Six of Swords

In the RWS deck, the Six of Swords begins a series of easily misunderstood images, culminating with the Ten. These cards all imply at least a slice of the meaning pie, but the meanings suggested by number and suit are in each case quite a bit broader. Here, the woman and child, or family if the ferryman is father, might be leaving troubles behind them, or otherwise making a passage from difficulties or unsatisfying condi- tions. It could be flight, or a seeking of refuge. They could also be reestablishing their social, cognitive, and perceptual worlds following a challenge they got from the fives, and broadening their understanding of the world. This could be what recovery groups call a geographic cure: thinking that past patterns can be escaped by moving someplace else. But these are lesser implications. More broadly, these characters are enlarging their world, extending their horizons, expanding their context, transcending an outgrown niche, or simply exploring a larger one. New ideas are needed to complete the picture. The ready swords imply they are bringing their wits along with them. This may be more of a case of ‘freedom to’ than ‘freedom from,’ even though some dissatisfaction or unpleasantness might still drive the move. As child leaves crib, and young adults leave home, the sage leaves nations behind him. We expand and then reintegrate in a more expanded context. Since we are dealing with the Swords, the mental world, the culture in which we are immersed might be our biggest factor and context here. The change is much more than geographic. We may be expanding, or perhaps upgrading, the society around us, or the company we keep. We burst out of the bubble of local or parochial culture. We may even make it all the way to global culture and find some collective common ground on those farther and foreign shores. This is a good card for anthropology and sociology, or comparative cultural studies. And if we really want to look for who we are, we can look into primatology, and even zoology. Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” We learn to suspend our judgment until more of the facts are in. Human is as human does, and we have to go see what we do. Books will only take us so far in showing us the way we actually live. Thus do the academics, in towers behind the high walls, know so little about us. The tourists also learn little, who bring their high walls along, as a sort of a shell. The maintenance of this shell, and the insecurity that requires it, is an industry unto itself. But we speak here of going more native. We want to fill in the lacunae on our maps. If the maps say ‘here be dragons,’ we need to go there and see that. Of course, ‘wherever you go, there you are’ has us wondering how much we can change, or how much we want to. The Yijing counterpart, Gua 13, Fellowship With Others, depicts a fire under the stars, where we have gathered for hundreds of thousands of years, inventing our language and telling stories. This is one of several places where the Yi suggests the benefits of crossing the great water. The phrase means different things in different contexts, but here it means to leave the familiar behind and seek out the larger family. We get beyond ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and anthropocentrism, to find our common ground. We get beyond our belief systems, collective associations, and mass follies to find etiquettes and ethics that we might all be able to share. We get beyond mutual endorsement and admiration societies to discover cultural diversity and creative cultural hybridization. We get good help and perspective from others. Our more usual search for like-mindedness can preempt a chance for expansion by way of variety. If there is a superior race, it is still yet to come, and it will mix the best of our separate, present-day traits. Krishnamurti sums this card up with: “you must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.” Beyond the socio-cultural elements to this card, we have also the personal cognitive world. This is still a departure from the familiar for greater familiarity, and an infilling of the mind with things it is missing. It’s a rounding out of the big picture, that we cannot get by staying in one place, at least metaphorically, or by minds remaining at smaller sizes. We need the larger world even to grasp our own private psyches. And perhaps we suspend judgment and belief until more facts are in. Crowley called this card Science, a word that derives from knowing how. We can add some more depth to this term now by adding the implications of interdisciplinarity and consilience: that is, the card represents a more comprehensive view of the world, not scattered and cut up into countless smaller disciplines, but integrated into a whole, and then tested against practical challenges. Holistic thought or thinking is not as simple- minded as one might imagine from reading the new age material. It is only simple in that when it all comes together or integrates, things might reappear as elegance or a simple-seeming gestalt.