Belated Swords

Sorry for skipping last week: time is hard and unforgiving, not unlike swords. (Have you ever heard of a +3 Sword of Forgiveness? A Vorpal Blade of Letting Shit Go? Didn’t think so.)

Having gotten through the only-possibly-mitigated suck of the ten, we’re on to the court cards!

The Page of Swords

Okay so. The Tarot has the whole go-to-the-end-and-restart thing happening a lot, and if the tens are completion, the pages are the restart. Another way to look at it is that the tens are the most intense a particular element and its association in the world can be with people, and the pages are the beginning of internalizing that element.

If you assume that there’s a coherent thematic thing happening here, that’s why the Ten is made of woe and stabbing and the Page is actually doing pretty okay. They’re a young fair-haired person in a tunic, holding a sword and running around on some hills, like how The Sound of Music should have opened. There are some clouds in the background, but the sky’s mostly blue.

In number-and-element terms, this is a young woman who’s good with things of air (knowledge, power, freedom), or someone who’s good with air stuff in an initial, learning kind of way, without authority.  Ideally, this can be the result of going through the Ten of Swords: the more-or-less “okay” condition after that card is some version of “fuck it.” If the Ten was positive for you, this is you taking the power and knowledge you reached for in a moment of desperation and figuring out how to make it a reasonable part of your life. If it was negative, the Ten-to-Page transition means realizing that there’s life beyond the worst thing ever, that you actually aren’t as lost as you think, and that everyone whose good opinion you fretted over losing can go to hell.

The more complicated version is about new ideas and vision and THE FUTUUUUUURE, which may or may not be so bright as to require tinted glasses, and hopefully not in an eighties-cold-war sense. The Ten is disaster, but so is the Tower, and in both senses there’s often the context that it’s a disaster that needed to happen: burning the forest to clear out the undergrowth. In that case, this would be the Minor Arcana version of the Star: fresh vision, insights, hope.

It’s also about vigilance, grace, and a little secrecy, because you might be hopeful, but you’re not naive, especially if you consider this in the context of the Ten. Hope is great, rebirth is great, but what happened still happened, and you’re wiser about the ways people can dick you over. So it goes.

Knight of Swords

This guy’s racing along on a white horse, with clouds blowing in the background. He’s got a sword, a shield, and armor, his hair’s blowing back, and it’s all extreeeemely dramatic! He Knows Things! He’s going to Do Something About This! Does it matter what this is? Ideally.

This is a card about courage, recklessness, and good intentions, the best of pavingstones. This is about a person with an ideal about knowledge, or freedom, or power, who’s determined to make it happen–often regardless of the cost to them, and sometimes regardless of the cost to others.

One of the dangers of Swords, and of power and intellect, is believing that you know exactly the way things should be and that you have the right-slash-duty to correct them when they’re not. Being a Knight, there’s a certain militancy about the “correctness” here: this person might work at a soup kitchen, but they’re more likely to run for office or protest cuts to healthcare.

If you’re actually right and you can be effective, this is great: go save the whales, get a damn minimum-wage bill passed, punch a Nazi in the face!

A lot of people are not these things. At best, in these cases, they end up ardent but flailing activists, quickly burned out and convinced that nobody can do anything because they couldn’t manage the equivalent of running barefoot up a vertical wall, or scholars so obsessed with a particular theory that they can’t handle alternative points of view. (Religion is an easy target here, but I dated a geneticist for a while, and holy God do people get vicious about mouse DNA.) At worst…well, we’ve got a whole lot of history for “at worst.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad card to draw, or even to be, but it’s one that calls for caution. The more I see of Swords, the more I think that their negative associations come from the tendency of people who Really Like Abstract Theories to see those theories rather than the way things actually are, and to take personally any differences between the ideal and the real.

When the world outside your head doesn’t match the world inside it, it’s very rarely your job to make that happen, and it’s never your job alone. Forget that at some degree of peril.