Six of Swords
Fixed air: apples, the ferryman, the farthest shore
Apples are considered sacred, immortal (their fruits remain viable while everything else dies around us), and spiritual guides for souls into the afterlife.
– Sarah Corbett in ‘Apple Magic for Samhain’
SIX OF SWORDS
The apple is connected to Mercury and to the ferryman in the Six of Swords – bridging the gap between the living and the dead, the past and the present, the known and unknown.
In the ‘Snow White’ story, the protagonist spends some time in an interstitial state between life and death after taking a bite of a poison apple.
But, like the seer, she does not remain in one state – she returns from the dead and shapeshifts back to her former, living self.
AQUARIUS II + SIX OF SWORDS
This card correlates with the third decan of Aquarius. You can learn more about the decans here.
Aquarius III is The Seer. The Six of Swords is about the magician, the passer between realms, the holder of liminal spaces, the one who cuts through.
T. Susan Chang calls this decan Celestial navigation and she says that she is ‘sympathetic to the idea that Mercury seems qualitatively well-suited to the peculiar electric genius of Aquarius.’
Who is the mysterious ferryman poling his charges to safety, from turbid waters (looking eerily like repeating Aquarius glyphs) to smoother ones? I don't know about you, but I can easily imagine the Magician as the same figure as the 6 of Swords' boatman. The Magician, as we know, is Mercury - he who knows all roads and passages, he to whom no way is barred, he who guides lost souls from one realm to another.
Austin Coppock also emphasises the nature of the ferryman in this decan:
The ferryman is the master of the space between worlds, for the crossing itself his realm. The ability to touch multiple shores but be beholden to none is the key to this face. Crowley calls this card "Science" in his Thoth deck, for it is only the method of science which can consistently connect the shore of the known with that of the unknown.
– Austin Coppock
He is referring to this description of the Six of Swords by Aleister Crowley:
But there is much more than this in the symbol. The perfect balance of all mental and moral faculties, hardly won, and almost impossible to hold in an ever-changing world, declares the idea of Science in its fullest interpretation.
— Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Using apple as a guide, consider a place in your current work-in-progress where your character(s) or narrator(s) are occupying a liminal space between the known and unknown. What happens when they venture deeper into the unknown? What do they bring back with them?