swords suggests that you are confronting some type of separation, loss, severing of ties, or suffering that will lead to important realizations about your emotional life and aid you to grow in wisdom. This card depicts ‘stormy weather for the emotions.’ You may need to deal with feeling alienated, cut off, disappointed, grief-stricken, or alone. Because Swords are a mental and conflict-laden suit, you may be involved in disputes with friends or loved ones. A hoped-for meeting with someone you care about may not materialize. Sometimes this card points to a need for surgery, either for yourself or for someone close to you. When all is said and done, the suffering and unhappiness implied by this card offer an opportunity for a fresh start.
Keywords Upright: Necessary separation, beneficial severance, detachment, surgery, absence, grieving in order to heal, the joy of release from sorrow, insightful but stormy weather for the emotions, attainment of wisdom through suffering.
Timing: 10 Libra20 Libra. Tropical, 3 October12 October. Sidereal, 27 October5 November.
Astrology: The stern taskmaster Saturn (exalted) in the second decan of airy Libra, also the realm of the Queen of Swords (Water of Air) and Justice (Libra). Saturn is linked to the World.
Number Symbolism: 3 – fertility, creativity, a triadic relationship, the first fruits of a joint venture.
Rider Waite: Three swords piercing a heart; cloud and rain behind. Divinatory Meanings: Removal, absence, delay, division, rupture, dispersion, and all that the design signifies naturally, being too simple and obvious to call for specific enumeration; (R) mental alienation, error, loss, distraction, disorder, confusion.
When Three of Swords is upright you can pretty much take it that life is going well but that’s when life takes us by surprise. If Three of Swords is unclear it may help to choose a card from the Major Arcana to provide more insight into what it is Three of Swords is trying to tell you. If you had a particular issue in mind, or want to seek clarification on something else, you can also choose again to get more guidance.
This chosen card is part of your upright card reading for Three of Swords using cards from the Rider Waite Tarot Deck. You will find many more tarot pages that will be of great help if you need tarot card meanings. Use the search at the bottom of the page. We have some amazing tarot books for you to browse. Please see below.
Here are some snippets from a few of my favorite books
Book Details
Creative Tarot: Its easy to see why artists in particular connect to the deck. Tarot readers tell storiesstories that might not always have a logical sense but have instead an intuitive meaning. The story is guided by a feeling, or perhaps the mood a color suggests to the reader, or strange coincidences in the pictures. (For instance, on one card, three figures are hunched over their work, so that might be relevant because . . .) That is a creative act. And so artists, used to working in that way, often take to the decks like ducks to water.
Complete Book of Tarot: Myth 13: Some tarot cards are really very ‘good’ and others are really very ‘evil.’
- Do get in touch if you looked for Three of Swords and we don’t have it listed. We would be more than happy to source the information for you. We hope you visit again for more online tarot information!
Tarot Triumphs: Tarot cards have been shaped by generations of human imagination and have acquired their own unique mystical and magnetic presence. We do not know exactly how and why they emerged, but they have certainly come to represent a kind of magical heritage. For hundreds of years, people have pondered the cards, read fortunes, and played games with them; they have recreated and varied the images and gleaned insights from them. Whether or not there was one person who invented the pack to start with, the human psyche, or ‘common mind,’ has done its work. If there was ever a single original pack, it has been altered, smoothed, honed, and tested over the centuries. We only need to think of the different artists and engravers working on all the different packs, creating their own version of the designs, each interpretation maybe just a little different from the last. Imagine, too, all those generations of colorists applying bright brushstrokes to the woodblock outlines, painting with intense concentration in humble ateliers to bring the cards into their full glory. Each of them may have dreamed about the cards in their own way and applied the colors just a little more inventively to leave their personal mark.1 And then we can recall the wide range of people who have used Tarot: nobles, common folk, merchants, gypsies, and travelers, all with their packs for game-playing, gambling, fortune-telling, and perhaps also for deeper reflection. Through all these hands the Tarot has passed, gathering meaning, accumulating the hopes and wishes of those who use it, triggering the imagination, and acting as a pathway to unseen worlds.