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
This week’s reading feels like an alliance to me — or more accurately, a truce, because it doesn’t seem to be an entirely easy one. This isn’t so much because the two parties, or aspects, are ones that are traditionally at war with each other; rather, they are too dissimilar to create a neat fit.
That being said, they have decided to work together, whether simply for a period or time or for a specific purpose. There is a feeling of ‘agreeing to disagree’ that enables both parties, or aspects, to co-operate in order to effect an equilibrium. Let’s look at the contrast created by the first two cards, and see how they are brought together in the third.
Pentacles are traditionally associated with the physical world and how we choose to operate in it. In the 7 of Pentacles, a man stands in a vineyard, chin resting on a long-handled tool that he has been working with, surveying the product of his labours — seven pentacles which hang like fruit in the vines before him. He seems tired. He has worked hard to get to this stage. It feels hot: the sky is clear — not a cloud in sight to offer any shade — and, apart from the vines, there is little sign of greenery around him. It is as if he has been rearing his crop in an arid landscape, against the odds. Yet he has met with success in spite of this. It reminds me of the vintners in areas such as California, Australia and South Africa, who not only have to work with nature in order to ensure their crops, but also have to work against it, diverting rivers and creating reservoirs to irrigate land that would otherwise be water-less.
Now we have a pause in the proceedings. A moment of review to assess progress. The crop is thriving, but there is still work to do before the pentacles are harvested and yield their value. The man is not yet wealthy: he is dressed well, but plainly, and the fact that he is in the fields means that he is still all too familiar with manual labour. The 7 of Pentacles is concerned with the building of ‘sweat equity’. It is only when we reach the 9 and 10 of Pentacles that the figures are promoted to a time of affluent leisure.