AUTHOR’S NOTE: In my opinion, neither the Thoth nor the Waite-Smith 9 of Swords does justice to the Golden Dawn’s title of “Lord of Despair and Cruelty.” While both capture the essence of despair, the overall effect looks more like “Despair after Cruelty” than an equal distribution of the two: the former describes a condition and the latter its cause.

My take on cruelty is that it should exhibit an unflinching, inhumane mental or physical beat-down rather than the dispirited sentiment offered by these cards. They suggest the aftermath of persecution more than the act itself. Color-wise, the RWS Nine is dolorous and its Thoth counterpart is alternately bleak and smoldering. Crowley was never one to miss a nuance so I wonder why he favored the malice of Cruelty over the malaise of Despair in paring down the Order’s original title when the latter would have worked just as well with “Ruin” (10 of Swords). Maybe it didn’t say “Mars” with enough conviction? Perhaps with the semi-scenic presentation he was honoring his original intent to “execute a pack after the tradition of the Medieval Editors” as he did with many of the other Minor Arcana? It’s difficult to be non-pictorial with something as pointedly dynamic as cruelty.

I recently discovered Lon Milo DuQuette’s depiction of the 9 of Swords in his Tarot of Ceremonial Magic, and the figure of a woman being stabbed by nine swords from every angle perfectly expresses the idea of being remorselessly “attacked from all sides” that my understanding of cruelty demands: there is no place to hide, nowhere to turn for succor, no escape from the torment. Both of the more famous cards are inert to the point of indifference. Only the blood dripping from the swords of the Thoth version conveys any kind of “lust for result;” otherwise the images are static. (See the postscript for more on this.)

Both the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley assigned Mars in Gemini to this card, which emphasizes the prospect of mental rather than physical abuse. It suggests the 3 of Swords on steroids, but the RWS Three has no blood spurting from the wounds in the pierced heart, implying the “dry heaves” of desiccated or exhausted sorrow that has – or will soon – run its course, while the Thoth Nine is awash in it. (By the way, where are the tears in the Threes? I can hear Ozzy singing “No more tears!”) The RWS Three invokes a dry-eyed, cerebral reaction that has no “juice” in it after the shock of the initial assault, and the Thoth Three sheds petals but no arterial gusher; it sports only the blackened “dried blood” of the Saturnian background. Both are relatively arid while the Thoth Nine has the good grace to at least bleed a little. (Maybe the Threes could weep a few “crocodile tears” to make a reasonable show of emotion?)

Between the two Nines I would view the RWS scene as the epitome of despair, and the Thoth card as coming closer to the definition of cruelty without quite arriving since, compared to DuQuette’s version, it leaves too much to the imagination. As a rule, tarot art is too dignified to resort to the kind of sadism that cruelty signifies, but a little graphic wrack-and-ruin in these cards would be more in line with the Golden Dawn’s premise. As it is, we’re left with a psychological and philosophical approximation of the devastating ordeal with little or no visual substantiation. That’s perfectly fine for the “self-help” crowd interested in attaining awareness and advancement by overcoming duress, but to my mind as an action-and-event-oriented diviner it’s just another case of “Where’s the beef?”

Postscript: On a whim, I pulled out the 9 of Swords from one of my “Thoth clones,” Liber T: Tarot of Stars Eternal. Now there is some disturbing (and effective) symbolic cruelty. The bottom half is “all Thoth” but the top half shows an armored warrior slaying bunnies with a spear and laughing uproariously while a figure in the background nonchalantly plays the flute. It parallels the slaughtered-rabbit scene from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surrealistic 1970 “acid western” film, El Topo. The flute player reminds me that Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries was scored for the mini-quest in the old computer game Full Throttle where Ben, the biker hero, has to cross a minefield by wiping them out with a bunch of battery-operated, exploding bunnies while the music is punctuated by well-timed detonations masking the cymbal-and-tympany crescendos. (How’s that for obscure leporidaen trivia?)