Barbara Walker Tarot - Nine of Swords: Cruelty

Threatened by a circle of Inquisitors, a young dryad/druidess desperately seeks the protection of her tree, which may prove unable to save her. Though the medieval scholar Psellus called the druidesses eternal minds in earthly bodies, able to know men’s thoughts and foretell the future, they seemed powerless to invoke their tree spirits against the Inquisition’s cruelty. The Inquisitions’ nine swords stand for hatred, scandal, unreasoning violence, brutal neglect or abandonment, misery.