The Fives
Tarot talk, Eros wisdom (you don't need to be Tarot literate to receive this)
Once I heard Britten LaRue say, you can live your whole life from (in?) the fives.
The fives in the Tarot are usually seen as bad: as big conflicts, big problems, big challenges.
When I learned that my astrological Sun placement corresponded to the 5 of Swords in the tarot, I was gutted. For years, I couldn’t find a single good thing about this card.
It was really Karen Hammaker-Zondag’s (KHZ because I’m impatient) work that made me see what Britten LaRue might be saying.
KHZ writes (this is lightly paraphrased/edited but the sentiments/insights are all KHZ): 5 has a remarkable relationship with humanity and life, and a deep association with eros.
We often see the number 5 in association with the search for genuine involvement in life.
First and foremost, eros is union, and the willingness to form a genuine relationship.
The number 5 is connected to the mother-mistress paradox, connected to goddesses who rule both love and war.
We encounter something of that paradox in the number 5.
It is a confrontational number.
It is a confrontational number in this respect: the arithmetical series 1-2-3 is a picture of father-mother-child and 4 represents the confines of matter - hearth and home. Three stands for the natural family and four for the social family.
But when we come to 5, a new dimension makes its appearance. According to some, the world of Eve is fenced off by the number 4, and the number 5 introduces Lilith - the deeper, mystical, darker, alarming, feminine facets and energies.
As human beings, we grow through confrontation.
Interestingly enough, the number 5 does not occur in natural crystal systems: thus there is no hardening of form at the basis of 5. Five loosens, and it also has something revolutionary in it. (Making the connection that the line 5 in Human Design is the Heretic, both the Savior and the Fallen Angel).
On looking at the 5s, we see how much difficulty we have in allowing this revolutionary influence into our lives, how much difficulty we have in our society with the role of union and Lilith.
The fives each represent problems that have to do with a lack of eros, and with the trouble we have in being a part of life.
Ok, now me + my thoughts:
Five is the pentagram, and all its magical connections. Five is alchemy through union - alchemy because of heat, fire, agitation, chemical reaction (with another substance). Not the self-initiated alchemy of metamorphosis. That’s not the 5.
There’s something here around the paradox of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. We want to participate fully in life! But - only if it’s easy, and safe and convenient.
The minute it begins to require something of value from us, we get confused, we quit, we decide we’ve made a mistake, or it’s not a fit.
We long for our soulmate - but only if they’re compliant, perfectly in tune, in total affinity and resonance with us - zero difference or conflict.
I think of the word yoga and how it means to be yoked. And how yoked means to be harnessed, tied to something, tied down by something. Of the extra care and consideration it takes to feel free and easy when one is yoked.
I think of the religious guidelines of “good” partnership meaning you are “equally yoked” and the pain of being “unequally” yoked. Yoked to someone or something that isn’t pulling their weight, isn’t trying to match your stride, is moving in a way that creates friction rather than alignment.
I think of how the cost of community is inconvenience, is boundary work, is vulnerability, conflict, repair, and the perpetual navigation of difference.
And yet, the five is about aliveness, life force eros.
There is a lesson here, an insight that:
the further we isolate, the more we distance ourselves from life force
the more life and love we want to feel, the more yoked we must allow ourselves to become
The fives have a plutonic/8th house quality to them.
The 8th house is the house of eros, of peak experience, of ecstasy, bliss, betrayal, grief. It is the house of being yoked to something/someone, the house of shared resource, of inextricable interdependence - the kind that makes you really vulnerable. The kind where you are not self-sustaining - and you know it.
The 8th house is about messy entanglement - both with love and with money. It’s about the inability to decouple deep vulnerability and love from the risk of deep betrayal and loss.
The fives also hold a wisdom about life that nobody wants to hear - and it’s preventing us from our fullest liberation. Because it’s paradoxical: there is no escaping the yoke.
If we don’t like a relationship, western culture teaches us to ghost, to cancel, to cut people off, to set boundaries so extreme the other person can’t get to us through them.
Western culture is obsessed with: I can do whatever I want just because it suits me and I give zero fucks about how that impact someone else because they can handle themselves and it’s not my job to care about them.
The truth is, the relationships we abandon, suppress, run from outside of us live on inside of us - unconsciously. And often very problematically.
Another big western value is: I’m not responsible for the sins of my fathers.
The fives argue otherwise - whether it’s fair or not, whether you want to be or not, you are yoked to your lineage, to your family constellations, to any debts or harms your family perpetuated - or endured.
And until you take responsibility for that, the yoke will not sit easy. We will try our best to pretend the yoke is not there, that we are free and unyoked, and our avoidant/flight behaviors might reach a fever pitch - but the more we struggle, the more we are ensnared by our internal representations of everyone we fled from and abandoned externally.
The fives have a message about relationship and difference.
The message is: relationship and difference exist, they have massive impact, whether we admit it or not. Whether it matches our worldview or not. Whether we wish to see it or hide from it. We are yoked to others, and as infuriating and confining as it feels, the move is to accept the yoke.
This means, let me be super clear, choosing to consent to something that does not feel like it originates with or belongs to us, or was a fair choice or a fully informed choice. This is a hard choice to make, especially since we’re making it retroactively and it seems like we don’t have much choice at all.
We do have choice. It’s just not the choice of: I accept this burden or I don’t accept this burden. What we’re actually choosing is not the burden - that’s going to be ours no matter what. We’re choosing if we willingly carry it, unpack it, tend to it, or if we struggle with it, try to abandon it unsuccessfully, our whole lives.
The irony is - there is more peace and more freedom in accepting the yoke than in trying to shuck it. What’s the saying: freedom in responsibility?
There are Saturn and Chiron lessons here - about how we hold burdens that feel unfair, painful, not fully consensual, not OURS, but somehow ours.
The fives tell us there is no avoiding, no escape. Especially not around relationships. In fact, not just any relationships, but the most troubling ones. The traumatic ones, the most painful and threatening ones, the ones we most desperately want to escape, repress, shed, leave behind.
Oftentimes these relationships are our parents, our children, our co-parents.
I’m not saying: stay in abusive or toxic relationships. I’m not saying: you HAVE TO forgive parents that were atrocious, neglectful or abusive. I’m not saying: it’s easy to love a child who is prodigal.
Lest you forget, we’re talking about the fives! These are cards that are unequivocally difficult.
What I AM saying is: you carry internal representations of these people - it’s just a neuroscience fact. You carry energetic entanglements with ancestors you’ve never met in real life, as annoying as it is to hear that. And THOSE internal representations need some kind of integration, as they are not inert. They are impactful.
This is not about bypassing or gaslighting. This is about doing the immense work (and it is WORK) of organizing, integrating, humanizing, forgiving, withdrawing projections, examining expectations, reparenting, making amends, etc.
A book that goes into more depth about why this is important and the consequences of cancelling/repressing even the most toxic people is called “It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn.
One thing western culture has really lost the plot on is eros. We are either so dead/depressed/collapsed inside, just going through the motions on our hamster wheels, terrified of jumping off, or otherwise we are living a toxic mimic of eros: chasing money, buying luxury items, obsessed with “fun,” in constant motion, under constant pressure to feel happy, feeding our senses but not our souls.
What we don’t want to hear is that the way back to eros is by accepting the yoke. That seems insane and impossible. Because it’s a different worldsense.
But I have found it to be true. That by accepting the burdens and responsibilities our lineage and our relational choices/accidents foist upon us, this is the secret route to eros, to feeling impossibly alive, delighted, surprised.
Maybe humans are meant to be relational menders the same way that spiders weave webs whole ad infinitum.
The secret is in how we consent to, how we hold what we are stewarding, even if it is an inheritance, a happenstance and not our fully consensual choice. We don’t just get one choice. We get to choose over and over again.
In a future post, I will look at each of the fives individually.
But suffice it to say:
The five of swords has to do with being yoked by ancestral debt - that is now yours to hold, to alchemize, to pay off.
Is this fair? That is not the right question. Nothing about life is, and yet we continue to use that metric. I could write a whole treatise on fairness and humans - the animals, the wild, do not do “fair.” They do something else: they do balance, natural consequences, faithfulness to destiny.
The five of cups has to do with being yoked to your choices and their unintended consequences in relationship - you are the one who betrayed AND was betrayed - now what?
The five of wands has to do with the inevitable difference and conflict that arises from manifesting life force and the wholeness of self.
The five of pentacles has to do with sharing/needing resources, again, in a way that isn’t fair/equal or entirely self-generated.
The fives are the cards that hold wisdom about interdependence, that unshame codependence.
Around deep and mysterious relationship(s).
Around eros, life force, living to the fullest.
Around living freely in a yoke.
Around liberation through confrontation.
Around expanding into responsibility that goes beyond you - and doing it skillfully and sustainably.
Around relational shadow and taboo.
Around how we must harness the wisdom of the dark feminine to be whole.
Here’s the good news: the 5s, should you pull one, are invitations into eros! Invitations into the messiest, scariest, hardest (and also most fulfilling) parts of relating. And this is lovely - in a plutonic way.
And it’s not fair. And that’s not the point.
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One way we can work with the fives is through creating corrective/integrative experience - this can happen imaginally/representationally or in real life or in a symbolically laden hybrid, called the psychomagic act.
If you’re curious about a 5s experience in your life, and/or looking for support around a 5s approach, I’d love to work with you.
I’m in the process of converting all my sessions to rituals.
Of bringing more magic to my clients.
Of finding ways to confront the things that we circumvent with words.
I am witch-mother and I live in the mythical in-between, and there is wisdom that only grows here that I have foraged for you.