Five of Knives – There’s a shadow hanging over me...

After the challenge of the Five of Scepters, today we have the Five of Knives from the Tarot of Vampyres. We see a young woman sleeping, while a dark winged vampire is crouching beside her. As with a lot of other versions of the five of Swords, the first question we have to ask ourselves is: who do we identify with? The girl, dominated by irrational fears or the vampire who manipulates and controls his victim by feeding these fears?  As you might have suspected, I feel more related to the young woman. She is sleeping, unaware of the malicious influence of the vampire, the symbol of our most primal fears of loss, abandonment, unworthiness etc. But all is not lost, She only has to wake up from her dreaming state and use her mind, the knife in the foreground, to cut through the deceit of the vampire and see life for what it really is. Too often nothing is as bad and scary as we fear it might be. Again when are able to wake up and face the vampire, then we can set free so much energy to put to use for our own personal development and transformation. Then we can climb the stairs in the background to a deeper understanding of who we really are.