Page of Swords

Within Waite's four-rank court, the Page is the air suit's junior figure; the Golden Dawn's equivalent rank, the Princess of Swords, carries the elemental pairing Earth of Air, intellect given the most grounded and least active of the suit's four expressions, a curious pairing for a card whose picture is the deck's most visibly windswept. Like the other three Princess ranks, she carries no zodiacal decan; Book T instead completes air's contribution to the sixteen-card elemental matrix through her rather than through any decanic assignment.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a youth on a windswept hill gripping a raised sword, hair and clouds blown sideways, watchful rather than attacking, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Valet d'Epees is a static heraldic figure holding an upright sword with no wind, hill or alertness of expression at all; the visible wind is one of Smith's clearest single devices for making an abstract element, air, into something a viewer can see moving.

Crowley's Thoth card keeps the Golden Dawn name Princess of Swords, her full title the Princess of the Rushing Winds, and renders her amid a storm of geometric cloud and blade fragments, Harris's more abstract equivalent of Smith's windblown hill, without the single watchful figure Smith gives the scene.

Upright the Page of Swords is read as curiosity, mental energy and vigilance, new ideas met with alert attention; reversed, as gossip, scattered thoughts, or impulsiveness that outruns careful thinking.

As a court card she carries the deck's double reading, standing for a young or youthful person, or for an influence of restless inquiry entering a situation; readers commonly use her visible watchfulness, the raised sword and the alert stance, to distinguish her from the more purely eager Page of Wands, this page's energy directed by attention rather than by simple enthusiasm.

Waite's own printed meaning, authority, overseeing, secret business, vigilance, spy, examination, leans toward a more guarded, even suspicious figure than the open curiosity most contemporary readers now emphasize; the softer, more purely intellectual reading of curiosity and new ideas has generally displaced Waite's language of secrecy and surveillance over the twentieth century.

Because the suit of Swords generally is read as the deck's most morally ambiguous, capable of clarity or of cruelty depending on how it is used, this page is frequently treated as the suit's least dangerous figure, mental energy not yet sharpened into either wisdom or harm, which is part of why her reversed meaning, gossip and scattered thought, reads as carelessness rather than as any deliberate malice.