These last few Swords pips don’t really get any more comfortable. In fact, they get darker and darker. The Nine of Swords depicts a nighttime scene with the subject sitting up in bed, apparently wracked with anxiety, terror, or grief. The black, black wall behind them could be an endless quagmire of darkness, but the most important feature here is that there are seven bold swords hanging there. While the hilts are all visible, the points vanish off to the right somewhere.

Before we get too far into the meaning of this card, I would like to draw your attention to some interesting details in this card’s art. First, on the side panel of the bed in the lower left, we see an intricately carved frieze that seems to depict two figures either playing or fighting among some trees. Next, the bedspread has very interesting designs on it! The roses are easy to pick out, but the blue panels, if you look closely, are covered in needlework depicting a variety of astrological symbols. Mars, the ruler of this Decan, sits in the subject’s lap, while Mercury, the ruler of this sign, hangs down nearer the floor. But they are not alone; take a closer look and see what you can spot.

The anguish depicted in this card is very difficult – an uncomfortable image and a crappy feeling to experience. This is one of those cards that is awkward to explain in a reading for a client, just as much as it is troubling to deal with when reading for yourself. I tend to look at the Minor Arcana in sequences, and as a suit climbs from Ace to Ten, at the same time, it descends further through the worlds of emanations to material reality.

Through this lens, the Nine of Swords is about elements in the Intellectual Realm nearing the first stages of material manifestation. Here, the pure intellect of the Swords begins once more to mix with the other elements. Ideas face reality, and suddenly there is a reckoning. What is the cost of your current path? What do you need to destroy in order to create? Almost every act of creation ends up having a price tag, and sometimes that price is difficult to bear.

Well, I warned you last time that the Swords are not the most cheerful of cards. How could they be? They are all about pointy things that are crafted specifically to hurt people.

When you approach the Rider-Waite-Smith version of this card just on face value, it’s bleak. The landscape is marshy and barren. The sky is grey and colorless, and off in the distance is a craggy mountain topped by a castle that seems distant and uncaring. The main character is bound and hoodwinked and surrounded by eight swords, which are presumably sharp.

This card had me in a quagmire of writer’s block for a while. I couldn’t think of anything clever to say about it. I read the entry for the Eight of Swords in Coleman Stevenson’s Dark Exact Tarot Guide, which provided me with a burst of inspiration, but even that fizzled. It wasn’t until I pulled the card from the Rota Tarot deck and really took a look that it hit me: it’s the Hod trap!

I don’t believe I’ve ever written about it before, but there is a concept in Hermetic Qabalah that each of the sefirot has an aspect that acts as a challenge that you must conquer before properly assimilating that sefirah and moving up the Tree of Life. Hod is the sefirah of intellect, logic, memory, and knowledge – a good match for the Swords. The Eights are all associated with Hod, which makes the Eight of Swords a particularly hairy card when interpreted through the lens of Hermetic Qabalah. I have often mused that the challenge of this sefirah, which I call the Hod trap, is to be so bound up in the mind, so bound up in intricacies and trying to be smart, that you can’t move forward.

Once I realized this, I realized what I wanted to say about this card. It is indeed about being bound up in thought. It is not necessarily a card of self doubt. The dangers this card warns of could be quite real. The problem is that you can never have enough information to navigate those dangers. The Eight of Swords whispers to you constantly that maybe one more piece of information will be the bit that shows you the safe passage through all threats and perils. But it will never come. That’s the trap of this card, what you need to avoid.

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