General Book of the Tarot: Swords: Queen of Swords

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Queen of Swords

TRADITION: Widowhood, female sadness, privation, absence, sterility, poverty, vacancy, unemployment, mourning, separation. Reversed: Bad woman, malice, bigotry, prudishness, hypocrisy, artifice, deceit.

THEORY: The female rulership of the element of Earth on the house of Taurus, in which the Moon is exalted and 'womanhood eternal' is contained. The house of money, in worldly affairs. So this card must mean either woman ruling by matter, material or magnetic attraction, purely physical charm, or ruled by material elements herself. The latter may be seen as: ruled by the desire of luxury and money, or as: overpowered by material difficulties, weighed down under the burden of a material world. A woman of Saturnian and Martian qualities is seldom charming unless in a purely physical and sexual way; there may be higher virtues, however, which in this case will be developed by suffering, such as chastity, severity, continence--from which it will be easily seen, that sterility, privation and mourning may derive, personally. Astrologically the Martian and Saturnian qualities are seldom found to be very 'benefic' for women, being very often signs of an unpleasant character or injured reputation. On the one hand this card may be a woman under affliction and severed from her natural protector or protection--widow, divorced, separated, though not the unmarried; on the other hand we have to see in this card the woman who is paid for her 'love,' and the fact that "woman costs money," a fact of more occult significance than the world at