HP Tarot - 5 D Torment

(2008) 5 1/2" x 10 1/2" Pencil on Paper. Processed and framed in Photoshop.

While the 4s are all about consolidation, the 5s are about an eruptive breaking of moulds. The stability of the 4s grows unstable, and if we were comfortably settled with the previous cards we now go through a certain amount of pain and insecurity at having to adjust. The 5s are under the auspices of Mars whose somewhat violent energy is very appropriate to the dynamic of these cards.

In the suit of Disks the Mars energy is the most painful and difficult. When material securities fall away and prove brittle people suffer. We are material beings and if we are robbed of that sustenance whether it be actual food or our home, possessions or sense of safety we are in pain. The best image I could imagine for this card is a quiet farm-stead with the fields ripe for harvest, and an army marching through, killing the farmer and his family, slaughtering his livestock and trampling his wheat into the dirt.

For a Harry Potter themed image I chose Dumbledore's withered hand after he touches the horcrux ring. He tries to break the mould of the material world by calling the dead to him and this breach ultimately robs him of his own existence - it is the first step on the path of torment that finally leads him to plead for death on top of the tower. The black stone of the ring is one disk, the other four are symbols for the most inauspicious of geomantic figures stitched into the sleeve of his robes: tristitia, carcer, rubeus and amisso - sadness, prison, reddening and loss.