Still Life with Tarot

I’m having a 5 of Wands kind of week. In some traditions 5 is a number of unity or even eros. It other traditions 5 is a number of strength and in some interpretations this became force, victory or battle. I think of the 5s as the struggling with others than can lead us closer to unity. Or farther from it. Not so great for my week, but wonderful as a subject.

Let’s take the 5 of Wands and look at it in  the 5 different contexts of my favorite reading the Gypsy.
The iconography of the 5 of Wands often shows a group of people at cross purposes. They are either hitting each other with sticks on purpose in a battle or they are hitting each other with sticks because they are trying to acheive a similiar goal and getting in each other’s way. Wands are our ambitions, our desires, our passions and our actions.

When I see the 5 of Wands in the column of cards designating the present, I can simply say - Hey look, people in your life are not cooperating with each other. They either can’t agree on an end or they can’t agree on a means. When I see the 5 of Wands in a column of cards designating partnership, I can say the exact same thing.

But what happens when the 5 of Wands appears in the column of self. A possibility is a similiar interpretation. People in your life are not cooperating with you and it is effecting your sense of self. It’s dominating your thoughts or keeping you from moving on with your own intent. However, the 5 of Wands can also represent conflicts in the psyche. Your own passions and ambitions may be at odds. Or your actions are not expressive of your actual desires.

It can be easy to confuse the self with the internal action of meditation, but when the 5 of Wands appears in the meditation column it poses a question or two or three or even five. Questions derived from the 5 of Wands might be:
Why are the people around you not cooperating with each other and you ? Do they have different goals ? Different desires ? What part do you play in this ?
And finally, what happens when the 5 of Wands appears in the column for recommended actions, Yang, where to put your energy ? The first time I ever saw that I was puzzled. Why would the cards say to put energy and effort into clashing with others ?

And then I recognized we shouldn’t always cooperate. Sometimes resistance is a good thing. Sometimes we need to stand up for our passions. Sometimes we need conflict for a group to establish its motives. Wouldn’t it be awful to discover too late that you were never working toward the same goal at all, because no one ever pushed the point ? Sometimes we do need to take our ball and go home. There are times when going along to keep the peace doesn’t serve our needs or the needs of others.

This entry was posted Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 11:34 am and is filed under Reading, Minor Arcana. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.