Dodal, linked reproduction
Dix d'Épées
Jean Dodal’s Marseille pack · Lyon, 1701–1715.
Read the BnF catalogue record ↗Where does the structure break?
The last numbered Sword card can put the damage in a body or in the arrangement of blades.
Start with the pictures
Ten of Swords
Pamela Colman Smith · 1922 printing, p. 235
Open the source scan page ↗Notice what changes
Dodal
Dix d'Épées
Eight curved swords form the outer enclosure. Two straight blades cross within it, adding a second kind of line to the repeated curves.
Smith
Ten of Swords
Ten swords pierce a figure lying face-down beside water. A pale band appears at the horizon beneath a dark sky.
Harris
Ten of Swords · 10
Ten swords occupy a branching geometric arrangement. Several blades converge on and break the central sword, with a bright orange area beneath the darker upper field.
Open Harris’s painting and reference page ↗Now read the authors
Waite’s explanation
Waite associates the design with affliction and desolation, but expressly says it is not especially a card of violent death. His reversed list admits gains while qualifying their permanence.
Crowley’s explanation
Crowley names Ruin and describes reason becoming detached from reality. He places the sword hilts at the Tree’s spheres and identifies the broken central sword with the Sun, linking the card to the Sun in Gemini.
Is the failure located in a person, a relationship among objects or the way the whole system is arranged?
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.