By Sarah Taylor

When I turned over the three cards I drew this morning for this week’s tarot reading, the first card I drew on the left was a blank one. I was confused for a split-second, and then smiled as I realised I’d forgotten to remove the two spares from the deck (either that, or, like the jokers in a pack of cards, they’re there to play silly buggers with unprepared tarot readers). But these cards themselves are significant, and an appearance by one of them in this reading is no exception. I’ll get to that a little later. But first, card order.

Ace of Swords, Two of Swords, Five of Swords from the Haindl Tarot deck, created by Hermann Haindl. Click on the image for a larger version.

I drew the card at centre first, then left, then right. In hindsight, this makes supreme sense to me given that the first card — the central one — is the Two of Swords.

Swords represent the mind, your beliefs, your thoughts, how you approach something psychologically. They also represent the written word, the spoken word, the law.

This reading is an all-Swords reading, and so your mind, how you construct your world, and how you express yourself are all fundamental parts of how you are operating right now.

The Two of Swords speaks to the idea of a temporary equilibrium. It is a point of balance, a suspension of judgment, a moment of stillness before action. It can also symbolise a contract or agreement that brings two parties together for a limited time to fulfill a particular purpose.

This is the moment you’re currently in, and it is the moment in which you get to choose between what lies to the left of the Two of Swords (the Two being your ‘contract’) and the right. In short, you get to choose between wisdom and Defeat — or between insight and conflict.

Now, back to that blank card and its significance as a ‘placeholder’ for the Ace of Swords. The Aces are discrete members of the 56 Minor Arcana cards. This is because, while they lead into the numbered cards, they are not in the world of the numbered cards. Cards 2 through 10 represent incarnate, embodied reality. The Aces do not. They are pure archetypes of the elements they represent.

The Ace of Swords is the pure archetype of Air, and given that Air represents the mind, the Ace of Swords is also the limitless potential of the mind. If we were to put words to it (which in truth we really can’t do effectively, the Ace being a pure archetype — though we can try to approximate what it means to our limited understanding), then the Ace of Swords is Solomonic wisdom; keen, dispassionate insight; the clearest vision you can have.

But here’s the thing about the Aces: they can stand for so much; they can stand for nothing at all. This was emphasized to me in the blank card I drew before drawing a card to take its place, which was the Ace of Swords. Sometimes, you might as well ‘draw a blank’ if you aren’t going to recognise that the only person who is able to manifest the Ace of Swords in your world is you. The Ace itself, divinely sent, can only meet you halfway: it stands in the non-incarnate world, and it is up to you to notice its potential and draw it down.

To put this another way, the presence of an Ace in a reading asks you to take a risk, because it is asking you to act on something that is not tangible. Is it available to you? Absolutely! But like the adage goes, “That book ain’t gonna write itself, ya know!”

That idea isn’t going to advertise itself. That insight isn’t going to apply itself. That theory isn’t going to test itself. That ground-breaking, life-changing inspiration that scares you shitless to contemplate isn’t going to do all the work for you, shoulder all the risk, and save you from the sweat of work — or the humiliation of defeat.

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No. The presence of the Ace is not a guarantee, either.

It is an all-or-nothing deal, and you are not protected from the consequences of your actions. BUT. Its potential is available to you — and its presence means you have more resources than you might at first consider possible. More, perhaps, than you can currently conceive of.

Think of the Ace of Swords as a seam of intellectual gold sitting deep in the Earth’s crust. It is there, for the taking. You are the miner. Standing there on the surface, tapping your toe in earnest, will not fill your cart. And if you go down there, you may simply fill your cart with rock.

Or you may strike gold. And the only way to do that is to commit.

The alternative you can choose in this moment of equilibrium is the card on the right, the Five of Swords. (I have a feeling that if you decide not to choose, the Five is what you’ll get anyway, given that the Ace needs your active commitment to it.)

The Five of Swords is when that temporary alliance of the Two of Swords goes tits-up, as we say here in the UK. It is not the under-handed, stealth-driven sabotage of the Seven of Swords, nor the existential anguish of the Nine of Swords, but it is a moment of “ouch!” where someone’s peace of mind is sacrificed on the altar of conflict. Blood is spilled in a battle of wills — a skirmish where there is a clear winner and a clear loser, but either way the victory is one that has its costs. It is accompanied with fiery fury and rage; emotions run very high; despair follows, even though it might be short-lived.

But to its left, there are peace, stillness, the moment where the mind can reflect on itself and see the truth: the Ace. The single sword that looks back at us in the mirror. In a sea of troubles, it is the grounded location of the lightning bolt of intuitive knowing.

But you’ve gotta reach out and take it. Sometimes having a handle on the truth is the greatest responsibility of all. Because it asks you to do something with it.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Ace of Swords (the pure, limitless element of Air), Two of Swords (Moon in Libra), Five of Swords (Venus in Aquarius)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.