By Sarah Taylor
We are obviously doing a lot of processing. I cannot think of another card that rivals the Seven of Wands in terms of number of appearances in The Weekend Tarot Reading. Its regular visits feel like a journey of review, an opening to something new emerging, a cleansing; review, opening, cleansing.
By way of a reminder, the Seven of Wands is about something coming up from below — and I see this as a pushing up of the unconscious into consciousness and the fight of the ego to keep it hidden. The reason I see it this way is because of the suit (Wands representing energy and movement of consciousness) and the fact that there is only one figure in the card while the remaining six wands are being held and thrust upwards by an invisible source: the unconscious is nothing if not invisible to us. And what often happens with the unconscious is that we project it.
The unconscious, unknowable as it is, feels dark to the ego. Its mystery feels chaotic to the organising powers of our conscious mind. And so our conscious mind resists it — and it has developed sophisticated mechanisms to do just this. There is no blame here; it is how and who we are. For the most part, and as hard as this is to admit sometimes, we don’t like change and we are programmed to avoid it.
As I mentioned in last Wednesday’s introduction to James Wanless’s article on projections in tarot, the acknowledgement and withdrawal of projections — of taking them back when you finally see them for what they are — is ceaseless, the work of a lifetime. Whenever we feel an emotional ‘pull’ or ‘hooking in’: that’s a sign that a projection might well be at work. When we feel so invested in something about another person or situation that we fixate on it: that’s the time to look inside to see if, in actuality, it has its origin in us.