Quantum - the Five Wands

[nisaba]

And here is hte card I like 77th-best in the deck. This is still a rich and rare compliment, don't worry. Visually it reminds me of the Fool - lots of thin, elongated triangular slashed and yellow, although, as a Minor, not as much detail incorporated into the image. Five blue-ish Wands cross each other to make a crude, unfinished pentacle, and where they intersect, blazes of energy occur. Behind them is a series of similar blazes of yellow deepening to orange and other colours. To me this card looks quite hard, and visually unsatisfying. I know the Five Wands is never an easy or a gentle energy, but does it have to feel so much like a superheated metal lattice, which will burn but does not actually move or change? That is how the image looks to my eyes.

And how does it look to my mind? Well, it has been tied to the concept of particle annihilations, the huge releases of uncontrolled and dangerous energy when matter and anti-matter contact each other and dematerialise. Something has to happen to all the mass in the particles that are becoming non-particles, and what happens is that in a sudden shock, it turns into pure energy.

The conversion is frightening, and can seem quite out of proportion. For instance, one of the scientist who writes books for the public that I read - I can't remember who but I'm betting Paul Davies, for the Australian connection - did a calculation in such a book, that if one hoof from an average-sized sheep were successfully converted into pure energy to pure matter without any energy-wastage or matter-residue, the resultant crater from the explosion would be four times the size of the city of Sydney! One wonders rather nervously whether he means the inner city, the extensive suburban sprawl or even the geological feature known as the Sydney Basin which is even more enormous than that.

Er ... I'm already a fair way from Sydney, but I think I might move. Off-continent. <grin> We have a large sheep industry in Australia, and I'm frankly worried about all those hooves. There's even a pet sheep which wanders freely around town and has been known to visit me, looking for afternoon snacks of fruit-peel. I really, really hope there isn't any stray anti-matter around here.

Joking aside, all this explosive potential is pretty much what I'd expect from a Five Wands person or situation. Fives are about change, instability; and sometimes if you have a lot of unexpressed energy churning around that is not directed into adequate outlets, it can boil over and produce explosions which, while probably not the size of a detonated sheep's hoof, will still do a lot of damage to those around you. The trick is to make sure that your surges of energy *do* have creative outlets. If you know you are prone to rage, get fired up about injustice towards minorities or climate-change or something, and use your anger as a motivational force for positive change, rather than sitting on it until it explodes and annihilates four cities.

The question that accompanies this card is "What creative possibilities are emerging from conflict?" Sit with this thought for a while when the card comes up for you.