5 of Swords: Aquarius I
Hermetic Title: Defeat
Decan ruler (Chaldean): Venus
Corresponding majors: Empress (Venus) and The Star (Aquarius)
Dates: January 20 - January 29
What is going on here!? As we arrive in the Aquarius half of Saturn's domain, the 5 of Swords reveals to us the aftermath of what looks like an extremely uncomfortable confrontation. Someone has won, but at what price? Behind him, his foes stand stunned, calculating, or grieving, like victims of a mugging. Now what will they do? Hurt feelings radiate from the scene, as if carried by a cold and shifting wind. The winner's smirk suggests that in the thrill of victory, he has yet to comprehend the gravity of the good will he has lost. This is what I call "the card of winners and losers". Whatever game we play, someone must win and someone must lose, and we all have feelings about that.
The Passivity Hypothesis
The major arcana associated with the 5 of Swords are The Empress (Venus) and the Star (Aquarius). Both are faces of the Goddess - faces we normally associate with fertility and hope; creativity and peace. None of that seems to be much in evidence in the 5 of Swords! Why? Where is the Venus in this Venus-ruled first decan of Aquarius?
Tabula Mundi ‘s rendition of the 5 of Swords Passivity Hypothesis
In assigning this card to this decan, the Golden Dawn grappled with this question too. Their answer was this: it all comes down to being a 5. Fives, as we know, are notoriously difficult in tarot; in esoteric tarot, this has to do with the fifth sephira, Geburah, on the Tree of Life. Geburah ("Severity") is the sphere of Mars. So, if you go by the Golden Dawn's Liber Θ, the 5 of Swords is the sum of Mars + Venus = conflict in relationships. Crowley put it another way: "Geburah, as always, produces disruption; but as Venus here rules Aquarius, weakness rather than excess of strength seems the cause of disaster. The intellect has been enfeebled by sentiment. The defeat is due to pacifism."
The most memorable phrasing of this viewpoint has to be Lon Duquette's: "Venus rules Aquarius and, for a moment, she is very happy to have him as her date. After all, they're both pacifists. They are a friendly, mellow, and sentimental couple. Unfortunately, this sensitive pair has shown up at the wrong party. A terrible fight has broken out in a very rough and well-armed area of Qabalahville—Geburah, the house of Mars... Naturally, Venus and Aquarius volunteer to be peacemakers, but they are just too nice, too peaceful, too weak to handle themselves in this violent neighborhood." (from Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, Lon Milo Duquette)
This is a consistent argument as far as it goes, but I've never felt it explains everything that's going on in the 5 of Swords. It's a really complex card, and to me it's not enough to say "Mars cancels out Venus" or "the weak suffer at the hands of the strong" - though those statements may well be true. There are a few other ideas about the Empress and the Star and their relationship with each other which I think are worth drawing out.
Beauty in Exile
Again, the correspondences: Venus = the Empress, Aquarius = the Star. What does Venus have to do with a Star? The answer is immediate. Although Venus is a planet, we have long called her the "Evening Star" or the "Morning Star" depending on whether it is dawn or dusk when she accompanies the Sun at the horizon. Astrologers associate the Venus cycle with the Sumerian goddess myth of Inanna, known to the Babylonians as Ishtar. Inanna descends to the underworld realm of her sister Ereshkigal; at each of seven gates she must give up her raiment, her totems of power, till she stands naked before her sister's dark throne.
A graphic novel version of the Inanna myth, by Michael Jessing
If you look at the Empress and the Star, you can catch a glimpse of mythos in action: the Empress is the Goddess clothed, adorned, empowered - she wears the very stars as her crown. But as the Star, she is naked; it is night, and she is dwarfed by the stars that once crowned her. Some versions suggest that Inanna tried to usurp her sister's throne, and that she was killed, her corpse hung on a hook. Winners and losers! For Inanna and Ereshkigal cannot reign together - only one can prevail at a time in one kingdom.
But this story is no tragedy: Inanna's servitors tend her with the water and food of life, and she rises up renewed. And this, too, is part of the Star archetype - the purifying renewal of land and stream, the rebirth of hope.
We can also consider the Aquarian myth of Ganymede - kidnapped for his beauty and compelled to serve as cupbearer the gods. So the 5 of Swords, we can say, touches on themes of leaving home - whether by force or by choice. It touches on themes of sibling rivalry and insecurity; of belonging and not belonging.
It also raises the issue of competition between women - the insecurities we struggle with, our anxieties around beauty, the way we attack ourselves and others even as we suffer from a chronic desire to please.
Proximity and Distance.
As Venus, the Empress attracts, draws near, makes intimate. Look at her world, so carefully tended. Within the shelter of the trees, she has made a little paradise: running water, cultivated grain, a soft and cushioned place to sit; what's more, she shelters new life within her. Every layer is an invitation to approach. It's safe, warm, and comfortable in here. Why would you ever want to leave?
As Aquarius, the Star is remote - its ruler Saturn was the planet traditionally farthest from the beating heart of humanity. If Saturn is the wall-builder, Capricorn designates the kingdom within the wall, and Aquarius the cold outer space beyond it. Here - excommunicated, unique, untethered - we are free to look back upon the civilization we left behind and imagine what a better world might look like. We are free to think outside of the box - in fact, we have no choice but to, because there is no going back inside it!
“'Remember that the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them.” [UPDATE: the astrologer Gray Crawford observed to me that in this image Galadriel is in fact drawing down the light of Venus!]
One face of the Goddess is the sweet refuge of the familiar; one face is the allure of the possible. One offers comfort; one offers hope. The 5 of Swords concerns itself with both, forsaking the familiar and striking out for new lands: the name of its game is Risk. The definition of risk: abandoning comfort and embracing hope. And while both native country and promised land each endear themselves to us in different ways, the passage between them is fraught with peril.
Troubled Waters, Ragged Sky
Water is integral to the Star's imagery. It's also an implicit presence when we talk about Aquarius. With its archetypal blending of sea and sky and its proximity to liquid Pisces, airy Aquarius is often mistaken for a water sign. (Even the Watcher Star of Air, Fomalhaut - once located in tropical Aquarius, now in Pisces by precession - resides in the Southern Fish constellation. And have you noticed that in sci-fi, all spacefaring vocabulary is based on naval vocabulary?)
There is water in the Empress, and there is water in the 5 of Swords, too. But I only just noticed this week that you can trace the flow from one card to the next.
Now no one is pretending this was deliberate planning on Pixie's part. But if you follow the water as it spills continuously from frame to frame, a suggestive narrative emerges. The Empress' waterfall is the source; the Star's pool is the destination. In between we encounter a turbid current, its surface rifled by high winds. If we see the Empress as origin and the Star as endpoint, the 5 of Swords becomes a fraught Middle Passage. It stands for the long, dangerous journey of the immigrant or refugee. Leaving behind everything that once sheltered us, we strike out for a life where we begin with nothing - nothing but freedom. (The egregious exception is slavery, where the passage ended in bondage, and the struggle towards freedom has taken centuries. In this case, the Star would play a later role: wayfinding by Polaris figured prominently in Underground Railroad stories of migration.)
Small wonder that the 5 of Swords grasps desperately for every possible advantage along the way! The calculus of risk and survival leaves little breathing room for empathy.
Also worth noting is the chaotic sky. Those scratched and rough gray forms aloft are Smith's approximation of stratus fractus, the cloud formations of brightly brutal windy days and choppy seas. Only one other card in the entire Waite-Smith deck shows stratus fractus, and that is the Knight of Swords. This is no coincidence. The 5 of Swords is the central decan of the Knight of Swords, otherwise known as "Air of Air". From the 5 of Swords, Lord of Defeat, the Knight draws his combative nature, his penchant for verbal sparring, and his motormouth. (I have a son born in this decan. He is a saber-fencing loudmouth who is literally always on the move.)
The Impossible Dream
A better life: it is the dream of every exile, and yet its beginnings are inevitably humble. Without family, currency, even language, each newcomer makes their way starting with virtually nothing. One Latin version puts it this way: miserie, paupertatis et analecte - "misery, poverty, and collecting crumbs." Agrippa's version speaks of "poverty and usefulness"; the Astrolabium Planum image shows a woman spinning. (How many 19th-century American dreams began with menial jobs in the textile industry?!)
Curiously, a number of commentators mention a peacock, which in some East Asian cosmologies represented transmutation. The peacock, it was believed, consumed poison and metabolized it into resplendent plumage. Toxins into beauty - a peculiarly Venusian theme, and reminiscent of another Venus decan, Scorpio III.
Aquarius is famous for its embrace of what seems hardly plausible: to be an idealist is to have a durable hope, even when facing the perpetually impossible. This entails a thorough acquaintance with inequality: the distance between what you long for and what you have. All aspiration comes packaged with a free side order of frustration and thwarted desire.
Thus the 5 of Swords can be a card of longing, sharp and bittersweet. It can apply to romantic feelings too,when they are unrequited. Longing is the double-edged sword that fans desire without satisfying it; it creates avid interest without the opportunity to pursue it.
The Everyday 5 of Swords
What does the 5 of Swords look like in real life, for those of us who are not emigrating, taking big risks or pursuing impossible dreams? It looks extremely uncomfortable, is what. I primarily experience this as the pain of comparison. X is so successful! Y's house is so clean! Everyone else's sh*t is so incredibly together! It's the classic "judging your insides by someone else's outsides" Thanks to social media, practically everyone now dances the 5 of Swords dance on a daily basis.
Wherever there is unfairness, the 5 of Swords rears its unprepossessing head. Feel guilty because you're not doing enough? Resentful because you're doing too much? That's 5 of Swords territory. It's there wherever there are "in" groups and pariahs and wherever there is Schadenfreude. Gossip, envy, pretense, snark, FOMO - they all run on 5 of Swords fuel.
But it's not all terrible. The experiences encoded in this card teach us about risk. (The elemental opposite of the 5 of Swords is the 5 of Pentacles, and one of my meanings for that is insurance.) Every time we take a chance in the hopes of doing a bit better for ourselves, we embrace the 5 of Swords. We look into its funhouse mirror and say You know what? Gonna do it anyway! And often as not, once we plunge into that icy water, those frigid skies so far out on the fringes of the weird, it's not nearly as bad as we feared.
The Takeaway
When you draw the 5 of Swords, be on the lookout for impossible expectations and uncharitable thoughts directed at yourself or others. These specters are like hope (the Star) turned against itself. It is good to have dreams and aspirations, yes? But not when they give you a stress ulcer!
The key to handling the 5 of Swords effectively lies in the 4 of Swords, but as with all swords, you must handle it wisely. The 4 of Swords is the experience of sitting in stillness with your thoughts. If your thoughts are jangly 5 of Swords thoughts, and you dwell on them, perseverating on them until that picture window in the corner dominates your whole viewscreen, you will make yourself crazy. Because 5 + 4 = 9, and we all know what the 9 of Swords feels like.
However, you can use the stillness of the 4 of Swords to subtract from the power of the 5. If you recognize that those 5 of Swords preoccupations are just one way of looking at the world, you can externalize them. (I do this through meditation, a core 4 of Swords practice.) You can see them for the fiction they are - a picture window that colors your perspective - and laugh at their absurdity. Because 5 - 4 = 1, and we know the Ace of Swords sees clearly even when the sky is chockful of stratus fractus. The Ace of Swords is that core glimmer of hope which inspired us in the first place, the dream we invoked at the beginning.
Finally, here is W.H. Auden's unforgettable poem, The More Loving One. Although it's ostensibly about unrequited love, it is broadly applicable to all situations where the thing desired seems impossibly distant. If you, like me, exist in a state of chronic longing for an indefinable and ever-changing something, a dose of Auden may help you to feel seen.
This track by Angel Olsen seems to me to capture the peculiarly sharp flavor of the Venus decan of Aquarius - the mirrors, the bleak longing for a beauty that seems unattainable, the hope and regret.
The More Loving One
W. H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.