The King of Swords rules the intellect: all things rational, logical, and free of emotional bias.
He knows how to handle situations without the messiness of emotions.
I recently met up with my friend, Chris, a fellow poet, and told him about an idea I had been working with, that mind does not know how to feel.
He immediately proposed the inverse: that the heart does not know how to think.
The heart may know what it wants, but I think of the Fool card—how the pulls of one’s heart can lead you off a cliff and into an abyss. Is this true? I don’t know if it’s true, but I fear it may be true.
A rule I’ve had for myself since reading The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz when I was 18 is to avoid making fear-based decisions. I have not always been successful in this, but when I have been, it has led to living with fewer regrets.
According to Toltec traditions, there are two tracks in life: the track of love and the track of fear. The teaching is that every decision is either one of love or fear.
As someone who lived life in survival for much of my youth, I have tended towards fear-based decisions. But I suspect this is the case of most people.
I made a new friend this year, Mike, who has now become a dear friend, and he is maybe one of the few people I know who exemplifies living by love-based decisions rather than fear. Thus, many doors have opened for him. (I think I’ll have to ask him more about this at some point.)
That’s what’s beautiful about the Fool card—the most romantic, dreamy card in the deck, card zero of the major arcana. The Fool only makes heart-based decisions, and I mean romantic part of one’s interiority that has nothing to do with anyone else.
I guess I come back to the Fool card because it is so antithetical to the King of Swords.
However, the King of Swords also does not fear. This is very important.
It makes me wonder what the mind could be without the influence of unconscious pulls and bias. And without fear.
It often helps to pull other cards in relation to the King of Swords because it can shed light on what areas we need to exert more discipline, more reality, and less dreaminess.
So, naturally, I pulled the next two cards from the deck, and I got the Eight of Cups and the Chariot.
Both of these cards can take on very different meanings depending on how they show up in the reading. Pulled in conjunction, there is an energy of moving on but also of taking a time out to assess how to move on.
The Eight of Cups is a card of retreat. The Chariot is on a journey, but the sphinxes drawing the Chariot pause. They are not moving. Not yet.
Yet, there is a readiness.
This is a “face your shit” conjunction. Go inside yourself.
And since they’re clarifying the King of Swords, the message is clear: It’s time to really think something through. Do not follow your heart off a cliff.
The Chariot, in particular, speaks to balancing the nuance. The black sphinx and the white sphinx represent duality. They are pulled in separate directions. They will not let the chariot rider move forward until there is resolution. Ouch.
Naturally, I asked myself, “What needs resolution?” so I pulled another card. That turned into pulling seven cards, and I still don’t know the answer, so I won’t share more on that.
I’m better at giving other people readings. It’s hard to stay objective when reading for oneself. If anything, the King of Swords knows this terrain.
I know I cannot always stay objective when reading for myself because of these pulls, my personal bias towards readings the cards a certain way and wanting a certain outcome. I can typically tell when this is happening, which helps curb delusion at the very least.
When I read for myself, I have to step out of myself and sometimes even vocalize the reading the in third person to get a more objective read.
I have virtually no air in my chart. I think I have one Aquarius placement, but it’s an outer planet placement—Saturn in Aquarius, all the people (born 1991 to 1994, roughly) who went through their Saturn returns during the pandemic.
All this is to say that I find that I am out of my element with this King of Air. It’s like we speak different languages, and it’s hard for me to find a way in.
But today, he has something to teach me, and it feels like an important lesson.