Knight of Swords

The picture

A knight at full gallop, all four of the horse's feet off the ground, charging to the left with his sword raised. Red plumes stream from his helmet and a red cloak streams behind him.

His visor is up and his face is visible.

The clouds are torn into horizontal streaks, all running the same way. The trees at the bottom left are bent hard over. The horse's mane blows forward.

Everything is moving in the direction he is riding.

Upright

Conviction travelling faster than the situation it is about to arrive at.

This is the fastest card in the deck and the least reflective. Directness, urgency, the decision taken and acted on in a single motion — the argument started, the confrontation walked into, the message sent before the draft was reread.

It achieves things nothing else in the deck achieves. It also arrives before the facts do, and the card is honest that these are two properties of the same speed.

The wind is behind him

Look at which way the trees bend and which way the clouds run. Both are going his direction. His cloak is streaming backward, not whipping at him.

He is not charging into a storm. The storm is pushing him.

That inverts most of what gets said about this card. The fury in it is not resistance being overcome — it is a following wind that has not been noticed, because from inside a tailwind the sensation is simply that you are extremely fast and extremely capable. Nothing is being fought here. Something is being accelerated.

The raised visor belongs with it. Nobody expecting to meet anything rides with their face uncovered, and he is not expecting to meet anything. He is going with the weather, at speed, and has taken the armour off the one part that would tell him if he were wrong.

Reversed

Speed with no target. Force applied to something that needed patience, and then applied harder when the first application did not work.

There is also the certainty that has stopped checking itself. Still fast, still forceful, no longer attached to anything capable of correcting it — and by this point the momentum is doing the arguing.

What it is not

Courage. The card contains some and is not only that. Charging is easier than deciding whether to charge, and this figure has skipped the second step entirely, which is a different quality from bravery and looks identical at a distance.

A second reading takes it as aggression aimed at the reader. He is far more often the reader.

In a reading

Asked what to do: act now, at the cost of precision, and know that is the trade being made. In an obstacle position it names haste — a decision taken too quickly to be revisited, generally by someone who felt very clear at the time.

With the Chariot, one is controlled momentum and this is not. With the Queen, speed set against discernment, and the pair is worth reading as a question about which the situation is short of.