Our Words Are Spells
Or, the Ace of Swords' reminder to watch what we say, especially to ourselves
I overslept on a recent Saturday morning which caused me to miss my nail appointment and super casual non-earth-shattering morning plans with a friend and I immediately texted my husband, who was out of town, to say, and I quote:
omg I just woke up what the fuck is wrong with me I’m such a lazy waste of life ugh anyway good morning
All because I woke up 2-3 hours later than planned. ON A SATURDAY!
It’s not like I slept through a court date or an anniversary breakfast or driving a friend to a medical procedure. And even if I had slept through something important, it’s not like I made a habit of it. Absolutely nothing about what had happened required any of my words.
I used to think everybody spoke to themselves this way until I saw a therapist for the first time in college. You know how at a first therapy appointment you just spew out your whole life story in a single breath? Well, I did that and the therapist looked at me horrified.
“Is that how you always talk about yourself?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I was tallying how many times you called yourself ‘stupid’ or ‘idiot’ or ‘dumb bitch’ and, frankly, I lost count!”
“Hmm, I hadn’t noticed. So anyway, do you think my boyfriend is over me? He’s totally cheating on me, right?”
My therapist could not care less about my boyfriend and spent the rest of our time giving me the unbelievable news that she had never heard such harmful self-talk in her practice.
After my appointment, I called my sister to gather proof that everybody talked to themselves that way and that my therapist was a complete hack and I should stop seeing her immediately.
“Jesus Christ. Of course I don’t call myself those things,” my sister said.
I called my best friend next.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asked.
My roommate replied, “Wait, what? I like myself. Don’t you?”
“You like yourself!? Well excuse me, Miss I’m God’s Gift to the World! Conceited much?”
Fast forward a couple decades and while I don’t outwardly and explicitly abhor myself the way I apparently did in my youth, I’m still pretty demanding deep down, and that can result in some harsh self-talk now and again.
While I’d love to say that the desire simply to be kinder to myself is what caused me to improve my ways, it is not. It’s the mystical truth that our words create our world. Speech is creative.
In mythology, the creation of worlds through speech or thought (which is internal speech) is a type of ex nihilo creation, or creation “out of nothing.” The most prevalent example of this, of course, is the Judeo-Christian creation myth in which God speaks the entire world into existence. The very first lines of the very first chapter of the Bible, Genesis, read:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. . . .
And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” . . .
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. . . .
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. . . .
In various Egyptian creation narratives, the world is similarly created through a spoken command. In the ancient Egyptian text known as the Memphite Theology, the creator god Ptah conceives of the universe in his heart and manifests it into form through a spoken command. In one version of a later competing Egyptian creation myth, Amun - God of the sun and air - creates the universe through divine thought.
Mythical incantations of all kinds, from “Abracadabra” on 2nd century healing amulets to “Open sesame” from Scheherazade’s “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” further exemplify the magical power of words.
What does this mean for us?
As a literature professor who reads myth metaphorically, I understand creation myths to be guides for our own creative processes. And that means that our own words and thoughts also have manifesting power. Our powers may not be as dramatically potent as commanding “Let there be light!” and an entire universe appearing out of thin air, but the mechanism is the same.
If we repeatedly berate ourselves with incantations like “I am so lazy!” we are going to create a world in which we consistently see ourselves as lazy. We will observe our laziness, expect laziness, and in turn manifest more laziness.
If, on the other hand, we wake up late on a Saturday morning and think, “Damn, I must have been tired! What a luxury to be able to sleep in undisturbed,” we are more likely to observe even more such simple luxuries and experience even more mundane magic to be grateful for.
And through this observational lens, which is constructed by our thoughts and speech, we create a lot of the world around us.
I feel like I am being reminded of this mystical truth when the Ace of Swords shows up in my daily card pull.
The tarot swords are the suit of the intellect - our thoughts. And the tarot Aces are seeds, instances, beginnings. The Ace of Swords, then, asks what we are planting or creating through our thoughts.
In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack tells us that the Ace of Swords “returns us to the true essence of the suit - intellect” and that it “leads us beyond illusions and limitations to the spiritual truth contained within life.”
And one of the essential spiritual truths is that our thoughts, at least in part, create our reality!
“With this Ace,” says Mariana Louis in Tarot and the Psychology of the
Soul, “it is time to trust our agency and sovereignty in ruling our lives.”
We have the power to shape our world with our thoughts and our speech. What spells will you be casting with your words?
Until next time,
Annie
Thank you! This is the most helpful description I've read on how to think about (see what I did there? 🤣) the Ace of Swords.
Swords always have seemed omens of bad experiences to me-often ones in which I feel powerless to avoid or mitigate the damage or pain. For me, Swords has been the suit of bully vs victim. I'm working on changing my perspective on them. Truly, they are all about the stuff in life we tell ourselves and others.
Thank you, too, for sharing your story of negative self-talk. That took bravery to tell, and it made Swords as the suit of Thought palpable.
I keep coming back to this post of your and it gives me different insight everytime! today's rumination was about creating my own happiness and then, your eclipse post led me to this. I am always learning so much about our everyday critical and spiritual praxis and somehow, your words always come at the right time <3