Five of Swords ~ Instinct and Intellect

Celestial Tarot by Kay Stevenson and Brian Clark

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time, writes Hélène Cixous in 'The Laugh of the Medusa.'

I've been reflecting on this phrase for a couple of months now. It came up a couple of months back when the Five of Swords was the card for that particular month. This depiction above, from the Celestial Tarot, shows us Pegasus, the divine winged horse, who was born from the severed head of Medusa. Censorship and severed heads have obvious, if visceral, points of intersection. And my subtitle for this card, the inner critic, carries on this theme of the silencing of voice. Medusa, with her hair of writhing snakes, could only be looked at with a mirror so deadening was her gaze. It's an interesting metaphor, reflection as a way in, the use of mirror, of indirect gaze as a tool for awakening.

Cioux writes in such a way as to leave the reader with questions as to the verity of this dark goddess's maligned nature. Censorship as the patriarchal silencing of feminine instinct, of kundalini energy, of uterine power. Not only does she draw a correlation between body and voice, implicit in her writing is the reality that body IS voice.

The Swords align with both communication and conflict. They represent the element of Air, the medium by which our spoken words are carried. Astrologically the Air trinity includes Gemini, Libra and Aquarius, each looking for its other half through relationship's mirror. One might look at the suit of Swords as the Earth longing to become aware, as a depiction of the seeming conflict between instinct and intellect.

Holding Cioux words in my awareness I lie down on the kitchen floor. The house is empty but for myself, the dogs and bird. I can see my limbs, breasts, belly, can sense sinew, muscle...all arranged on the worn wood surface, its uneven architecture lined up beneath me. Each pale strip holds stories, hollow and spacious like birds' bones, a poetics of emptiness. Feeling into the experience of censorship, of somatic censorship, that Cixous writes of here. Trying to find words for the flesh of the moment. And I realize that my throat is not big enough for this language that wants a skin.

Embodiment is a paradox. It’s a pilgrimage that ends ultimately in loss. There is no resolution in its mutable dialectic. Descending into the body is to grasp at the pages of transience while at the same time touching the limit of form. This tension mirrors the tension in all the Fives.