5 of Swords - what's your position? - victim, perpetrator, or witness
full moon tarot offering for June { Full Moon on 11 June 2025 (AEST) }
Full moons are a time of illumination and revelation, bringing what may be hidden and out of sight to light.
Each full moon, I draw a tarot card at random and offer a perspective and suggestions for soul work and psycho-spiritual inquiry.
Use whatever shows up as the opening for deeper inquiry. You can enhance your experience by way of journalling, making art, meditation or even simply holding the images and enquiry in body-mind.
A man stands in the foreground on a flat grey surface holding 3 swords - 2 in their right hand, one in their left. Meanwhile, 2 swords lay at his feet. His red hair blows back in the wind. He wears a green tunic, red pants and tan boots. He’s looking to the side and back with a smirk, as 2 figures retreat toward the edge of the surface and a flat rippling body of water. One person has their head in their hands. The sky is pale blue, with grey jagged clouds, also looking wind-swept.
—What do you see?
You can listen to me read this post here
I wrote about the 5 of Swords back in December 2022, so if you like, you can read that here. I’ll kind of touch back on some of those themes about power dynamics and your approach conflict, but I’ll mostly weave in some new observations today.
The swords suit represents thinking and ideas - all that stuff of the mind and intellect, including reasoning, focus, attention and deciding. All the 5’s in the tarot are symbolic of conflict, and so the 5 of Swords points to the more competitive aspects of everyday life through the lens of the aggressive and warlike nature of the swords, as something that cuts and can harm.
In the scene, a battle has taken place, and it appears that we have a clear winner and a couple of losers.
— Are you involved in some sort of argument, slanging match or battle of words? Are you winning or losing?
I find I naturally identify with and have an empathic response to the losers in the scene, and vilify the winner. To be fair, this is probably intentional, as the unpleasant facial expression and haughty attitude of the red-haired figure do little to endear them. He’s all too sharp, too smug.
I could never be so heinous and greedy as to try and win at any cost - could I? Could you?
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But just as the victor may be overpowering their sparring partners with an excess of swords, by overusing logic, ethical reasoning, even snark and criticism, it’s just as much a problem if we use empathy as the foundation for correct or proper behaviour or goodness.
Righteousness can sit at both ends of the thinking-feeling spectrum.
— What is right and wrong in this situation? What does this tell about your attitude towards how power ‘should be’ used and conflict dealt with?
I’ve also just noticed that I’m talking about a third position in this dynamic that I haven't directly considered before - the one of the observer. We’ve all been in an uncomfortable position of witnessing a fight that feels inherently unfair and out of balance.
— What did you do? What did you wish you had done?
I’m not sure we can all say we took a stance that exemplified our moral position.
I see the medicine in the card, then in recognising how in a given conflict situation, we may each be the victim, the perpetrator, the (silent?) witness.
Understanding that none of us owns the trophy of moral superiority can help facilitate the necessary ongoing and dynamic interplay of thinking, feeling and action when we come up against opposition.
A template might follow a path like this …
↻ Our thoughts, reason and logic are often vilified as the source of all our problems. Operating from pure intellect is problematic. It can make us cold, cruel, and most likely lonely. So we need our minds to pay attention to what is real and help sort out and discern the truth.
— What is going on, really?
↺ But then, centering in watery feelings means we can overflow in idealistic rage or sorrow. Without good containment, we are prone to victimhood and empathic over-identification.
— How sturdy is my container to hold steady in my emotions?
⇅ So when we value’s mind’s capacity for truth and discernment, and integrate this with heart-sense and receptivity, this develops into wisdom through the alchemy of experience.
— How might I play with and dance between my ‘position’ to broaden my experience?
⇆ Meanwhile, remaining grounded in the core value that we are human beings and bodies that exist with other humans in the greater context of the world, can help guide energy and action toward navigating and managing difference, loss or gain through a more conscious and contextual morality.
— What makes me forget my place in the world among others?
Thanks for reading, Mendy x
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I haven’t done the chat before, so it’s an experiment. I’ll start it off, and am happy for you to jump on with your experience of either the card through your lens (i.e. what you saw), respond to one of the prompts, or just share what it awakened in you. Random, circular thoughts and even asking more questions welcome!
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