Tag: 5 of swords

Card for the Week of 15 Sept 25

Here is something a little different for the card of the week.

Daily meditation Tarot is a fantastic way to learn Tarot. The same idea can be extended to a card for the week. It is a next-step exercise that is more about building your intuition and general energy sense.

It’s easy to do.

Shuffle your deck, however you like. Shuffling is helpful because it clears any old energy from previous readings and ‘wakes up’ the deck (for lack of a better way of describing it)

Choose a card, any way you like. Cut the deck, fan the deck, draw from the top….whatever makes you happy.

In fact, making yourself happy is kind of the point of the card I drew, the Five of Swords.

It is often about ego and conflict. But the vibe here is internal, and I get mental images of the Five of Wands to go along with this. Put it together and it is about internal conflict. What do you NOT want to do that you are forcing yourself to gut it out and do? Where do you feel resistance? What part of this coming week do you want to block or avoid. What about the current situation that feels blocked or like it is blocking you?

Learn from that. Road blocks have signs on them. Detours are still a path forward. Or a message that maybe you were going the wrong way. Or a confirmation that the new path you’ve been considering is indeed the right one.

Like a daily meditation, it can help to put the card somewhere you can see it during the course of the week – someplace safe, like a bed side table or something. Whenever you see the card, take a second to be in the moment. Feel the energy, think a little how your initial impressions have connected (or not) with the week as it unfolds.

If you want to learn more about how to do your own daily meditation Tarot, PeaceTarot: Tarot as a Way to Peaceful Thoughts in Troubled Times is available as a pay what you want .pdf download in the TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi shop.

New Week – New Layout

Introducing the NEW TaoCraft Taijitu layout for a collective look at the week ahead. “You Choose” readings return next week. Order your TaoCraft Taijitu Tarot reading HERE

Thanks for watching! Likes, subs and shares are always appreciated. Private readings, memberships, and virtual coffee all help support the Sage Sips blog.

Taijitu is another name for the famous yin-yang symbol that inspired this layout.

The Yin card (right) shows the energies that you are pulling toward you (the dark part of the symbol) and energies that are growing in influence (the white dot in the black half)

The Yang card shows things you are resisting or need to push away and release (the white part of the symbol) These are energies that are diminishing in influence (the black dot in the white half)

The Harmony card suggests how to flow forward with these energies instead of fighting the currents. This card suggests a good next step in your journey.

These blog readings are just a glimpse of the general, collective energy. It might fit for you, or it might not. If it does, great! The ideas are yours to ponder and use as you see fit. If not, don’t worry. Feel free to use the search bar and browse the archives. Type in a Tarot card or topic and you might find something helpful in the post archives. I’ve been reading cards professionally for over 20 years, blogging for a lot of that, so there is plenty to read! Although I don’t do in person, party, online or phone readings now, I still have personalized readings by email (they are my best readings anyway) available to help support the cost of writing and hosting this website.

TaoCraft Taijitu Tarot for the week of 31 March 2025

Yin card: The Empress. The turn of seasons can help support your mood. It’s a good week to touch grass literally and figuratively.

Yang card: Five of Swords. Rise above the mischief. Find your inner bada$$ get over it. The storm is beginning to pass and there is recovery work to be done.

Harmony card: The Lovers Focus on what you really want, not one the means that you think will bring it. Look to the destination and the way will become clearer. (Inspired by The Witch’s Coin by Christopher Penczak)

Starting tomorrow, there is something special planned for NaPoWriMo in April. Stay tuned! See you at the next sip!

Choose your card: sound and fury.

Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee

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Right or left, choose the card that feels like the right one for you here, today, now. Pause the video if you need to think about it. Restart to see the reveal.

Queen of Swords: Claim your space, and speak your truth. If you want to be heard, you have to say something first.

Five of swords: sound and fury can signify nothing. Are you really under attack, or is your ego bruised?

Choose Your Card: Eclipse Day Tarot Reading

Sage Sips Blog is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee

YOU CHOOSE:

Your choices are everything. They are the cause that brings your future into effect. Tarot helps to guide those choices so you can make good ones.

Tarot doesn’t tell you what will happen in life. Tarot helps you figure out what to do when life happens.

Death: OF COURSE this is your eclipse day card. Eclipses symbolize change and transformation. That is exactly what the death card is about. Only an empty cup can be filled. Let the old and toxic go and welcome the new and better in.

Five of swords: The price of victory is too high. Is this really a hill worth dying on? Redefine your goals. Work toward a victory that makes sense. You don’t have to prove your point based on blind principle.

High Priestess: Magic and spirituality come only from within. Yes, it really is nothing more than the moon’s shadow. The magic and mystery is up to you to feel and find. music via youtube shorts Allyman’s Tarot Deck used with permission @publishinggoblin1072

Newsletter 14 September 23

Meditation Tarot reading & newsletter

Admit it.

If you don’t know, you will later if you stick with this for any amount of time.

Own more than one Tarot deck, that is.

If you are a Tarot enthusiast you probably have a deck or two around, especially if you read very often. If you are a professional, it goes double. We all end up with more than one deck. Most are self-purchased, which shows what baloney the superstition about being gifted your first deck can be. The tradition of it has value, I suppose. It would boost the confidence of a young reader and tie them to some degree with a mentor, or at least connect them to a more experienced Tarot reader one way or another.

Some of the professional Tarot readers I know have dozens. Oodles and shelf loads even. I’m not a collector by nature and started off swearing that a good reader should only ever need one deck – so of course I have 10.

Choosing a deck for a reading is the same as dealing with reversals. When you get right down to it, it is a matter of pure intuition.

With reversals, I just feel my way through it and decide if the reversal should be considered as PART of the card’s message, or whether it was just happenstance in which case I just flip the card right side up and move on.

Same with picking up the deck for these collective energy blog readings or private email readings. For in-person readings, I carry two decks in unmarked tarot bags with me and let the client choose. I have one deck, the only one gifted to me, that I use only to read for myself. I use the Alleyman’s, Heart of Stars, and 1909 RWS primarily here in the blog – the first two because their creators have graciously granted me permission to do so and the latter because it is in the public domain.

Often I’ll compare and contrast the different decks when I’m doing a one card post like this. Different decks visually capture different facets of the deck. You can do the same thing by doing an online image search to browse different decks.

Today’s card is a good example. Some cards use fairly consistent images across decks. The three of swords, for instance. It almost alwasy has some iteration of three swords in or around a heart. I don’t know if that is by design, by coincidence or the sheer strength of the card’s presence in the collective unconscious. Other cards, like the five, differ. The RWS above gives a sense of “cleaning up” after a battle, both in the literal sense and in the modern meaning of profiting to the max. The figure seems to be picking up dropped swords, smiling and making gains from the suffering of others.

The Heart of Stars portrays the figure as more egotistical, even sadistic or disturbed taking a form akin to the Joker in the Dark Knight series of Batman movies.

Witches Tarot with art by Matt Evans shows five swords arranged tips together and downward in the sky with a dragonfly and fairies (I think hinting at the trickster wishes granted in Fea and Genie lore)

The five of swords made by Sam Dow for the Alleyman’s Tarot shows a throne made of a tree with swords in the roots.

All show victory but at a high cost or some sort of concurrent loss, but all have subtle differences that shift the emphasis.

The advice today is basically try not to shoot yourself in the foot as the saying goes. Ask yourself if the victory, the win, the competition is worth the cost.

Weekly Digest:

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*card image Waite Smith 1909 Tarot, public domain

Pigs and Squirrels

Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee

Some days you just call it a day

Hello and welcome to Sage’s Short Sip Tarot. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the five of swords. It’s one of those cards that gives the swords suit its reputation for being doom and gloom bearer of bad tidings. Not everything in life is all cotton candy and unicorns. It’s Tarot’s job to get in our face about the messy parts of life as much as it is to inspire us with the pretty ones. Tarot’s symbolism is both because life and nature is both, to borrow the sentence pattern from that line in that movie The Craft.

The five of swords is, at least in part, about winning at all costs and when the costs are too high. Hannibal and the elephants he used to cross the alps and win a victory in one battle against the Romans, but ultimately lose the war is the classic example of this. He started with 37 elephants and only one survived or some such thing.

Of course, my favorite telling of the Hannibal story is Eddie Izzard’s brilliant stand up bit about the Latin language including something about elephants looking like squirrels in the front and pigs in the back.

Thinking of that favorite piece of video (it’s on the internet, and I recommend it) might be a little carry over from yesterday’s Tarot Turnover where we talk about how to read Tarot on the members only blog. Yesterday’s card was the Page of Cups, which always carries a little bit of humor and absurdity. I mean, it shows a dude on a beach staring at a fish in a cup. Whatever other symbolism that may hold, it is on its face a little silly.

So are pigs and squirrels.

When we combine the two cards we get a reminder very apropro to a Monday morning like this.

Ridiculousness and absurdity might be a clue.

When things are dramatically not going your way, when you run headlong straight into a wall, it might be time to pack up your pigs and squirrels and cross the Alps another day.

Winston Churchill may have equated victory with survival, but is that really the victory we are stressing over? If this card speaks to you today, it may be time to stop and evaluate your goals. If it is survival, yes, by all means do that.

If your goal is a quick mocho-choco -frozo-latte when there is a line at the coffee shop, then this is your cue to ease up, and define victory a little differently. Be kind to yourself AND the local barista. Is this really as big of a deal as it feels? Is it worth it? What do we define as a success? Do we need to re-visit and change our goals and our definition of success? What is really, really worth every bit of your persistence and resources and what should be left for another day?

Thanks so much for reading and listening. I wish you and all of your pigs and squirrels a lovely Monday.

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See you at the next sip!

Watch Out for those Petards

Members only learn-to-read Tarot post featuring the Five of Swords, hoisting and petards now available on the ko-fi blog.

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Only Human

TaoCraft Short Sip is a Tarot contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee

It’s only human.

Hello and welcome to the TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the five of swords from the Alleyman’s Tarot with art for this card by Sam Dow. This is my new favorite five of swords.

Ever since the Waite Smith Tarot deck of 1909 either created or popularized illustrated minor arcana cards, the five of swords has generally depicted someone striking a pose with swords at sunset. Mark Evans artwork for the Witches Tarot shows a dragonfly flying upward despite a whole frolick of fairies and five swords hanging over it like Damocles’ was having a clearance sale. All of these are heavy on the victory part of the phrase “pyrrhic victory” as they should. This certainly isn’t the full on defeat, stay down there and heal vibe that you see with the ten of swords.

Still, this card can touch an uncomfortable meaning. Life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. Mistakes, for example. They are only human. Sometimes our posing at sunset victories come at the price of mistakes. In the Light Seers deck, the figure on the card is holding his forehead with a regretful vibe and a sense of ‘what the heck did I just do’. With this card, the silhouette figure looks like he is sitting in a chair and having a full on sulk. As any toddler will demonstrate, sometimes you just have to stick your lower lip out and have a good pout.

But then comes the trick of it. While you are pouting, you can also be re-assessing. If you learn from your mistakes, a pyrrhic victory is still a victory even when the thing you learn is what NOT to do next time.

Thank you so much for reading and listening. I always appreciate your likes, subs, shares, follows, questions and comments.

Speaking of comments, the comments have spoken and I’ll be cutting the deck into three stacks and drawing from the right stack for the month of August. We’ll try again in September and see if we can collectively come up with something different.

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See you at the next sip!

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It’s hard to win a battle with yourself.

TaoCraft Short Sip is a Tarot contemplation for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today is the five of swords.

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip: Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the Five of Swords. I think the energy today is perfectly summed up in the Pamela Smith artwork on this particular card. The main figure is in a wide stance, battle ready and surrounded by a stack of sword while the other figures face other directions and look for all the world like they are just taking a little stroll on the beach. The water imagery here is important. The chill people are all facing the water. Mr. Stabby Pants in the foreground isn’t connected with the water or the other people at all.

I don’t know who asked”What if they gave a war and nobody came?” but this card hints at the same thing. It’s hard to win a battle when you are the only one that shows up. It’s even harder to win a battle within yourself.

Everyone feels out of sorts sometimes. Everyone has a pair or two of very cranky pants that we wear on occasion. Everyone knows that it a bad idea to take that crankiness out on other people.

Taking it out on yourself isn’t any better.

When you are in a bad mood, feeling sorry for yourself or thinking of yourself as a victim just pushes the spiral downward. It takes a Herculean effort to turn things around and go in the other direction.

Of course, I’m not talking about depression or other mental health conditions. That is something for genuine care, not a Tarot blogcast. I’m talking about the few-days glitch. The card points toward those times when you feel punchy, out of sorts, cranky, gnarly and just not quite yourself. What do you do if you are feeling ready to pick a fight but you are the only one around?

Sometimes turning a bad mood around takes more than a Herculean effort. It’s way worse. Sometimes turning around a cranky pants day takes acceptance and time. The more you fight and struggle the more disrupted and tangled your feelings and energy can become. Sometimes feeling out of sorts is the flow you have to go with – but not act on. Just honestly acknowledging your own pain, frustration, anger, fear or sadness can take the edge off of it.

In her book Be Water, My Friend Shannon Lee describes a day when her father, Bruce Lee, was so angry that he punched the South China Sea. That afternoon in a boat began the journey that eventually gave us the “Be water, my friend” interview that has inspired so many.

Bruce Lee’s philosophy is rooted in Taoist philosophy and the Tao Te Ching famously teaches that “He who conquers others is strong. He who conquers himself is mighty.”

If the Five of Swords has crossed your path, be on the lookout for letting a bad mood get the better of you. Watch out for self-sabotage or thinking of yourself as a victim. Unleash your inner awesome onto acknowledging, flowing, and adapting.

Even on a cranky pants day, be mighty, my friend.

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A Sip of Tarot: The Struggle Is Real

A pyrrhic victory is a win at enormous cost. You win, but there is absolute carnage everywhere by the time you are done. The name comes from ancient history. I’m not sure, but I think elephants were involved (cue Eddie Izzard – I love her sketch on Latin)

The five of swords tend to be, ultimately, a positive energy card, hinting at likely victory (the dude on the card looks kind of smiley) but you still have to consider the cost. One of the meanings I’ve seen for the card is ‘stubborness’

One of my favorite internet memes is paraphrased G.K. Chesterson quote, “A [warrior] fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him.” I think the meme’s substitution of “warrior” for Chesterson’s “true soldier” speaks to the essence of a warrior. It speaks to the difference between defense and blind violence.

There will always be challenges in life. There will be times we have to defend our limits and boundaries. The struggle is real, but what price victory? Are you fighting to project (your idea) or protect (those you love)?