MISSIVE 37

The Six of Swords and What Awaits at its Far Shore

The Six of Swords in the classic Waite-Smith art is a somber scene, a grim departure on a small boat, as if to represent exile:

It follows the pyrrhic victory of the Five of Swords; together, these cards tell a tale of alienation caused by perceived supremacy, detachment through intellect. Most depictions of this card are tragic. There is a sense of emigration with nowhere to go.

Yet the Thoth tradition uplifts this card, assigning it to the heavily favorable position of Mercury in Aquarius, labelled Science:

This is human rationality at its most exalted: departure from others, innovation, novelty. Ideation so grand as to be patentable. Maybe.

This contradiction, to me, illustrates the substructure of the card as a whole. As the later Swords remind, the exaltation of human intellect is not necessarily good once it achieves its ultimate state. Every model or strategy works to a point.

I rather enjoy, then, the 8th House Tarot’s depiction, revisiting the boat as a gondola toward the clouds, as the arc of a cumulonimbus looms:

The Mercury in Aquarius structure involves being a step ahead of others; seeming to have one’s head in the clouds due to a mastery of the problem space at hand. But in this is also a departure from the cares and beliefs of others, a degree of alienation that isn’t necessarily effective in the total of human reality.

No mental map of how the world works is the world-in-itself, and while sharp discernment allows access to certain mysteries, it inevitably leaves others unsolved. The chaotic, the irreproducible, and the immeasurable are all beyond total rational understanding. We do not live in a closed system, and need more than our empirical tools to exist as complete human beings. To rely on them too heavily is dangerous.

It is now commonplace to see intelligence applied too thoroughly separating itself from the human experience. Macroeconomics departs from the material conditions of the lives it describes in favor of abstractions that allow for more complex computational processes. Silicon Valley trains machine learning models on human data in the futile expectation of creating algorithms that can operate outside human biases. Abusive personalities hammer on the “irrationality” of those closest to them for the sake of preserving their egos. Once this ship departs for the mind palace in the clouds, it leaves a great deal of the practical, societal, and spiritual behind.

There are, of course, cases where such departures are good. The card describes very well schisms like those of Galileo, or Bruno, where human rationality managed to defy long-lasting intellectual structures, and pushed towards a wiser future. As history shows, however, it didn’t work out too well for them on a personal level.

Simultaneously, that disruptive force can be harmful for human reality at large; the present state of the gig economy and its slow constriction of opportunity is a great example. Very few app-driven industries have maintained popular favor as we move into a new decade, let alone actually made any money.

When boarding the boat of the Six of Swords, reflect very strongly on whether or not the departure needs to happen, and what is being left behind. It might be the world.