Fifth element as I see it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this so called “fifth element” recently. Most people say that it’s the spirit and while I don’t disagree, I believe that there is more to it. The way that I see the fifth element is as a culmination of all of the other elements. You could call it “spirit” or “soul”, but I prefer not to name it.
Let’s take the suits of the tarot and arrange them around a pentacle as an analogy, as an example.
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Let’s say that you want to find happiness in the material world. You would look at the coins.
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However, coins alone can’t bring you happiness. The best salary means nothing if you hate the job. You have to love your job; you have to be passionate about it. That’s the cups.
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But then, in order to get that job in the first place, you need to be intelligent, you need to be logical. That’s the sword.
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Still, if you spend your life hesitating, even if you are the most intelligent person in the world, you will never make your move and you will never get the job that you wanted. That’s the wand.
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In the end, it wasn’t the salary that made you happy. It was the travel that did, it was the voyage.
It’s after all of that work that you can finally be happy, that you can finally be with the “fifth” element. Without using all of the other elements you would not complete a cycle. Your pentagram wouldn’t be a pentagram. The lines would not form a cycle.
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However, being what we are, we never stay with that element for too long. We are never happy with what we have. It is the beginning of a new cycle, of a new pentagram. It is the continuation of a never ending circle.
Seeing that fifth element as a culmination of the cycle, I can’t imagine adding any cards or any suits to represent it. The closest to it, is your spread. It’s the reading as a whole. The fifth element is what the sitter come seeking when he or she asks us to read the cards; how to play the first four elements in order to close their cycle and reach the fifth element.
If I were to ever name this element, I would name it sky since people have been looking up to it since the dawn of humanity.
(I also find it important to say that I don’t see this "pentagram" as something flat, but more as something 3 dimensional.
http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/8937/96718657.jpg)
