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Five of Swords & Medea · The Tarot Card Catalogue

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, and welcome back to the tarot card catalog, the show where we take one tarot card and one story from somewhere in human history and let them mess with each other's meanings for a while.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Today's card is the Five of Swords, and today's story is the Greek myth of Medea, the woman who helped her husband become a hero, and then, when he threw her away, did something so unthinkable that her name has been a synonym for maternal horror for like 2500 years.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you right now, this is not a comfortable pairing, but I think it might be one of the truest ones we've done.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's start where we always start with the card by itself, no story attached yet, just what it means when it shows up on its own.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: The Five of Swords in most Riderweight Smith-based decks shows a guy standing in the foreground, kind of smirking, holding a bunch of swords, sometimes his own, sometimes swords he's picked up off the ground.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And in the background, there are two other figures walking away heads down, defeated.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: The sky's usually a little stormy, a little unsettled, like the weather hasn't caught up to the fact that the fight's over.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the traditional read on this card is conflict, specifically conflict that's just ended and somebody won.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: But, and this is the part where every guidebook loves to point out, the win doesn't feel great.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a triumphant card.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's popping champagne.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: The guy holding the sword looks less like a victor and more like someone standing alone in a field wondering what he actually gained.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the keywords you'll usually see are things like winning at a cost, hollow victory, discord, being right but at the expense of the relationship.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it points to conflict itself, tension or disagreement, or someone pushing too hard to be the one who's correct.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And there's also this thread about intellect and strategy.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Swords as a suit is usually mind and thought, words, argument, not swords as in literal violence most of the time.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the Five of Swords often gets read as you won the argument, but look at what it cost you to win it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to be up front because this show's whole premise depends on this.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Tarot doesn't have one locked meaning.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Different traditions, different decks, different readers will emphasize different parts of this image.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Some readers lean into the humiliation of the people walking away.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Some lean into the isolation of the guy who's left standing there with an armful of swords and no one to celebrate with.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some readers actually flip it and ask whether the person collecting the swords is defending themselves after being outnumbered.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is this self-preservation?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is this survival?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone just assumes it's cruelty because he's the one left standing.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's genuinely ambiguous, upright, and everything.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the baseline here isn't a rule book.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's more like this is the card of conflict's aftermath, and the discomfort of a win that leaves something broken.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that discomfort is exactly where I want to bring in Medea, because Medea is a woman who wins completely, totally.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: She gets exactly what she set out to get, and it's one of the most devastating things you will ever read.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, quick context because the version most of us know comes from Euripides, an Athenian playwright writing in the 5th century BCE.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's worth saying plainly, this myth existed in other forms before him, and there are older traditions where Medea's story goes differently, somewhere she's remembered more as a goddess or a healer figure than a murderer.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Euripides is the version that stuck, the one that got performed and retold and turned into the Medea we mean when we say the name like a warning.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the version we're working with today, knowing it's not the only one that ever existed.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here's who she is.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Medea is a princess of Colchis.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is a distant foreign land from the Greek perspective, out on the edge of the known world.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And she's not just royal, she's genuinely powerful.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: She's got serious magical ability, deep knowledge, the kind of mind that can outthink almost anyone in the room.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: When the hero Jason shows up looking for the golden fleece, he doesn't get it through his own heroism, not really.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: He gets it because Medea falls for him and uses everything she has: her intelligence, her magic, her willingness to betray her own family, to make sure he survives the trials and gets the fleece and gets out alive.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: She is functionally the reason Jason becomes Jason the hero instead of Jason the guy who died trying.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And she gives up everything to do it.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Her home, her family, her whole world.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: She sails off with him, and for a while there's a life.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Corinth, children, two sons, a household.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: She's not a footnote in this marriage.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: She's a founding partner in it.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Everything Jason has, he has because of her.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then Jason decides to marry someone else, the king of Corinth's daughter.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: A better political match, a cleaner life.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the detail that I think matters most.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't even frame it as a betrayal in his own head.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: He tells Medea essentially that this is a good thing for everyone, that she and the boys will still be provided for, and that he's being reasonable.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Which is its own kind of violence, isn't it?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Being erased and told it's for your own benefit.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Creon, the king, decides Medea and her sons are too dangerous to stick around and orders them into exile.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where Medea does something that I think gets underplayed in the popular shorthand of this story.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't rage in the streets, she goes quiet.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: She asks for one day, just one day before she has to leave.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Creon, not knowing what he's dealing with, grants it.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: That one day is everything, because Medea is not out of options, she's out of illusions.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Her mind, the same mind that got Jason the fleece, the same strategic brilliance that once served him, turns completely and starts working against him instead.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: She sends the Corinthian princess a wedding gift, a beautiful robe, a golden crown, but laced with poison.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: The princess puts them on and dies in agony, and Creon, trying to help his daughter, touches her and he dies too.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Two deaths engineered from a distance, elegant and merciless.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that alone would be a revenge story, a brutal one but a legible one.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Betrayed woman destroys the people who wronged her.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: We'd almost be able to sit with that.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But Medea isn't done, because killing Creon and the princess doesn't actually touch Jason where it hurts most.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: He'd grieve, sure, but he'd move on.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's the kind of man who moves on.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: So Medea makes a decision that the play doesn't let her make easily.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: She wavers.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Euripides gives her an actual monologue where she talks herself into it and almost talks herself out of it and back in again.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then she kills her own sons, not out of madness or as a woman who's lost her mind.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: She's completely lucid.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: She does it because it's the one wound Jason cannot recover from.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: She takes away the only thing he has left that matters.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then she escapes in a chariot sent by the sun god, no less, completely unpunished, at least by any human hand.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Jason is left alive and broken, and that's the point.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: So sit with that for a second next to our card.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because look, the Five of Swords is a scene of someone standing over a battlefield holding the swords while other people walk away defeated.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Medea is that figure.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: She wins.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: She wins so completely there's nothing left of Jason to even fight back with.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: But here's where it stops being a tidy metaphor and starts actually complicating the card.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because in most Five of Swords readings, the guy standing there still has something, his weapons, his advantage, his life intact, even if his conscience isn't.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Medea's victory cost her the thing she loved most in the world, the one part of her life that wasn't about Jason at all.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Her sons were hers too, not just leverage against him.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: She burns down her own house to make sure his burns down with it.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that, I think, is the real center of this whole pairing.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Five of Swords isn't really about winning.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the moment your intelligence, your strategy, and cleverness, the very thing that you use to build things, reorganizes itself entirely around making someone else suffer.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And once that switch flips, the victory you get isn't a victory anymore.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's just devastation with better aim.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Medea doesn't lose the fight.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: She wins it so completely that everyone loses, herself included.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's the sword you're left holding after a war like that.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: You got what you wanted, and there's nothing left to want it for.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if we bring that back to the card, I think this changes how you sit with the five of swords next time it shows up.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Forget you won but at a cost.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's too gentle and tidy.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Try this instead.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Weaponized insight.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's what this card can mean.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not intelligence itself, but intelligence pointed like a blade aimed to wound.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Try grief with a strategy, because that's what Medea's revenge actually is.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sorrow that got organized and that built a plan.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Try the victory that needs a wound, meaning some wins only feel real to us if the other person is bleeding.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that should scare us a little when we notice it in ourselves.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because here's the thing this card is quietly asking.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you let it, when you're in conflict with a partner or a sibling or a coworker, whoever, are you trying to resolve something or are you trying to make sure they lose?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Those are not the same fight, even when they look identical from the outside, and only one of them leaves you holding something worth having when it's over.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the one thing I'll leave you with.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And just sit with it.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Don't rush to answer it out loud.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Think of the last time you really wanted to win an argument or a conflict, and ask yourself honestly whether you wanted to be right or whether some part of you wanted them to hurt.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to like the answer, just notice it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for this one.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for spending this time with me, the Five of Swords, and Medea, a woman who is brilliant and betrayed and did something no story has ever fully forgiven her for, and maybe shouldn't.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to go further with any of this, readings, courses, or mentorships, that's what I do anytime you're ready.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can find ways to contact me in the description.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And until next time, think about that field after the battle.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: The swords are all gathered up, someone standing there, technically victorious, but look closer at what's actually left on that ground and ask yourself if winning is even the right word for it anymore.