Dodal, linked reproduction
Quatre d'Épées
Jean Dodal’s Marseille pack · Lyon, 1701–1715.
Read the BnF catalogue record ↗Rest or an arrangement to stop fighting?
A resting effigy and swords meeting in a flower make different kinds of pause visible.
Start with the pictures
Four of Swords
Pamela Colman Smith · 1922 printing, p. 247
Open the source scan page ↗Notice what changes
Dodal
Quatre d'Épées
Two pairs of curved swords create a layered oval around a central flower. Their repeated edges frame an open space rather than a human figure.
Smith
Four of Swords
A recumbent armoured figure rests with hands together beneath three hanging swords. A fourth sword lies along the base, below a decorated window.
Harris
Four of Swords · 4
Four straight swords point inward toward a large flower. Their hilts sit at the outer corners of a balanced diagonal arrangement.
Open Harris’s painting and reference page ↗Now read the authors
Waite’s explanation
Waite identifies the figure as a tomb effigy, not simply a sleeping person. His meanings include retreat, solitude and repose alongside the funerary associations that helped shape the design.
Crowley’s explanation
Crowley calls the card Truce and connects Chesed and Jupiter in Libra with a settled intellectual arrangement. He reads the rose as social harmony and the fixed swords as compromise whose stability may be temporary.
What has become still here, and what remains poised to act?
Write one thing you can point to in the image, one interpretation from a named author, and one inference of your own. Keeping the three separate gives you something useful to revisit.
Sources and image credits
The Dodal cards are one early-eighteenth-century Marseille witness. The black-and-white Smith plates come from the 1922 Rider reprint, whose title verso lists first publication in 1910. Colours in later editions can differ.
Foolmade supplies the linked Dodal reproductions. Its surrounding commentary is not the basis for our historical claims. These images are linked externally; the Smith illustration reuses the public-domain source scan with its full page context.
Harris’s paintings are linked on their host’s reference pages. Crowley’s text is the separately identified Thelemagick transcription of The Book of Thoth. Neither a modern reproduction nor a transcription replaces examination of the original artwork or edition.