Of the four Rider-Waite-Smith knights, the Knight of Swords rides hardest, sword thrust forward at full gallop into a wind-torn sky, and the image is generally read as the most literally violent of the sixteen court cards, closer to a cavalry charge than to any of the other knights' more measured postures. Pamela Colman Smith gives him none of the Knight of Cups' offering gesture or the Knight of Pentacles' stillness; everything in the composition, cloak, mane, racing clouds, points forward.
No equivalent scene exists in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Cavalier d'Epee is a static heraldic horseman like the other three Marseille knights, holding an upright sword with no sense of motion at all; the ferocity now strongly associated with this card is entirely a Rider-Waite-Smith invention, absent from the older pattern's plainer picture. In Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck, within their Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess scheme, the equivalent figure keeps the name Knight of Swords and is generally rendered with similar aggressive motion, consistent with air's traditional association, in this system, with intellect driven into forceful, sometimes destructive action rather than with calm thought.
Air is sometimes assumed to be a gentle element because it governs intellect, but the Golden Dawn's court structure treats each element's masculine, mounted figure as its most forceful expression regardless of the element's other associations, and this knight is the clearest illustration of that principle: air moving fast enough becomes a weapon rather than a breeze.