Brief Post-Vibecamp reflections on Swords Arcana
Vibe-checking the Tarot
Introduction.
In a standard Tarot deck, one suit gives notably worse vibes than the rest. The numbered swords cards are alarming, featuring blindfolds, bondage, tombs, pierced hearts, battlefields, and worst of all, insomnia. The final card is just a corpse stabbed with 10 swords and left on the ground. The other suits do depict some tension, unhappiness, and even combat, but there is no question that the Swords cards make most of us much more uncomfortable, at least on first glance.
What does that mean? Is it a problem? If so, what is to be done?
Bad can be good.
Having a suit for bad feels isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Depending on how you approach the deck, it might be an asset.
Sometimes we want the deck to function as a catalogue of specific events and developments, such as when using it as a procedural story generator, or if you were to attempt actual oracular forecasting. If the deck is to generate narrative, it makes sense for it cover a full range of possibilities, including various forms of loss, tragedy, failure, crime, and other forms of suffering. Grouping thematically similar events together just makes sense, and it doesn’t really matter if some cards are happy (or fortunate) and others just suck.
Psychologizing Tarot doesn’t by itself create a problem, since psychology has its own dark side.
Increasingly we tend to use the tarot as a vehicle for exploring psychological traits, types, and experiences. Suit symbols are interpreted as signifiers for personal faculties (intellect, emotion, energy, etc.), for temperaments (sanguine, choleric, ENTP, etc.), or for other intermediary abstractions (“Air” or “Water” when treated as thematic bundles rather than actual substances).
Human psychology can of course be dangerous and unpleasant, and often is. Having “bad” or “scary” cards in the mix may be entirely appropriate, especially if you link cards to transient moods or modes rather than long-term dispositions. Even at the disposition level, disagreeable, melancholic, spiteful, combative, and other “negative” personalities exist and it may be useful to have cards reflect them.
When we move to what I tend to call developmental or therapeutic tarot, apparent problems emerge.
Much of the psychological work we do in modern Tarot proceeds from a particular set of assumptions.
That the 4-suit system divides up the space of human experience or capability into 4 equally significant and valuable sections
That these sections should be thought of as balancing, harmonizing, or co-creating each other much like yin and yang or the generating cycle in Wuxing
That healthy development involves integrating and balancing all the suit energies, all of which have substantial and equivalent worth.
Once we’ve installed such a framework, the facially unpleasant character of Swords appears to become a problem. We will have “assigned” something else to the “Swords” slot (perhaps intellect, or “Air”, or science, wit, etc.), and the overt bleakness of the Swords may seem to conflict with our assumption of equal value. We then find ourselves asking,
“What’s wrong with (X), such that representing it with the Swords would make sense?”
or
“Given that X is good, how can we account for or explain away the bad vibes on the cards that represent it?”
Narrativizing the suits heightens the tension.
Another common interpretive move is to take each set of 10 suit cards are interpret it as a story. If you combine this with the assumption of developmental tarot, each suit tells the story of a person devoted to expressing or cultivating the associated trait, value, or faculty.
Taking the suits as sequences makes the Swords even more alarming. Now Swords doesn’t just have a corpse as one of its 10 images; now it’s a story that ends with a corpse, which can be a hard sell.
For instance, if we have first decided to associate swords with intellect and academics, we then have to ask why the natural endpoint for thought should be an impaled corpse. Even allowing for metaphor, we may think the deck itself ends up looking anti-intellectual.
Shape of a solution
I think an adequate resolution will need to do two things:
First, we’ll need to think more carefully about the cards themselves and test how justified our negative reactions really are. Most everyone who works in Tarot will tell you that Death and the Devil sound awful but actually representing productive or liberating possibilities, and even the Tower has its apologists. Many say that unlike the dark-themed majors, Swords cards are actually just bad, but why not give them the same chance to show us redeeming features?
Second, we need to ask ourselves why “Swords” deserved to be one of the 4 suits in the first place, and to check whether the sword is actually a good symbol for the themes we’ve assigned it. Tweaking our theming so that the content matches to the symbol more closely should help mitigate that dissonance.
Is the Swords story even really that bad?
In my 21st century social circles, Tarot reading is mainly done by women, and women tend to assume that ending up as a corpse impaled by multiple weapons is a bad thing, for some reason. On the other hand, as the great Jreg pointed out, some men kinda want to die in a war.
Some pursuits demand everything from us. You can pour your time, your health, and even your life into athletics, art, politics, and of course actual war and violence. We often begin these projects knowing that there is no permanent victory. In the end we will surrender or we will be consumed utterly. But for the right cause, or the right aim, at the right moment, that might be worth it.
If I were to take all the swords together as a narrative, I’d take the 9 as an aging soldier awaiting the call to what he knows will be his last battle. I’d imagine him fighting that battle off screen, on card 9.5. He gives everything he has for the cause, and we are left to imagine the outcome. On the 10th card, we’ll see that he died, but that doesn’t mean he failed. Maybe his side carried the day. The 10 of swords shows him impaled with 10 weapons, so maybe he made a 10-to-1 impact on the field.
If you want a positive spin on the suit, go rewatch Fellowship of the Rings. The Ten of Swords is Boromir, only Peter Jackson used arrows.
Sharpening thoughts about thinking.
Dying in the right battle can be worthwhile, but is this tale of martial valor a good fit for “intellect”, “reason,” “wit,” or the other cognitive things we tend to assign to Swords? The life of the mind does have its own battles, but personally I think the intellect is too vast and multi-faceted to be captured by any one suit. In my personal view, Swords ought to mean to something more specific.
(After all, there’s no reason a general suit for the life of the mind would need to be swords in the first place; why not pens? scrolls? tablets?)
I’ve particularly struggled to differentiate Swords from Wands conceptually, and I know I’m not alone in this. Air and Fire always get assigned to those two suits but are sometimes swapped. The staves are used as weapons sometimes, so both suits depict battles. And, Wands are often held to represent “creativity,” something I find very hard to distinguish from my “intellect.” The other suits have more distinctive vibes and domains, but I still think social deduction and reasoning can belong to Cups, and many types of professional skill or problem-solving ability to Coins.
Rather than standing in for intellect as a whole, I like to think of Swords cards specifically in relation to the most competitive or dangerous intellectual pursuits. Experimental science (cutting the world open, or into smaller pieces); the math olympiad contests; the tenure-track race; researches motivated by obsessive curiosity; the bottomless pursuit of self-justifying excellence (such as the ambition to master as much pure math as possible); competitive chess, etc.
The thing about these cutting manifestations of intellectual drive is that most of them never let you “arrive.” No matter how good you are, you can’t win against every challenger forever, and you can’t complete a final project that leaves no further mystery, no room for improvement. You contend against other humans until they finally bring you down, or you contend against the world until you give up or it breaks you and your successors step over your body.
Conclusion
I still don’t think the 10 of swords is where most people should end up, most of the time. I am steeped in what I called developmental Tarot, and am usually happy to look at it as a warning of what happens to those who pursue their most daring ambitions without making concessions to pragmatism or to other human values.
But still — on the right day, for the right cause, couldn’t it be worth it? To throw yourself against the overwhelming force and go out satisfied that it took 10 to bring you down?
Next time I see you it would be fun to look over my tarocchi deck with you. Most of the suits are same as the now standard and the whole thing is pretty violent in imagery but the equivalent of Swords cards are quite rich in the way you describe. Ominous, but for good reasons.