Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate. — Carl Jung
Given that the Sevens have made a regular appearance in my tarot articles over the recent weeks, it might not seem immediately obvious why we should devote another article to them. However, there seem to me to be three compelling reasons to do this.
First, it is a good exercise in consolidation: pulling all of the various sources together in a single article affords an element of cohesion that they otherwise wouldn’t have. Second, when we look at them together, we are able to see themes that we might have missed when we met them individually. Third, my ideas about the cards — and one in particular — have shifted now that I have had the opportunity to write about all four of them. So this isn’t just a recapping and a review; it is also a re-visioning.
Approaching the Sevens from a broader, thematic viewpoint, let’s look at how the minor arcana is structured. There are 56 cards in the minor arcana, divided into four suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Aces); and within each suit, the cards run from Ace to Ten, followed by (in the Rider-Waite Smith deck) The Page, The Knight, The Queen, and The King: fourteen cards in all. So, in one respect at least, the Sevens represent the mid-point of their suits. I would argue that this mid-point isn’t just to do with their chronological location. It is also a pivotal point in the journey that each suit describes.
Once we have left the world of non-incarnate potential (the Aces), the complexities of life on planet Earth start to interact with the cards as they make their way through the suits. So, Twos introduce us to the world of duality, with a hint at the fact that we can never experience something as a pure opposite; Threes develop that idea by looking at what happens when a third element is added to the story… and so a multi-layered picture of life is constructed in front of our eyes, as more layers are added as the cards progress. Last month, we arrived at the Sixes, where the pause of the Fours and the confusion of the Fives brought us to, as I put it, “calmer waters, where we are able to regroup, take stock, and act with more clarity.”