Hello and welcome to My Tiny Tarot Practice.
My name is Amelia Hruby and I host this show where I've been sharing my journey
exploring the tarot card by card, starting with each suit of the Minor Arcana.
Today's card is the King of Swords.
In the Rider-Waite-Smith edition of the tarot, the King of Swords depicts a
person seated on a throne.
They're wearing a blue tunic or gown of some kind with a red cloak on it and
a purple cloak over that.
They have on a crown and they're facing us directly when you're looking at the
card holding a sword in their right hand, which appears to be our left as the viewer.
And they have this really like clear gaze. Like I always feel like the king
of swords is staring right back at me as they hold their sword aloft and sit
a little rigidly on their throne.
And just like we've seen with all of the court cards in the suit of swords,
there is a blue sky with clouds in the background.
And this figure appears to be kind of seated above or at a distance from anything around them.
We can see some sort of trees in the distance, but there's nothing nearby.
There's no like closer sense of place in this card.
In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack describes the king in this way.
She writes, as a maintainer of
the social structure, the king represents authority, power, and judgment.
He takes the mental energy of air and uses it to uphold and rule the world with
the keenness of his mind and the force of his personality.
And she continues then to draw a connection between the king of swords and the emperor,
pointing out that both are seated on these thrones, you know,
staring directly at the viewer of the card, holding something aloft in their right hand.
These archetypal symbols of power that we've seen repeated over and over again in our cultures.
And speaking to this similarity, Rachel Pollack writes, we can call the king
the emperor's representative in the real world.
While the emperor embodies the archetype of order, law, society,
the king of swords maintains these principles in practice.
So what Rachel Pollack's describing here is the way that in the major arcana,
we have these sorts of archetypal images.
But when we encountered especially the court cards in the minors,
we see actually they're like lived representatives.
So perhaps a ruler that we might think of in contemporary society,
they might not be the emperor, the archetype and everything of the archetype,
but likely an embodiment of the king of swords.
And I do think that the king of swords is closely related to our contemporary
idea of leadership at its best and its worst.
Living as I do, as many of us do, in a patriarchal society that emphasizes logic,
rationality, and very specific iterations of masculinity,
we're often taught to think of leaders as incredibly smart, emotionless men. in.
And I think that when I encounter the King of Swords, often I bring a lot of that baggage with me.
I think of the King of Swords as a stand-in for a contemporary patriarchal ruler,
and I've had to work to try to detach my understanding of this card from that image.
And in fact, I don't know if we need to. I think in pulling this card in a reading,
it very well could represent a a challenging boss, a problematic leader or patriarch.
But for myself and on this show, I'm always trying to reframe the cards in a
more perhaps like uplifting or positive light to be a little simplistic about it.
And so I like to think of the King of Swords then as the end of the journey of the suit of swords.
So I'm imagining them like the utmost wisdom of the intellect in action.
I think with the Queen of Swords, we see the visionary leader who can hold the
vision, even create the strategy.
But I think with the King of Swords, we see the leader who can both hold a vision
and make that step-by-step plan to bring it to life and oversee all that it
takes to bring that to life.
And I think that a positive interpretation of the King of Swords as a leader
would be someone who then surrounds themselves with people who are more akin
to the other archetypes of the tarot,
who bring in the cups and the wands and the pentacles and are able to blend
or merge or alchemize the many elements together.
And I think, unfortunately, what often happens in our contemporary society is
that we're trained to deny or divorce ourselves from those other elements and
to only uphold the intellect.
And the journey through the swords has been a journey of the perils and pitfalls of intellect alone.
Alone, but when we bring the intellect alongside the emotional,
the heart-centered, the creative spirit,
the material world, and how we relate to resources, like when we can bring all
of that together, then I do think the King of Swords has so much to offer in being a visionary,
in being a strategic thinker, a logistical maven even. in.
And so that's how I'm personally reimagining this card,
even amidst the baggage it often brings up for me through the sort of coldly
logical masculine ideal of leadership that we often see in our society.
What would it look like for a leader to embrace the intellect and alchemize
it alongside other elements of our human experience.
I'm suddenly imagining all four kings coming together.
And that takes me back to the emperor, because in the major arcana,
the emperor is the number four.
Four is the number of foundation, the number of stability, of wholeness, of home, the square.
And it makes me think then that we in fact need all of the the kings to alchemize
in order to have the archetypal ruler of the emperor,
to have a type of leader who is able to embody the kingly qualities of all of the elements.
And that allows me to approach the idea of leadership and of kingliness in a new way.
I rarely do this on this show, but I will also just give a shout out to a song
that has really helped me approach this card in a new way, which is Florence
and the Machine's song, King.
Highly recommend it. I will link it in the show notes if you want to listen to it yourself.
I hope that this interpretation of the King of Swords has invited you into the
card in a few different ways.
And having done that, I want to thank you for listening to this episode of My Tiny Tarot Practice.
And in fact, to thank you for listening to this season of My Tiny Tarot Practice.
With the King of Swords, we complete the fourth season of the show and our journey
through the Minor Arcana.
I'm so grateful that you tuned in for one or more moments of that journey.
If you've ever enjoyed an episode of this show, I hope that you will please
leave us a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,
and maybe even take this as an invitation to treat yourself to a new tarot book
or deck from my bookshop link in the show notes.
Supporting the show with a purchase or a
review is a really wonderful helpful
way to support me in continuing to
do this work and i do plan to do a fifth season for the major arcana so i would
love a little support as i prepare that season and our final season of this
journey together May this episode and many more help you uncover your kingliness.
I hope that you have a wonderful day.