By Sarah Taylor
There is, or has been, a sense of loss that might have carried with it some considerable pain. But what has fallen away has created a clearing — the rubble indicative of structures that may have felt safe, but which were standing in the way of clarity and insight.
In the first card, the Five of Swords, if you’re able to look close enough, you’ll see that the German writing speaks of ‘anxiousness over defeat or loss’. The card isn’t about defeat or loss — it is about the anxiousness associated with defeat or loss. That’s an important distinction, and it may bear fruit to analyse it:
Are you mourning what was lost? Or are you focussed on the sensation of loss for its own sake?
It might be that you are no stranger to loss; it might be that what you have lost in the past has been significant, and a source of deep and legitimate grief. Is what you are facing now the same thing? Or is it an echo from some distant, perhaps buried, memory? No-one can know this apart from you, but to know the difference viscerally — in your body — is akin to experiencing the clarity that the figure has access to as he stands on the site of (his own) defeat.
Once bitten, twice shy. And he has been bitten for sure — look at the destruction around him. However, I find the structure beneath him to be dense and unyielding; lifeless. This isn’t a particularly attractive scene at all. It is a wasteland — it has the feeling of a derelict city after a battle, but one that wasn’t in tune with its surroundings. A concrete jungle, if you will. He has my empathy. There is loss and he is in a landscape that will no longer shelter him.
Yet there is the presence of two things. The first is the next card in the Swords suit, which isn’t in the reading, but which is implied: the Six of Swords, which marks a transition away from strife and towards new lands.