Spades

Spades is one of the four suits of the standard French-suited playing pack, and in the tradition of cartomancy, fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards, it carries a settled range of meaning: conflict, intellect and hardship.

Suit, element and tarot parallel

When cartomancers and occultists set the playing-card suits beside the four suits of the tarot's Minor Arcana, Spades is paired with the tarot suit of Swords and with the classical element of Air. This scheme of suit, element and tarot equivalence was systematised in the Western esoteric revival, notably by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, though the practice of reading fortunes from a common deck is older and more widespread.

The correspondence is one convention among several, other writers have exchanged the elemental attributions of two suits, and it is described here as part of the documented cartomantic tradition rather than as a fixed rule.

The English name of this suit is a borrowing from a different pack, and the shape on the card is a third thing again.

Pique, the pike

In French the suit is pique, the head of a pike or spear, and the sign is a pointed leaf-like shape on a short stem. That is what the French designers of the later fifteenth century drew.

Spade, from swords

English calls it spades, from the Italian spade, meaning swords, the suit it displaced in the Latin-suited packs used earlier. The digging implement the modern English word denotes has nothing to do with it. Clubs acquired its English name by the same route, from Italian bastoni. In both cases the old Latin suit name stayed with the slot when the French sign moved into it.

Why the French signs exist at all

The French pattern replaced pictorial suits, German hearts, bells, acorns and leaves and Latin cups, coins, swords and batons, with four flat two-colour silhouettes that a stencil could print. Production cost is the reason this pattern spread and the others did not.

In cartomancy

Readers map the sign onto the sword suit of the Latin packs, which is the source of its association with conflict, severance and hard news. The mapping is a reading convention, and in this case it is also the historical name reasserting itself: the suit is called swords in English by accident and read as swords on purpose.