Lord have mercy that the tarot card you were drawing on your birthday isn’t an omen of what’s to come for the year. Because I was “called” to work on the Five of Swords. Or I was “pulled” to, I dunno, I find all that New Agey jargon a bit fluffy but there it is. “I was called to” just means I don’t have a logical explanation for why I did what I did.

The Etteilla Five of Swords features an engraving of the Roman Emperor Aurelian (214 – 275 AD). Aurelian is best remembered as a soldier-emperor during the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of military anarchy, foreign invasions, when Rome faced economic and political turmoil, who succeeded at the reunification of Rome. He reigned as emperor for about five years, between 270 and 275.

One of his greatest victories was taking back control of Eastern Rome and Egypt from Queen Zenobia, a military campaign he started in 271. Septimia Zenobia (240 – 274 AD) was Queen of the Palmyrene Empire (modern day Syria). She took under her control much of the Roman East and annexed central Anatolia and Egypt, ruling over one of the wealthiest independent albeit short-lived city-states of the Near East. She goes down in history as one of the most formidable challengers against Rome.

In Historia Augusta (circa 4th century), Zenobia is described as being of “dark complexion, her teeth were of a pearly whiteness, and her large black eyes sparkled with uncommon fire, tempered by the most attractive sweetness.”

To reclaim the territories that Queen Zenobia had seized for herself, Emperor Aurelian launched a campaign to reunite the eastern provinces. Zenobia was ultimately captured by Aurelian and exiled.

Though what she’s wearing in my drawing is not historically accurate to queens of that time and region, I would bet Zenobia was no average woman anyway. She was not likely to have followed the norms. According to historian Al-Tabari (839 – 923 AD), Zenobia was adept at riding horses, would march long distances on foot alongside her troops, and could hunt as well as any man, and could out-drink any man.

So instead of having just Aurelian’s mugshot in the lower third, I illustrated him in a scene, in combat with Zenobia. Thought it’d make for a more interesting card.

Then for the lower third reversed position, I went with Izanami, Shinto deity of creation and death, of the underworld, of shadow, and of chaos. After dying during childbirth, Izanami became a kami and dark goddess of the underworld. She signifies loss and mortality.

Izanami and her husband Izanagi stirred the seas with a jeweled spear to form the islands of Japan. She birthed not only the land itself, but also the kami who now occupy that land.

Tragically, Izanami dies while birthing the fire god Kagutsuchi. Enraged from grief, her husband Izanagi kills his newborn son with his sword, the Sword of Heaven (Ame-no-ohabari). Kagutsuchi’s dismembered body then gives rise to other kami.

Izanami descends to the underworld where she decays and herself becomes integrated and fused with the land of the dead and of decay. Thus, she is a kami of both life and death, growth and rot, of creation and destruction. She is also a kami of transformation, as she herself changed from a mother goddess giving birth to the kami of the world to the ruler of death itself.

In both the Orsini and Lemarchand texts on Etteilla’s card meanings I’ve been referencing, the reversed Five of Swords means grief, burial, having to ceremoniously say your goodbyes, but to take heart, because brighter days are ahead.

Traditionally the reversed keyword should be Grief or some variation thereof. And I would make the case that I did go with “some variation thereof.” I went with the phrase, “Break the Cycle.” Implied in that phrase is suffering and grief, but I’m giving it a bit of a lift. =)

What causes grief and what inspires one to say “break the cycle” is a common root cause. So I haven’t changed that root meaning to the Five of Swords reversed. I’m just looking at that root from a different perspective.

Oh, fun. In the Tarot Belline, Magus Edmond replicates the keywords from the Etteilla: Perte in the upright position and Deuil in the reverse.

Etteilla’s influence continues: Waite certainly sourced his interpretation of the Five of Swords from Etteilla.

In Waite’s Pictorial Key, he says the Five of Swords means “degradation, destruction, revocation, infamy, dishonour, loss, with the variants and analogues of these” and reversed, it means “the same; burial and obsequies [funeral rites and rituals].”

Per Crowley, the Five of Swords is the Lord of Defeat (hence I went with the narrative illustration that I went with — Queen Zenobia is ultimately defeated). In the card meanings pamphlet Crowley published in The Equinox, he describes this card as featuring “two Rayed Angelic Hands” each holding two swords and a third hand holding a sword upright in the center as though disuniting them. Rose petals have been torn asunder and are falling. Keywords Crowley associates with this card: “Defeat, anxiety, trouble; loss and vileness of nature.” Yet there’s a personality implied here that is “clever and quick in thought and speech.”

My SKT deck was a fusion of Waite and Crowley, told through the story of Hector, warrior for Troy, who is aided by Aphrodite, fighting Achilles, aided by Athena, who has sent her messenger, the owl, to oversee the battle.

My illustration work has improved so much since drawing the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot. I can control the consistency of the outline thickness a lot better now than I could before.

It’s crazy how changing the size of the digital brush makes such a big a difference. When I was drawing Aphrodite two or three years ago, I was using size 8, which is the thickness you see in the outlines above.

And now my digital brush size is 4. Huge difference, right?

To close out this update, here are two cards I recently worked on that didn’t get a dedicated blog post, though you’ll find them on my Instagram:

The tarot awesomeness that is John Choma pointed out to me that there is a keywords flip-flop discrepancy in the Etteilla Ace of Wands.

Per Choma, in Etteilla’s original 1789 deck, the keyword for the upright position was Naissance (Birth) and Chute (Fall) was the reversed position. However, it somehow got flip-flopped in subsequent posthumous iterations of Etteilla’s deck. The subsequent Etteilla II and Etteilla III had the keywords “wrong” or flipped, with Chute in the upright position and Naissance in the reverse. Doh.

I also went back to tweak the previously done Seven of Swords and Three of Swords, though I think the Roman Emperor Pertinax in the reverse position of the Three of Swords could use more touch-ups. I only drew half of him, and then did the copied mirror image of the half I drew to create the symmetrical whole, but it’s looking a bit too obvious and unnatural. I do like my butterflies though. =)