Five of Wands.
Five swinging, and not one blow landing.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
Five young men on one mound, five staves crossing at every angle. Not one blow is landing. Every tunic is a different colour, nobody is in uniform, and nobody has fallen down.
Five people swinging and nobody hurt is not a fight. It is a room where everybody is talking at once, which makes it noise and cost rather than damage. Whatever this is costing you in time and attention, nobody in it is bleeding, and you can stop counting it as a war.
Four things people go to on this card
- the staves
You went to the staves, crossing at every angle, and not one of them actually striking anybody.
Noise rather than damage. Five people are swinging and nobody has landed a blow, and nobody will, because the staves are all in the air at once and none of them is aimed.
So the cost is not injury. It is time, and attention, and the grind of a thing that never resolves because nothing in it ever connects. If you have been bracing for the hit, you can stop bracing; what you should be counting is the hours.
What have you been treating as a fight that is actually five people talking at once?
- their clothes
It was the clothes you noticed: five young men, five different colours, nobody in a uniform.
A group with no side to be on. Nobody here belongs to anybody, and that is why it will not resolve: there is no line down the middle for it to resolve across. Two sides can make peace. Five colours can only get tired.
If you are in something like this at the moment, the useful move is not to win. It is to work out whether there is even a shared question, or five people answering five different ones in the same voice.
Are the people in this arguing about the same question, or five different ones?
- their faces
Their faces held you: boys rather than soldiers, and none of them looks frightened.
This is practice. Ability gets made in the open, in a mess, against people who are also making it up, and nobody is being hurt while everybody gets better. The faces say it: interest, not fear.
That reading is not a consolation. It only holds if you are actually learning. Ask what you have got better at during this that you would not have learned in a quiet room, and if the answer is nothing, the faces are lying to you.
What have you got better at in this mess that you could not have learned quietly?
- the ground
You went down to the ground, a bare brown mound with a little green on it, and everyone standing on the same small piece.
One hill, five people. Nothing is wrong with any of them. The space is too small for the number in it, and that is the whole of the trouble, drawn as a patch of earth.
That is most workplaces, most families in one house, most projects with two leads. The fix in this picture is not a winner. It is more ground, and if you are in it, the question is where the ground could come from.
Is this a disagreement, or just too many people on one piece of ground?
Its ten degrees
The Golden Dawn gave the Five of Wands 0° to 10° of Leo, ruled by Saturn, and Book T calls it the Lord of Strife. The Sun is in it from 23 July to 2 August. The decan page for this card.
The wheel runs on from here. The decan before this one is Four of Cups, the Moon in Cancer, 12 July to 23 July. The one after is Six of Wands, Jupiter in Leo, 2 August to 12 August. All thirty-six, in order.
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Five of Wands on Geburah, severity, in Atziluth, the world of fire: every five is Geburah, in its own suit's world. It is the fifth place in the Tree of Life spread.
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.
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