Five of Wands

What Five of Wands means

Fives break the square. In every suit the Five is where the number stops cohering and the suit meets what it cannot absorb, and in Wands what it meets is itself. What obstructs here is likeness: several efforts pushing in one direction and getting in each other’s way for exactly that reason. Fire against fire is not opposition, and the usual way a disagreement ends — somebody turning out to be right — has nothing here to fasten onto. What makes the card thankless is that the exertion is real and leaves nothing behind to record that it happened, so afterwards it reads as training or as waste with equal plausibility.

Upright

Several energies want room at once. Distinguish productive disagreement from noise, and make the purpose of the exchange clear before trying to win it.

Reversed

Avoiding every disagreement can leave the real issue untouched. Choose a small, respectful way to name the friction, or step out of a contest with no useful purpose.

A question to sit with

What are we each trying to achieve beneath this disagreement?

Traditional attribution

Saturn in Leo. Attributions follow the Golden Dawn with Waite's numbering.