Small cards, Swords
Nine of Swords
Cruelty
Thought can become punitive when it repeats an accusation without making anything clearer. Distinguish a practical responsibility from a sentence you keep passing on yourself or another.
What would an accurate, less punishing account say?
Correspondences
- Decan ruler
- Mars in Gemini
- Suit element
- Air
- Sphere · Hermetic Qabalah
- Yesod
- Ten-degree span
- 10-20 Gemini
Sources
The numbered cards combine a sphere, a suit element, and a planetary decan. The Ace begins at Kether; Two through Ten follow the numbered spheres. These are symbolic correspondences, not a birth chart.
Book T (1912) · printed p. 199 ↗
The Book of Thoth · Part IV, Nine of Swords ↗
Spans use a starting boundary inclusive and an ending boundary exclusive. Older texts may describe the same interval with ordinal degree numbers.
Symbols
In the Book T design
The rose is absent and a central ninth sword separates the others.
Book T (1912) · printed p. 199 ↗Two accounts
Book T: Lord of Despair and Cruelty.
The account brings together distress, harshness and the weight of difficult work. It also allows patience, faithfulness and unselfish conduct when the card’s relationships are favourable.
Thoth: Nine of Swords.
Book T’s title is shown separately from the Thoth name. The symbol note below describes the 1912 text, whose design can differ from Harris’s painting.