“As the saying goes “You can put lipstick on a sow but it’s still a sow,” or similarly and more bluntly, “You can’t polish a turd.”
– from my 2019 essay When “Bad Is Bad”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Over the last few weeks I’ve encountered two posts in the online tarot community where novice diviners were agonizing over the suit of Swords, asking “If there are no bad cards, why is this suit so ominous and depressing?” Both times I pointed them at Arthur Edward Waite’s statement in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot: “The suggestion of harmony and other favorable readings must be considered in a qualified manner, as Swords are generally not symbolical of beneficent forces in human affairs.”

I’ve been dealing with this unhappy condition as it applies to most of the Swords and a few other scattered examples over my 50+ years of practice, first with the Thoth and later with the RWS decks, and have written several essays on ways to accommodate it. But it has only recently become a bone of contention with holistic lifestyle sages of the “it’s all good” persuasion. The tiresome mantra in the realm of popular tarot theory is “There are no entirely bad cards, they all have a positive side.” Trying to make that point stick can require some energetic “mental gymnastics” and I, for one, am not convinced.

I was once involved in an online discussion with Mary K. Greer on the subject of “bad cards,” and she agreed that it can be nearly impossible to cast their limited virtues in a more favorable light, so they definitely qualify as unfortunate and must be taken largely at face value. In short, if there is no remedy for a “rotten apple,” seekers must tolerate its unpleasantness with as much grace as they can muster under the circumstances. Failing that, they wind up manipulating the context of the reading to make it agree with the prevailing wisdom, which is patently absurd. After all, this world isn’t Wonderland, Oz, Narnia or other children’s tale of moral rectitude, it’s more like Gene Wilder’s sly, unsettling version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

One instance is the RWS 10 of Swords, where optimists point to the Sun that seems to be rising on the horizon at the far right of the scene, offering encouragement that things can only get better. But what if it is actually setting and night will soon arrive? Think about it.

Similarly, there is an upbeat opinion that the Tower doesn’t actually destroy anything, it just enables the victim to “build back better” even as the bricks and mortar rain down.

The ragged beggars on the RWS 5 of Pentacles are often described as having access to divine redemption, but a close look at the image suggests that the pair has already passed the door of the church, which was barred against them because the wealthy clerics don’t want to face the unsavory (and most likely unsanitary) consequences of inviting them into their gleaming pseudo-sanctuary. All the indigents can do is peer forlornly at the opulent stained-glass window before moving on, but they seem to have given up on even that glimpse of a better world. It’s more of a pointed commentary on the “haves” and “have-nots” than a message of hope and opportunity. It’s titled “Lord of Material Trouble” for good reason.

Or how about everyone’s least-favorite card, the 3 of Swords? More sensible observers recognize that the suit of Swords is related to Air in most decks and therefore represents the cerebral domain, not the sphere of emotions. Even before I knew that Pamela Colman Smith’s image came from the Sola Busca tarot, the popular definition of “heartbreak” struck me as a “red herring” that leads the unwary down the wrong path. But it is a pernicious misapprehension that just won’t die. The Golden Dawn didn’t help matters by labeling it the “Lord of Sorrow,” so I made my peace with that misnomer by translating it into the Buddhists’ “sorrow of attachment to the world,” a more philosophical concept that I’ve discussed in another essay. In practice, however, I read it as temporary mental indigestion that will soon pass. Most RWS users put on a “stiff upper lip” and plow through the pictorial anguish with a bright “Well, that sucks, let’s talk about something more pleasant.”

I think of this relentless form of “grin-and-bear-it” cheerleading as the tarot equivalent of Monty Python’s “Happy Valley” sketch, in which the citizens “tenaciously frolicked away” because they were prohibited from displaying any signs of emotional distress on pain of legal prosecution. In one memorable vignette, an unfortunate man who was convicted of having “moaned quietly to himself with malice of forethought” was told by the beaming judge “I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you cheer up,” upon which he, the jury and the courtroom observers all laughed heartily in unison, right on cue. The tarot version of this scenario would of course be the “rehabilitated” Hanged Man.

The point of all this is that there are times when we should just “call a spade a spade” and not hog-tie ourselves in verbal knots by trying to talk our way out of it. We don’t have to be harsh about the implications, but we also shouldn’t shirk our responsibility for giving clients what they asked for: a straight answer. I rise to the occasion with carefully-chosen words that say what must be said without resorting to that other Monty Python trope: “being-hit-on-the-head” lessons. There is bad and then there is bad, and the seeker doesn’t have to know that we’ve presented “the lesser of two evils” in our choice of language as long as they get the message loud-and-clear.