Swords is one of the four suits of the Minor Arcana, the fifty-six numbered and court cards that make up the larger part of a tarot deck. In the elemental scheme of the Western esoteric tradition the suit is attributed to the element of Air, and its cards concern thought, conflict, speech and the intellect; ideas, decisions, strife and the cutting edge of the mind.
The suit and its element
The tarot began in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, its four suits matching those of ordinary Italian playing cards. The elemental correspondences read here, Wands to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, Coins to Earth, were formalised much later, chiefly by French occultists of the nineteenth century and by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, who wove the suits into a wider system of magic and astrology.
The suit is described here within that documented interpretive tradition; the elemental attribution is a convention of Western occultism rather than a feature of the game from which the cards descend.