THE MAGICIAN § THE FOOL § FIVE OF PENTACLES
We are fortunate when the Magician takes a leading role in a card reading. This character prepares for what can be expected. The Magician knows just how powerful his tools are, how to use them, and how to efficiently prepare for what can reasonably be expected. This archetype does his best work from a position of awareness. He pays close attention to his environment and the wants and needs of the people within it. At this time, we will gain the best results if our reflex action is thoughtfulness. A shift in focus is how we clear our minds from the pursuit of a desired outcome or expectation. This is how we allow for spontaneous solutions and reimagined means to occur to us. The Magician achieves his awareness by way of effort. He stops both his wandering mind and his hyperfocus to listen, with a relaxed mind, to people, animals, trees, to all of his surroundings. He becomes meaningfully thoughtful, conscious of himself as a desiring and competitive animal. He is a good guide for us right now because we need information more than we need to be right or ahead of the curve or in a dominant position. Consider whether or not you need to control something—or even have an opinion on it at all. Think of this: The chance that human beings are the center of existence is zero percent. In the end, of course, control is an illusion and the Magician always prepares himself for confrontation with this irreducible fact.
Thoughtfulness brings stability, and we need that because the Fool is ready to escort the Magician into a new cycle. It is the Magician’s role to form a good answer, a workable solution, or an actionable set of steps forward. But the Fool is the one who will convince the Magician to take the final leap. All the planning, preparing, troubleshooting, and thoughtful reimagining that can be done has been done and only the leap is left, making these two archetypes a good pair. The Fool pushes where the Magician procrastinates, and the Magician prepares where the Fool rushes in. The future is always uncertain—even when it seems more or less predictable, it’s not. To meet upcoming challenges, we need to prepare by creating enough internal peace that we have the energy to respond rather than react as we go along through our days. We cannot foresee everything that might happen, which is to say that we do not and cannot know what will, in fact, happen. This is the reason the Fool will step into the lead for a few miles and also the reason the wise Magician will so easily defer to her guidance. And as long as this Fool energy is around, get plenty of the joy of it, notice all the joy you can. Make it a game.
The Five of Pentacles rounds out our month, and if we choose it as a positive omen, we can use it to our advantage. Considering the Magician and the Fool are working in tandem, we can expect a twist in the narrative. Together, these two will deliver a fresh feeling to something already established or assist in landing on a new foundation. In either case, there are certain ideas that we might carry from the past, maybe a dogma we picked up along the way that is neither accurate nor useful. We can expect to feel challenged in a few areas of our thinking and should consider options for change. Parts of our lives, parts of ourselves come to different forms of closure. The death of one person changes the world they leave behind. Life will eventually shift around our absence, and when it does, all the troubles we carried will wash into the sea. We can use this Five of Pentacles to release ourselves from pointless burdens. May we know the difference between old rules we made up and actual limitations.
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illustration by Gurleen Rai