Inspiration Within: The Ace of Wands & Five of Swords
Deck credit: Small Spells Tarot
It’s easy for conversations about Venus retrograde to focus only on relationships. Romance takes precedence in our collective understandings of the planet of love and the erotic—which makes sense, as romantic relationships occupy an unduly privileged position on the hierarchy of relationships our culture values and understands. While dating, sex, and this particular type of love are valuable and certainly worth exploring during this time, I think this retrograde cycle is also an incredible opportunity to explore our relationship to creativity.
In her classic essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes:
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information…The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.
I would argue that ignoring the creative aspect of the erotic is one of the ways in which we misname it, and enable it to be used against us. An erotic that necessarily depends on something or someone outside of ourselves to be experienced is inherently less empowering than considering it as something that originates from us, and that we can express independently. By limiting what we allow ourselves to understand as the erotic only to what we see externally represented as “erotic”—sex and romance (especially between straight and cis people) we cut ourselves off from an enormous source of inner power and wealth.
That’s why this retrograde is an invitation to reinvestigate our relationship with our own creative erotic. Because hopefully none of us are out and about meeting new folks, the quarantine is especially conducive to exploring this branch of Venusian energy. The Ace of Wands always shows up as an invitation to look for inspiration, to explore what ignites our creativity. I think there’s also an invitation to reframe inspiration with this cards: while we often refer inspiration as something that comes from outside of the self, it might be more helpful to consider it as something that originates inside, but that we’ve forgotten; and that, once we see something outside of ourselves that reminds us of our inner artist, we remember our creativity and can work with it.
The five of swords, in turn, is a reminder that we don’t need to benchmark. I’ve always understood this card to be about competition—the sense of scarcity that impels us to look towards others to understand what we should like, how we should present, what we should create. Your creative energy is your own. Your art is your own. Only you can make and think and invent and write what you, uniquely, write. I’ve often found that a powerful self-sabotage technique I use is looking for “inspiration” as a veil to really sussing out who I consider to be competition. Comparing yourself to others is detrimental to the power that lies in the potential of the creative erotic. Get in touch with it as we move towards the end of Venus’s retrograde. That’s what this transit is really about.
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