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Picture it: Ithaca, 11th century B.C.
Or something.
You’re a teenager, your dad’s been out of town on business, you’re home alone with your mom wondering why dad hasn’t called to let you know when he’ll be back, and a bunch of frat bros show up, eat all your food, drink all your beer, order your servants around, pass out in all your guest rooms, and refuse to leave. For months!
That’s essentially what Telemachus, the teenage son of Odysseus is dealing with when his father leaves for the Trojan War and is lost at sea for years, leaving him and his mother Penelope with absolutely no control over their household, property, or future. Without the man of the house present, Penelope and Telemachus feel like powerless victims who can do nothing to stop these freeloaders from having their way with their home, cattle, food stores, gold, all of it.
Penelope, a mere woman, certainly has no say in the matter as far as ancient Greece is concerned.
And Telemachus, a mere boy, mostly hides in his room crying, fantasizing about how sweet it would be if his bad-ass father Odysseus showed up and surprised all these goons by kicking their ass six ways to Sunday and reclaiming his position as master of the house. Then, because Telemachus doesn’t actually hold out hope for his father still being alive after all these years curses the gods and says there’s nothing he can do so he’s just going to lie there and suffer and tell everybody who is willing to listen about it until his own dying day.
You know, 10 of Swords style.
The 10 of Swords represents ultimate victimhood. The figure in this tarot card has suffered - or is currently suffering - endless pains, hardships, and wrongs, and there’s simply nothing he can do about it, or so he believes. He has given up all hope and agency and might even be identifying with and even enjoying his victimhood. In Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation (that’s an affiliate link to support indie bookstores by the way), Meg Jones Wall observes “a passivity” in this tarot card,
a contentment with melodrama that can be impossible to understand from the outside. Rather than trying to escape our circumstances, the Ten of Swords finds a kind of pleasure in the pain, relishes avoiding any actions that might shift our outlook or alter our situation.
If you haven’t actually read Homer’s The Odyssey, you might be surprised to learn that we don’t even meet Odysseus until Book V of the epic poem. (The abridged version I read in high school, for example, started right in the action, in medias res it’s called, with Odysseus at sea fighting off the monstrous cyclops, the seductive sirens, and more.)
The first four books of The Odyssey are devoted to Athena’s plan for snapping Telemachus out of his victim mentality and getting him to do something to change his circumstances.
Bright-eyed Athena (as she is often called in the myth), daughter of Zeus and goddess of wisdom and warfare, states at the council of the Olympians that the gods should opt to lead brave, loyal, and noble Odysseus safely home to Ithaca. And, she adds,
“I will myself go to Ithaca, to put heart into his son and make him do something.”
Notice that Athena did not say, “I will appear to Telemachus and magically put an end to his woes so he can wake up one day and have everything be different and be delivered from his helpless victimhood.”
(I low-key wish though, am I right?)
She appears to Telemachus disguised as a wise old friend of the family and, after listening to Telemachus retell the same story - again - about how the frat boys have taken over his house and are eating up all their food and harassing his mother and refusing to leave and how he wishes his father would just come back and take care of things but oh well that’s probably never going to happen and woe is me, she states:
Ah, well, of course all that lies on the knees of the gods—whether [Odysseus] will come back or not, and punish them in his own house. But you had better think how to get them out of the place, that is my advice.
In other words, regardless of whether Odysseus returns home or not, Telemachus cannot just sit there and do nothing.
And neither can we.
And that’s the invitation of the 10 of Swords.
When things are not going our way, when we are suffering undeserved and overwhelming stress, hardship, and difficulty in life, we cannot simply lie down and take it. I mean, we can if we don’t actually want things to get better, which is a very real phenomenon that happens. People start to identify with their pain and struggle and actually hold on to it for dear life because they don’t know who they would be without their suffering. They don’t want their suffering to end!
But assuming of course that we do want to change or heal whatever is causing us pain and suffering, we need to do something. We need to act.
In Telemachus’s case, Athena gives him a laundry list of stuff to do:
Stand up to the intruders and kick them out.
Tell your mother to decide whether she wants to remarry or not so these bozos can stop lingering around hoping she picks one of them.
Find a ship and a crew and start traveling to nearby cities to inquire of your father’s whereabouts.
If you find him, great. And, if not, come home and honor his death once and for all so you can move on.
To snap out of victimhood and begin to be able to tackle even the first of these tasks, Telemachus had to let his former self die. The weak, feckless, sniveling version of him had to cease to exist to make room for the new, strong, and effectual Telemachus to be born. The one worthy of being his father’s son, the noble and fearless Odysseus.
Telemachus musters up his strength despite his heavy heart and addresses the hoards of men reveling in his home:
Is it not enough, men, that you have been carving up a good portion of my possessions all this time, while I was still a boy? But now you see I am grown up…
And eventually, when Telemachus visits Odysseus’s dear friend and fellow warrior Menelaus in Lacedaemon to ask for news of his father’s fate in Troy, we see further evidence of Telemachus’s rebirth as a man of agency and power in the way Menelaus describes him:
I declare I never saw any one so like, man or woman—it amazes me quite, how this young man looks exactly like the son of Odysseus!
…
That man had feet just like that and hands just like that, and the way his eyes go, and a head and hair on him just like that.
Telemachus has, metaphorically speaking, let his former self die so that he can step into his new, divinely empowered self.
(If fast-forwarding a couple millennia will help, think Taylor Swift in her Reputation era: “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh! ‘Cause she’s dead!)
🐍
If we suspect that we’ve been playing the role of the victim (it happens to the best of us), the 10 of Swords tarot card lets us know that it’s time to let that narrative come to an end. In the Minor Arcana of the tarot, tens mark completion and the need for some kind of ending or closure so we can move on to the next act. The figure in the 10 of Swords is that hammy community theater actor who milks their death scene for so long that both his co-stars and the audience start thinking to themselves, “We get the picture. Just die already.”
(I felt like this when I played Eponine in my high school’s production of Les Miserables. I climbed up a ladder behind the barricade set in the center of the stage, “got shot” at the top of the rig, grabbed my stomach in pain to signal to the audience that I’d been hit, proceeded to climb down the front of the barricade in a way I can’t actually recall now, then attempted to lay motionless on the stage which was near impossible because I was so nervous my stomach was heaving up and down with each breath, only to have the guy playing Marius hoist me up in his arms so I could sit up against him, still grabbing my allegedly profusely bleeding stomach, and SING A WHOLE OTHER GODDAMN SONG before finally putting my character and myself out of my misery.)
The 10 of Swords makes sure that we do not milk our suffering for too long. That we do not get too comfortable playing the victim to actually heal, recover, and take charge of our lives. We can’t just fantasize about and pine after a better version of ourselves, especially since, if you’re anything like me, that can often lead to judging and berating ourselves for being terrible human beings.
That helps nobody.
The 10 of Swords reminds us that we can - and in fact must - let go of certain versions of ourselves if we want to give a new version a chance to emerge.
Athena’s list of directions for Telemachus was quite specific. What might your own action list for transformation and rebirth look like?
The metaphor of allowing our former self to die might mean letting go of negative thought patterns, limiting beliefs, and harmful perspectives that keep us small and stuck. It might mean moving away from behaviors, habits, and narratives that no longer serve us. Or, maybe it means forgiving ourselves or others for past mistakes or failures.
If we don’t shed the aspects of ourselves that hinder our progress and growth, we can’t create space for new experiences and ways of thinking that are necessary for us to grow into more empowered, more loving, more creative, and more authentic versions of ourselves.
Below is a gentle, self-reflective tarot spread to try when you suspect that you’re holding on a little too firmly to a victim mentality that is preventing you from taking action and changing your life.
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