Eruditus
I'd like to share a story that helps me to remember the essence of the seven of wands. It is an essence that the Rider-Waite deck hints at. Mr. Therion's Thoth deck, in my opinion, captures it.
When I was in my early twenties I went to New Jersey to live with my girlfriend and her family. It was an amazing cultural experience for me, and was to provide the foundation for my awesome respect for Tarot. Anyway, my girlfriend at the time had a stepbrother, and he and I got into a semi-friendly rivalry over a stupid video game. It was an old-style video game, the kind that had a Score Board at the end, and I always used to pride myself at how my initials dominated that Score Board. Yes, all the way up and most of the way down stretched the majestic curlicues of my sigil.
Until one day I sauntered downstairs to the basement, fired up the computer, loaded my favorite game, perhaps daydreaming about something else, comfortable in my alpha status...and there I saw it, the Offense, an execrable, putrid little fraction of a graffito--my nemesis's initials. High up on the chart, too. Not at number one, certainly, nor even near number one.
But close enough to make me nervous.
I forgot what I was daydreaming about. I sat up in my chair, leaned forward, and slicked the joystick's buttons with perspirations from my frantic thumbs.
That's the essence of Crowley's 7 of Wands: Interruption. Crudity. Defiance.
Think of that lumpen, knotted plebe wand that has shouldered and strongarmed its way in front of those six prisspot wands, Adepts' wands, the bourgeois wands of dogma and convention and intellectual cowardice and smarmy self-assurance and delicate ritual. My girlfriend's stepbrother's coup represents the rough tool of blunt violence, that ugly and inappropriate club. I--more importantly, my haughty, stubborn self satisfaction (the pride of the Adept, perhaps)--represented the slender staffs that had been so rudely upset by the vulgarian.
That is the 7 of Wands.
When I was in my early twenties I went to New Jersey to live with my girlfriend and her family. It was an amazing cultural experience for me, and was to provide the foundation for my awesome respect for Tarot. Anyway, my girlfriend at the time had a stepbrother, and he and I got into a semi-friendly rivalry over a stupid video game. It was an old-style video game, the kind that had a Score Board at the end, and I always used to pride myself at how my initials dominated that Score Board. Yes, all the way up and most of the way down stretched the majestic curlicues of my sigil.
Until one day I sauntered downstairs to the basement, fired up the computer, loaded my favorite game, perhaps daydreaming about something else, comfortable in my alpha status...and there I saw it, the Offense, an execrable, putrid little fraction of a graffito--my nemesis's initials. High up on the chart, too. Not at number one, certainly, nor even near number one.
But close enough to make me nervous.
I forgot what I was daydreaming about. I sat up in my chair, leaned forward, and slicked the joystick's buttons with perspirations from my frantic thumbs.
That's the essence of Crowley's 7 of Wands: Interruption. Crudity. Defiance.
Think of that lumpen, knotted plebe wand that has shouldered and strongarmed its way in front of those six prisspot wands, Adepts' wands, the bourgeois wands of dogma and convention and intellectual cowardice and smarmy self-assurance and delicate ritual. My girlfriend's stepbrother's coup represents the rough tool of blunt violence, that ugly and inappropriate club. I--more importantly, my haughty, stubborn self satisfaction (the pride of the Adept, perhaps)--represented the slender staffs that had been so rudely upset by the vulgarian.
That is the 7 of Wands.
