Seven of Wands

The picture

A young man in a green tunic stands on a green rise, gripping a leafing staff across his body with both hands. Six more staves come up at him from below the edge of the slope.

His footing is uneven — one boot is planted higher than the other, on a rock.

He is wearing one low shoe and one tall boot. They do not match.

Upright

A position that can be held, at the cost of never resting.

The advantage is real and it is geographical. He is above them, and being above them is the entire reason one person can hold off six. The card is about defensible ground and the work of standing on it.

This is conviction under pressure: staying with a decision, a boundary, a piece of work, while people who disagree keep turning up. It says the position is tenable. It offers no view whatever on when the pressure stops.

Nobody is holding the six

Look at the bottom of the card. Six staves come up over the edge of the rise and not one of them has a hand on it. There are no attackers in this picture at all.

Whatever he is fighting has been drawn without faces, without bodies, and without any indication of how many people are actually down there. It might be six. It might be one person with a lot of staves. From where he is standing, braced, with his weight on a rock, there is no way to tell — and there is no way to tell from where we are standing either.

That is a fair account of sustained opposition. It rarely arrives with a countable number of opponents attached. It arrives as pressure coming up over an edge, and the person holding the line spends a great deal of energy on an enemy whose size they cannot establish.

Every staff in the card is in leaf, his included. The thing being contested is alive on both sides of it.

Reversed

The ground given up. Sometimes sensibly, and sometimes out of an exhaustion that gets reported afterwards as a change of mind, which is a kinder story and a less accurate one.

The position can also be defended past all sense. Fighting on every edge at once until the defending has become the whole activity and nobody involved could now say what was originally at stake.

Commonly mistaken for

Paranoia. There really are six staves. This card describes actual opposition, and treating it as the reader's imagination is a misreading with consequences that land on the reader.

People also read it as heroic, and the shoes argue against it. He got dressed in a hurry, or in the dark, or in whatever was nearest. Nothing about this is glamorous and it is plainly wearing him down.

In a reading

In an obstacle position this is sustained pressure rather than a single opponent, and the advice is usually that the ground is worth holding — followed immediately by the harder question of whether it still is.

With the Nine the pair is the same fight later on, with a bandage.