The Five of Wands is a card that helps you recognise conflict and make a game plan for dealing with it.
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To give you a bit of context whilst you reflect on your own relationship to the card, here’s a few key things to know about the Five of Wands.
The Five of Wands is an action packed card. In the Rider Waite Smith tarot, it’s illustrated like this: five figures play at war - each hold a wand in their hand like a weapon, and they’re all clashing against each other in their own way. There doesn’t seem to be an us versus them attitude going on here - there’s a me vs everybody else mindset at play.
But while there’s certainly conflict here, there’s not anything particularly dangerous going on - not yet anyway. The wands clash in the air, no one’s using them as weapons for full-on bodily attack. In fact, there’s something of a dance going on.. and you have to wonder if you’d entered just a few minutes earlier, you might have found a focussed group working together to use the wands to build something. Now it seems they’ve all had their own ideas, and competing interests have dissolved the collaboration. Maybe, if you’d entered the scene five minutes later, you’d find violence, but nothing’s progressed that far yet.
All of this is to say that the Five of Wands not a scary card, it’s just a chaotic one. It’s the first sign of a storm brewing, but it’s early days - there’s time to reunite the group, or to reasonably come to a compromise.
When the Five of Wands comes up in a reading, the first question I ask myself is: am I trying to make too many things happen at once? (The answer, by the way, is usually yes). I invite you to look at this card as an opportunity to review where your attention is going, and if the varied things you’re committed your time and energy to are aligned, or if, because they all need different versions of you, they are stretching you too thin.
In your tarot journal, you’re asked to reflect on what this card means to you, now, in this moment, and what actions and thoughts it inspires in you. As you journal, pay attention to what you’re personally picking up in the card, but also consider what the key themes in the card might be telling you. Where are you experiencing conflict right now, and how can you pause and bring things back into alignment for yourself? Can the various things you’ve committed to work more smoothly together, or do you need to remove some of the wands from the equation for a while, for your own safety?
This mini-tarot lesson was brought to you by me, Chelsey Pippin Mizzi, founder of Pip Cards Tarot. I hope you gained a little context to help you continue reflecting on the card in your own way, and I’ll see you tomorrow for another mini-lesson.