With the Sun in Pisces (dissipation) and the Moon in Gemini (communication), today is a Five of Swords day.

The Five of Swords is a card of conflicting impulses. Feelings blind intelligence; intelligence is not in touch with its emotional basis.

An excerpt from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 explains all:

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Without active intervention, today’s energy is likely to manifest either as an inexplicable impasse or all all-out defeat because of your inability to capitalise on progress made to date. Although this unfortunate state of affairs could be due to simple pride or neglect, most likely it is because of a more complex need to escape:

thoughtless words

lost friends

bits and pieces of disconnected memory.

When yesterday seems more real than today, know that you are in real trouble.

According to the 18^th century philosopher David Hume, the only thing of which we can ever be certain is that we perceive an unbroken stream of subjective ideas and images. Hence our notion of ‘self’ can never be more than a fiction; the mind’s way to join up disparate events together as a continuum. As the result, the thing that you know as ‘self’ is always subject to change. In her memoirs (Moments, 85), Virginia Woolf notes that it would be interesting to compare and contrast the ‘two people’ that you are (‘I now’ and ‘I then’).

Woolf’s suggestion is not just interesting but absolutely necessary if you are to put the past behind you in a way allowing for real movement forward. The Five of Swords is a violent, confrontational card; it carries the risk of  defeat owing to poor organisation.

So on a day like today, use the energy available to do yourself a huge favour – release that from your past which is resisting your future. Clear out the clutter of yesterday to make room for tomorrow.

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McIntyre, Jane L. ‘Hume and the Problem of Personal Identity, (177-208). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. Dave Fate Norton and Jacqueline Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 (online).

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being, Autobiographical Writings. ed. Jeanne Schulkind, London: Pimlico, 2002