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 explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
From a minor arcana card to two major arcana cards. From the personal steps that we can take to allow (as opposed to compel or drive) something to emerge, we die to ourselves to make way for the birth of something new. This is a call to become a ruler of integrity in your inner domain, which has the ability to ripple out and impact the world around you.
The Seven of Wands is making one of its regular appearances in the Weekend Tarot Reading. It must be one of the most — if not the most — frequent visitors here, and from this I would suggest that there is an underlined message: We are being asked to work through a lot of our own ‘stuff’, to be aware of our own processes as much as we can, and to be prepared to allow things that are rising into consciousness to come to the surface without retreating into attack — either inner or outer — or into denial.
Many interpretations of the Seven of Wands focus on the idea of heroic action against an aggressor, and it is entitled “Valour” in many decks. I see the Seven of Wands from a different, although related, angle, and I quote from a previous article:
The Seven of Wands shows us that which is thrown up from beneath that we must then contend with. There is no other figure in the card: perhaps this is a battle that we fight alone. Perhaps it is a fight that we have with ourselves. Perhaps that ‘beneath’ is what rises from what had not been conscious until now.
There is good reason why we have so many defences with which to fend off the unconscious. Psychoanalytic theory sees defences (for example projection, denial, repression, among others) as a necessary function of the ego to defend itself against ‘attacks’ from the unconscious in order to maintain equilibrium. In this way, stopping what is coming up from beneath is an act of valour: We are, at a certain level, employing what we have in our arsenal in an attempt to keep functioning in the world we have created.