The Five of Wands
Symbolism
This image is a simple one. A lot is going on, it seems, but it is one simple story of five characters all dressed in different colours, each waving around their wand in a barren environment. They symbolize on one front our many-faceted creative abilities and many different people in our lives with different strengths of self-expression.
They look to be fighting in some way and trying to get the better of each other or at least make their wand seem more important. This symbolizes both our inner struggles with our many different passions and when our passion clashes with another.
Keywords
Upright: Creative conflict, Ego battles, pride, competition, defensiveness, chaos, diversity, Self-righteousness, domination, inner conflict.
Reversed: Repressed aggression, poor boundaries, violence, fighting, passive-aggression, compromise, cooperation, solutions to conflict, teamwork.
Upright meaning
With the Fives, we see conflict a lot and the strong energy of Gevurah being expressed as the wand element is owned by the five senses and the ego. Here we wave our wand of creativity and intuition around as if it is the most important, and we are so caught up in our way of creating that we are blind to the importance of diversity and others potential. So we end up fighting instead of collaborating.
This outer conflict is a mirror for an internal one as well. We will have different desires and ideas of what may be best for us, and often struggle to be focused on the importance of one at a time. We multitask and become less productive and with less discipline, our energy is easily dispersed.
When we are passionate about our way, it is not always easy to compromise and see that someone else’s input is equally important. Competition is a big part of this card’s message. Too many cooks spoil the broth, only when these cooks cannot relax their ego a little and appreciate more than one opinion. Here is a group of leaders and no one knows how to follow.
We may have many passionate voices in our heads telling us what to do and where to go, but which one do we follow? Our ego finds it hard to know what our intuition sounds and feels like, so we end up grabbing any idea and passionately following that path. This also can be seen as many people sharing opinions and advice and us feeling unclear about where our true wand and passion lies.
Because this wand reflects our sexuality, it can also speak about our passions being shared physically in a variety of ways, often with lusty abandon. Our life force can be easily dispersed and lost when we forget the importance of holding and channelling our passion inwards and upwards.
Reversed meaning
When this shadow Five comes up, it is a good time to pay attention to our denial of this subtly aggressive inner conflict. When we refuse to own our inner-critic, we may explode with the outer world at times or at best, act with passive-aggression. Passive-aggressivity is the subtle way we express our inner conflict while being able to deny owning the aggressivity behind it. Unless those tricks are seen!
If we have a past trauma with conflict, we may be afraid of confronting the world, butting heads with others, and being burnt again. This can create the ‘doormat’ personality where the inner fire is squashed, and we don’t stand up for our passion or creative needs. That is, until we have no choice, and this is when we may express a bottled-up fire in an exaggerated volcanic way!
There is always much healing to be seen in the reversals, and this shadow Five speaks about healing this negative relationship with aggression and the repression of our fire. Any outer conflict will mirror an inner one where we have the power to be aware and choose to change our old habits.
The healing in this card will often be a practice of boundaries. We will avoid conflict when we are not able to say no or healthily defend our needs. When we tune into our personal needs and respect them by giving importance to them, we can create healthy boundaries that will allow us to feel safe in any environment, even one that is challenging. This reversal can also speak about resolutions to conflict and cooperation with others.