Weekly Tarot: Seven of Wands

[An explanatory intro: I’m experimenting with incorporating my ongoing study of the Tarot into the stuff I’m producing for Patreon. This is the first in a series of brief weekly analytical posts I’ll be writing on individual cards. I’m clearly not getting as deep into them as someone more knowledgable in the full occult history and symbolism of the Tarot would be able to, but I think this is a useful exercise for myself and hopefully you might find it interesting. 

What I’m including in here is not authoritative, and like all Tarot interpretation, it’s highly subjective and particular to me. You may get different things out of the same card or have different understandings of what it means. That’s fine; I’m of the opinion that there’s really no wrong way to do Tarot. Or at least I’m not interested in arguing about what the right way is. 

I’m drawing the cards at random. I decided to do it that way rather than start with the beginning of the Major Arcana and proceed from there because it’s more interesting to me to not know beforehand what I’ll be writing about in any given week.

I often get asked about my deck, since I prefer to eschew the more conventional Rider-Waite deck (I just don’t vibe with the aesthetic). It’s the Ethereal Visions deck by artist Matt Hughes, and it’s available all over the place online for a pretty reasonable price.]

Seven of Wands

In previous posts I’ve talked about the unique nature of the Wands suit—its connection to the element of fire, symbolism that mirrors The Magician in the Major Arcana, and the attributes of power, confidence, energy, creativity, boldness, action, and vitality. Those are all positive things, at least in positive contexts, but as I noted in my post on the Two of Swords, there are also several cards in the Wands suit that deal with difficulty and conflict. 

This isn’t unique to the Wands suit, obviously. Pentacles, Swords, and Cups all contain cards that represent positive and negative things. Indeed, many of the cards are mostly value-neutral and their meaning can be entirely dependent on their place in the spread and the cards around them. 

A note that I should have made earlier: many Tarot readers use inverted cards, which all on their own represent the negative aspects of whatever the card represents. I don’t use that technique; in part I feel like I get plenty of flexible nuance out of readings without doing so, but also one of the things I like about the Tarot is how streamlined and elegant it feels, and for me personally, introducing that element of extra complexity actually sort of gums up the works. At some point I may incorporate it into my readings but as of right now I’m disinclined to do so. 

So the Seven of Wands is about conflict. More particularly, it’s about defiance in the face of something, conflict of the type that threatens to knock you off your feet or shake you from whatever ground you’re on. In particular, this can be about holding to the strength of one’s convictions when they’re being tested, standing up for what you believe in, refusing to budge from your position even when pressure is being exerted on you to do so. 

It can also have connotations of aggression—not merely being defiant but pushing back hard, and not even necessarily pushing back at something but being the first one to make the push. This is the kind of thing I tend to have negative gut feelings about, because I associate aggression in all forms—my own or other people’s—with a lot of anxiety. But it can also be softened into assertiveness, confidently seizing an advantage rather than looking to start a fight. 

Like I said, the positive or negative interpretations of a card are affected more strongly than anything else by its place in the spread and how it makes the most sense to interpret it in the context of the other cards. But when this comes up in a reading, often I feel cautiously optimistic when I see it. This is because I associate it most strongly with the first things I mentioned—being defiant, holding one’s ground, standing up for what one believes in. In any place that indicates any part of the near future it can be a bit anxiety-making, because it causes me to consider what might happen that would put me in a place where I would have to do those things, but it also serves as a reminder that I can do them, that I should have confidence in myself to be able to stand up to whatever it is that might come at me. 

If it shows up in a place more about the present, it’s even more reassuring in that way. There’s a strong selection bias here which is almost certainly determinative: I tend to do readings when I’m feeling unsettled or worried and in need of some centering, which makes me far more likely to interpret the card that way when it appears. I’m going through a rough time, so here’s a card that means I should hold fast. 

But that’s actually the whole point of the Tarot as I use it; I can always stand my ground, I’m always capable of holding to what I believe in, and the Tarot as a problem-solving tool is great at tossing out helpful reminders of things like that. 

(Did you get something out of this? Please consider becoming a supporter; at the $1 tier and up you’ll get the full writeup of the Celtic Cross spread I’ll be doing once a month!)