The Five of Wands, Strife: Saturn in Leo

The Five of Wands, Strife, is the Thoth deck's name for Saturn ruling the first decan of Leo, roughly July 23 to August 1. After Venus closed the Aries triad with Completion, covered in the previous part of this series, The Four of Wands, Completion: Venus in Aries, the Wands cross into fixed fire, and Saturn's cold, restrictive hand meets flame at its most stubborn. Strife is the small card where that collision becomes visible as open conflict.

The First Decan of Leo: Saturn Opposes Fire

Leo is a fixed fire sign, steadier and more self-assured than Aries's cardinal rush, and it is ruled by the Sun. Saturn, the planet of limitation, delay and hard-won structure, sits awkwardly in its first decan: a restrictive force placed directly in the sign of confident, radiant will. In Golden Dawn correspondence, a planet placed in a sign that resists its nature often produces friction rather than ease, and Strife is the clearest example of this across the whole suit of Wands.

This is why the card reads differently from any strife shown elsewhere in the deck. It is not fire burning out of control, as the suit's root energy might suggest, and it is not fire extinguished, which Saturn alone could threaten. It is fire contested: several wills, each legitimate, competing for the same ground, with no single actor clearly in the wrong.

Strife: Crowley's Reading of a Difficult Card

Crowley kept the older title rather than softening it, and in The Book of Thoth he is blunt about the card's temper: energy expressing itself as a scramble, competitive and directionless until something or someone imposes order. Tradition holds that this is Saturn's particular gift here, however unwelcome: the friction of Strife eventually forces a structure onto fire that, left to Leo alone, might simply keep burning without result. The conflict is not pointless. It is the costly way this decan builds the steadier footing that Leo's second and third decans, Victory and Valour, will inherit.

Ill-dignified, beside cards of exhaustion or bad faith, Strife can show conflict that has stopped being productive, a contest kept alive out of habit rather than any remaining stake worth winning.

Geburah, the Number Five, and the Four Fives

Every small card numbered five belongs to Geburah, the fifth Sephirah, the sphere of severity, judgement and necessary destruction on the Tree of Life. The series on the Sephiroth covers what that placement means across suits: Geburah, Severity, and the Four Fives. Geburah prunes what Chesed's mercy allowed to grow unchecked, and every four-card formation on the Tree eventually meets this test. In Wands, Geburah's severity meets fire directly, without water's grief, air's doubt or earth's worry to slow the collision, so Strife is the small card where Geburah's disciplining force is least buffered. The Five of Cups mourns a loss; the Five of Swords accepts a costly defeat; the Five of Disks worries over scarcity. Strife alone fights, openly and without disguise.

This is also why Strife, despite its discomfort, is not usually read as the deck's worst outcome. Geburah's severity is corrective, not malicious, and a reading that lands here is often describing a necessary contest rather than a senseless one.

Reading Strife in a Spread

In practice, Strife suggests active competition: for a role, a resource, a decision, or simply for whose account of events will prevail. The card's advice is not to avoid the contest but to enter it clear-eyed, since avoidance under Saturn in Leo usually just delays a confrontation that was already due. A querent asking about a conflict at work or in a group project should read Strife as confirmation that the tension is real and probably necessary to resolve directly.

It pairs tellingly with Lust, the trump Crowley assigned to Leo in place of the older Strength, because both describe fierce energy that has to be ridden rather than suppressed. Where Lust shows that energy mastered through union with it, Strife shows the same energy still being fought over, the stage before mastery is possible.

The Decan in the Wider Calendar

The Golden Dawn's decan tables, which Crowley carried into the Thoth deck from the order's Book T, continue the Hellenistic planetary-sign sequence into Leo exactly as they did Aries; the broader history of the decan system is covered on the English Wikipedia's decan article. Checked against a tropical ephemeris, late July's Saturn-in-Leo window marks the year's hottest, most contested stretch of fixed fire.

Strife opens the Leo triad of this series. The next part follows Leo into its second decan, where Jupiter turns contest into Victory.

Distinguishing Strife from the Suit's Other Hard Cards

Readers sometimes flatten every difficult Wands card into one undifferentiated warning, and Strife is easy to confuse with Ten of Wands — Oppression, Oppression, the decan that closes this series. The distinction is structural, not just emotional. Strife is a contest between roughly equal forces, still live and still worth entering; Oppression is the accumulated weight of a burden already carried too long, where the question is no longer who wins but how to set something down. A reading with Strife asks a querent to engage; a reading with Oppression asks them to stop. Keeping Saturn's two very different placements in the suit apart, one at Leo's opening, one at Sagittarius's close, prevents a reader from giving the same tired advice to two genuinely different situations.