Lord of Defeat
concealing and revealing, tarot guides for the new moon, my forthcoming book, and a new class for the minor arcana-lovers among you!A
A friend of mine, a fellow spiritual practitioner in the Western Magickal Tradition and student in my recent class on the tarot and the natal chart, was struggling with the Five of Swords. “How can I think of the Five of Swords differently from the word that’s there?” he asked me one afternoon.
The word he was speaking about was “Defeat.” The Five of Swords is the card that has the dubious honor of being its lord. “Little Lord of Defeat,” I whisper to myself when I draw it from my deck. It’s a habit of mine, putting the diminutive “little” in front of the esoteric titles for the bad cards from the Minor Arcana, as if the adjective could make “defeat” and “failure” (Seven of Disks) and “cruelty” (Nine of Swords) and even “satiety” (Ten of Cups) somehow cute. Or if not cute then, at the very least, no big deal. That “little” of mine is language as a lie, habit as a brushing off, a kind of petty evil trying to diminish what it is I do with the tarot everyday when I’m facing cynicism from some hard part of myself that still doesn’t jive with how beloved the cards are to me, how seriously I take divination (nothing less than a conversation with God, gods, the images and words of the divine). In these moments, the “Little Lord of XYZ” is a bad vernacular habit I surface to ward off the potential for that meanness to hurt, the cynicism to land in a soft and precious place that I’ve only in recent years stumbled my way into finding in myself. But cynicism can’t be fought with nonchalance, coolness, the pretense of something being just fun and games when it isn’t! So I answered my student truthfully and seriously, which is to say, I told him the following:
Every card is an arcana, a living Symbol that reveals and conceals as appropriate. The Five of Swords is the Lord of Defeat, so there will always some element of truth to that. One of the first practical moves we can make when we’re learning to read the cards is looking to see where that truth shows up in your life. You can most easily do that by looking to where the first decan of Aquarius falls in your natal chart. What house does this card live in? What does it mean for Venus, which holds decanic rulership of this place in the sky, to rule this area of your life? What other planets or important points in your horoscope are there? How does that match or diverge from your own experience of this place? Why is Venus in the sign of the Water-Bearer associated with Defeat?
The Five of Swords is also very many other things. In the Kabbalah, it’s Geburrah in the world of Yetsirah, or Strength in Formation. It’s the place in reality where strength comes to us through the ability to cut down or through, sometimes quite literally, sometimes through words, sometimes (and even better than the first two) through the presence of the Divine Word that shapes every level of reality here on earth. These esoteric associations can seem an endless rabbit hole or, more to the point, an endless horizontal axis upon which meaning spreads out, thins out, slips on new coats, paints on new faces, raises new questions. What is the relationship between Venus as Love and Love as Strength? How are Defeat and Strength in Formation one and the same? What does it mean to have your astrological Moon ruled by the Five of Swords, and how might we read or tell a narrative of breast cancer alongside this symbol, this card that comes up for every new twist and turn in my own journey through illness?
But divination as it endlessly presents along a horizontal axis or rabbit hole of fractalizing associational meaning is little better than a LLM playing the role of your therapist. There’s nothing real there, nothing true, nothing good, not absolutely. Many tarot readers, astrologers, esotericists, animists, academics, feminists, all those generous, good-hearted people who started out with the very real, very true sense that “something is wrong here; things should be otherwise” get stuck here, in this mirage-like place where the quest to become more of oneself, or to help others in similar, abject positions, or to be healed, or to heal society, or to be connected to a higher, deeper principle, has been abandoned in the anxiety of being unable to name anything without qualification. If you can recognize the danger of this moment, you do find the vertical axis of truth that always exists, that’s always ready to offer itself to you, when you are ready to see it.
The Minor Arcana of the tarot are minor secrets in that they are, always and at once, concealings and revealings. As living Symbols — sumpatheia, in the language of the Neoplatonists — they offer you incalculable breadth of seeing into your own life, the world, the relationships therein. As sumpatheia, they also conceal everything that you are not ready to see, that you cannot see until the reality of the vertical is made clear.
There’s an old cliché about two people riding the same bus through the same landscape. One person sits there, experiencing Heaven. The other finds herself immersed in Hell. The difference between the one and the other has little to do with their personalities or their brains, their identity markers or their hopes and dreams. The difference is that one has had contact with the vertical axis and, paradoxically, like Percival discovering the Castle of the Grail King, has experienced the implosion of every axis all at once, has entered into and thus has faith in a place where time and space are one.
If the tarot is a true description of a cosmology — living Symbols that show us the Gods we are, encounter, bow before, and turn about with — then the Five of Swords is neither “little” nor “endless,” neither “Defeat” nor “Strength in Formation,” and it certainly isn’t all of these things, at once, either. Instead, when you draw our Lord of Defeat, you can know, immediately, with precision that, on one level of reality, it is irrevocably and unalterably “Defeat.” On another, it is planetary Venus bestowing love, sweetness, and gift in a moment of peril or betrayal. On a higher plane, it is the mystery of discovering that the goddess Aphrodite unbinds you from Defeat precisely at the moment you experience it, and in realizing this wonder, you yourself free the goddess from the lies of existence, the formation of the horizonal plane. There’s a fourth level, too, but that is a mystery only you can name, in silence, for yourself.
Sending love on the Gemini New Moon! I am happy to pull a tarot card for you as a guide for the next two weeks. I am even happier to tell you that my forthcoming book Interruption: Divinatory Essays on Illness and Narrative is now available for preorder from Sul Books. They’re having a summer sale; you can currently get 25 percent off the book price with the code SUMMER25.
Finally, I’ll be teaching a course on the minor arcana as they correspond to your natal chart and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Minor Secrets: The Vertical Axis and Cosmology of the Minor Cards of the Tarot will run for six weeks, beginning on Wednesday, August 5 and ending Saturday, September 12. We’ll meet every Wednesday evening at 7 pm ET for 90-minute lectures diving deep into the Minor Arcana as living symbols in support of and supported by your personal horoscopes and the Kabbalah and every Saturday morning at 9 am ET for querent sessions, where students have the opportunity to ask questions about their own charts, tarot cards, or anything else that falls within the realm of esoteric, literary, divinatory, occult, or spiritual study. I cap these classes at 14 students to maintain an intimate cohort of spiritual friends. They’ve been such a source of joy, warmth, learning, and camaraderie during these dark times! Please join us! All lectures and sessions are recorded; asynchronous learning and students welcome.
The cost is $300, but if you feel called to the class and need a discount or some other kind of arrangement or work-trade, please email me at cameronscottsteele AT gmail DOT com.
For tarot card guides for the New Moon, comment with your rising sign and your question below.
Astro Notes
Offering a consideration of the relationship between ruin and desire, the New Moon occurs this evening around 11 pm ET at 24 degrees Gemini. Thinking about Gemini’s association with the Lovers card of the tarot, I like to think about New Moons in this sign as helping us to think long and hard about our responsibility toward the Beloved, whatever the Beloved in our life may be. With New Moons, we plant seeds, we turn inward, we allow the Moon, in all of its darkness, to be found ablaze, in love, somehow more visible than ever, precisely because it is found in the heart of the Sun.
