Five of Swords

Meaning: Upheaval, conflict, and loss

Depiction: Having snapped Ahab's boat on the first day of the chase, Moby Dick rises vertically from the water,  stuck with three twisted lances from older fights. Two more float on the water nearby.

Text: Chapter 133 - The Chase, First Day
Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into the air.

Rockwell Kent's illustration from Moby-Dick (1930)

Comments:  Moby Dick as the victorious warrior in this image, with  a stove boat in the background, clearly captures the card meaning of a lost fight. According to Wikipedia, this is also known as the defeat card.

XX. Judgement

Meaning: Assessment and letting go of the past. Rebirth and karma.

Depiction: That most famous scene in the last chapter where Moby Dick takes out the Pequod with a blow of his forehead, watched by a stunned crew in Ahab's boat and Ishmael swimming alongside it.  The three harpooneers, Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego are at the mastheads, with Tashtego at the top mast, hammer in hand. Everyone still alive at this point knows it's about to be all over.

Text: Chapter 135: The Chase - Third Day
From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.

Comments: Here, Moby Dick plays the role of the angel of judgment, and the Pequod crew are the souls whom he calls.