Card of the Week: Nine of Blades

The past is a place of reference, not of residence.  Past mistakes are meant to guide you, not define you.  Guilt can either hold you back from growing, or it can show you what you need to shift in your life.

The Nine of Blades evokes anguish, guilt, remorse, shame, and mental torment.  Your or someone close to you may be suffering from grief over a loss, self-blame for a perceived inner failing, the seeming hopelessness of a depression, or some other self-imposed despondency.  But these feelings must not necessarily be endured in solitude.  Look for ways to offer or accept help.

Inverted, this card urges defiance against mental forces trying to claim you.  Relieve guilt with a confession, seek an external cause of a perceived past failure, or find a way to confront your fears.

In “Obsession”, the Enterprise is surveying planet Argus X when landing party members are killed by a dikironium cloud that feeds on their red blood cells.  Kirk believes the cloud to be a creature that he had once encountered and failed to kill years earlier, and directs subsequent landing parties to search for it and fire their phasers at it.  Lieutenant Garrovick does so, then blames his own brief hesitation for the deaths of more landing party members.  The cloud creature leaves the planet, and Kirk believes it wants to return to its home world to breed.  During a space battle, Kirk learns that the creature can dodge the ship’s phasers, and realizes that neither he nor Garrovick could have killed it previously.  When it finally reaches its destination planet Tycho IV, Kirk and Garrovick lure it into a trap and destroy it with an antimatter explosion.